Prithviraj Chauhan won the first battle of Tarain in 1191 and held Ajmer and Delhi for about fifteen years, according to the oldest Persian and Sanskrit records

Prithviraj III of the Chauhan (also spelled Chahamana) dynasty, one of the Rajput clans of the early medieval north, beat Muhammad of Ghor at Tarain in 1191, in a fight that ended with the Ghurid sultan wounded and his army pulling back in disarray. A year later Muhammad returned with a new army, and the second battle on the same ground, in 1192, ended Prithviraj’s reign. The Persian historian Minhaj-i Siraj describes both battles, and a Sanskrit court poem was composed in the same years as the fighting.

A kingdom from Thanesar to Mewar

Prithviraj was born about 1166 and came to the throne about 1177, Britannica says. He inherited lands that ran from Thanesar in the north, once the capital of Harsha, to Mewar in the south, and he ruled from Ajmer and Delhi. Within a few years he took charge of the administration himself and put down a revolt by his cousin Nagarjuna.

He then turned on the Bhadanakas, whose raids had troubled the Chauhan lands around Delhi. Britannica says they were destroyed so thoroughly, some time before 1182, that later records stop mentioning them. In 1182 he defeated Paramardin Chandela, the ruler of Jejakabhukti in central India.

That campaign is the best documented of his reign. The editors of the Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum report that Alexander Cunningham noticed three inscriptions on the pillars of a temple at Madanpur, all stating that Prithviraja III defeated Paramardin and ravaged his kingdom in Vikram Samvat 1239, the year Britannica also gives as 1182 CE. The Chandela war raised his reputation and also his number of enemies, in Britannica’s account: it drew the Chandelas and the Gahadavalas of Kannauj together and forced him to spend more on defence along his south-eastern frontier. A campaign against Gujarat followed, though little is known about it.

Coins carry his name too. Numista’s catalogue, citing the standard references by Tye and Rajgor, lists a billon jital (a small everyday coin) of Prithviraj III with a horseman on one face, a bull on the other and the Nagari inscription “Sri Prithvi Raja Deva”. The British Museum holds a copper-alloy coin of Muhammad of Ghor, named in its inscription and minted at Delhi, with a horseman to the right and a seated bull to the left. After the conquest, the Ghurid mint in Delhi used the same two figures.

Which accounts to trust, and why

The sources differ in age and in what they were written for. The Prithviraja Vijaya is a Sanskrit court poem in praise of the Chauhan kings. According to Har Bilas Sarda’s 1913 article in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, it survives in a single birch-bark manuscript in Sharada script, found in Kashmir by Georg Bühler in 1875 and kept at the Deccan College library in Poona. Cynthia Talbot, as a Scroll review of her book reports, dates it to just after the first battle of Tarain.

Hasan Nizami began his Persian history, the Taj-ul-Ma’asir, in 1205 and devoted it chiefly to Qutb ud-Din Aibak. Elliot and Dowson’s introduction to their translation calls it poor in historical detail. The work opens with Muhammad’s 1191 expedition to India, and the introduction points out that the author makes no allusion to the defeat at Tarain that the expedition was meant to repay.

Minhaj-i Siraj closed his Tabaqat-i Nasiri in 1260. His father had been appointed judge of Muhammad’s army in Hindustan, and for the second battle he names a man who fought in it as his informant. Muhammad Awfi, who lived in the reign of Iltutmish, tells a version of the second battle in his anthology of stories.

The Prithviraj Raso, the epic most people know, belongs to a later age. Talbot, per the Scroll review, places its writing between 1580 and 1610. A reviewer quoted by Cambridge University Press, Audrey Truschke, notes that Rajput elites treated the Raso as a central text from the late sixteenth century, the years when Rajput houses such as Maharana Pratap’s Mewar were dealing with Akbar’s Mughal state.

Tarain, 1191

Muhammad had taken Lahore in 1186 from the last Ghaznavid ruler, and towards the end of 1190 he seized Bathinda, a fortress that belonged to Prithviraj’s side, according to Britannica. As border raids grew, the Chauhan officer in Delhi appealed to the king, who marched out at once. The armies met at Taraori, about 110 km north of Delhi in present Haryana.

Minhaj, in Elliot and Dowson’s translation, says Muhammad had left Qazi Ziya ud-Din Tolak in the captured fort at Sarhind (Bathinda) with 1,200 men, and that Prithviraj came up against it. Muhammad returned to face him, and the other Rais of Hindustan were with Prithviraj. The sultan charged the elephant that carried Gobind Rai of Delhi, whom Raverty, citing the Muslim historians and three Hindu chroniclers, identifies as Prithviraj’s brother, and drove his lance into the Rai’s mouth. Gobind Rai struck back and wounded the sultan’s arm. A young Khalji soldier jumped up behind Muhammad and rode him out of the fight, and the army ran until it was clear of pursuit.

The outline in Britannica’s summary is the same: fierce fighting, Muhammad seriously injured, his forces withdrawing in disarray.

Thirteen months at Sarhind

Minhaj says Prithviraj then besieged the fort at Sarhind for thirteen months, and that it had capitulated before Muhammad got back. The next year the sultan assembled another army. An informant who served in that army told Minhaj it numbered 120,000 armoured horsemen. That is a recollection passed on to the historian, and chronicle numbers of this kind are not counts.

Tarain, 1192

Minhaj and Britannica agree on how the second battle was fought. Muhammad left his banners, canopies and elephants with the main body in the rear and sent his lightly armed horsemen forward in four divisions of 10,000 mounted archers each. They harassed the Rajput army from every side, and when the Rajputs gathered to attack, the archers were to back each other up and charge at speed. In Britannica’s telling, elements of Prithviraj’s army broke ranks to chase the archers and were cut down by heavy cavalry, and that the first battle turned on numbers on the flanks while the second turned on mobility.

Awfi gives a night ruse: Muhammad had fires kept burning in his camp, marched off in the dark, and struck the enemy’s rear at dawn. Raverty quotes a later account in which Prithviraj’s side was lulled by a message proposing a truce. Minhaj mentions neither.

According to Minhaj, Prithviraj climbed down from his elephant, mounted a horse and rode off, and was caught near Sarsuti. Gobind Rai of Delhi was killed. Ajmer, the Siwalik hills, Hansi and Sarsuti passed to the Ghurids.

The sources do not agree on one point of the campaign. Britannica’s article on the battles says Jai Chand of Kannauj supported Prithviraj in 1191 and not in 1192, while its biography of Prithviraj describes Jayachandra as a rival who wanted his ambitions checked.

What happened to the king and to Ajmer

Minhaj says Prithviraj was captured and put to death. Hasan Nizami gives a slightly different sequence: the Rai of Ajmer was taken prisoner in the fighting and at first spared, then ordered killed after an intrigue, and the son of Prithviraj was appointed to govern Ajmer. Ajmer was annexed to the Delhi sultanate in 1193 and returned to its Rajput rulers on payment of tribute, Britannica’s article on the city says, which is consistent with a son left in place.

Muhammad’s commander Qutb ud-Din Aibak took Delhi in 1193, according to Britannica. Minhaj records the defeat of Jai Chandar of Kannauj near Chandawar, and Britannica dates the battle of Chandawar to 1194.

What the Raso adds

The Prithviraj Raso, attributed to the bard Chand Bardai, tells a fuller story. In it Prithviraj carries off Sanyogita, daughter of Jayachandra of Kannauj; Britannica says the historicity of that episode remains a matter of debate. The Raso also has the captured king taken to Ghazni and blinded, and then striking Muhammad with an arrow during an archery display.

The older records give no support for that ending. The Scroll review reports Talbot’s finding that the early Sanskrit and Persian texts show Prithviraj was neither carried to Ghazni nor blinded, and that he was most likely killed in the battle or executed after refusing Ghurid terms. Raverty, in a note, collects other versions, among them a Jammu chronicle in which Pithora is taken to Ghazni and blinded, and he calls them partly traditional.

On the age of the Raso the sources disagree. A line from Britannica’s Rajasthan article, quoted on its Chand Bardai page, dates the earliest manuscript to the twelfth century, while Talbot’s Cambridge University Press book on the epic’s history puts its writing at 1580 to 1610. The Cambridge description of her book notes that he is called “the last Hindu emperor” in modern times because Muslim rule lasted for centuries after his defeat.

Muhammad’s own death came on the road home to Ghazni, after he put down a Gakkar revolt in the Punjab, in the year 602 of the Hijri calendar according to Minhaj. Britannica gives the date as 15 March 1206, at Damyak.