The Battle of Khanwa 1527
The Battle of Khanwa, fought on 16 March 1527, was the second of the three engagements that determined the political shape of early modern North India. Babur, with the smaller of the two armies, defeated the Rajput confederacy of Rana Sanga of Mewar and, in doing so, broke the principal Hindu military power in North India and established Mughal authority in Rajputana. The wider political and military context of the engagement is set out in the Babur and the Rajput resistance to Mughal rule pages.
Background: The Rajput Confederacy Under Rana Sanga
Rana Sanga of Mewar (r. c. 1509 – 1528) was the most powerful ruler in early sixteenth-century Rajputana and the head of a confederation that, at its height, included most of the major Rajput polities of the central and western Indian subcontinent. Sanga himself was a formidable military leader, having fought a dozen pitched battles against the Delhi sultans and the chiefs of Malwa and Gujarat, and he had assembled a coalition that combined Rajput, Afghan, and even some disaffected elements of the late Lodi state. Estimates of the size of his army at Khanwa range from 50,000 to more than 100,000, depending on the source.
The Two Armies
Babur’s army at Khanwa is generally estimated at between 12,000 and 15,000 men, of whom a substantial proportion were matchlock-armed infantry and expert gunners. The Rajput army, in addition to its numerical superiority, included a large body of heavy cavalry, drawn from the warrior clans of Mewar, Marwar, Amber, and other Rajput principalities, as well as a number of war elephants. Sanga’s forces were experienced in the conventions of Rajput cavalry warfare, in which the shock of massed horsemen was expected to break an enemy line in a single charge. The Rajput army also included a substantial number of Afghan auxiliaries led by Hasan Khan Mewati, an Afghan chief of the Mewat region south of Delhi, whose defection to Sanga gave the Rajput army a measure of infantry capability that pure Rajput forces typically lacked.
The Course of the Battle
The two armies met on the plain of Khanwa in the late morning of 16 March 1527. Babur once again deployed his forces in a fortified laager of carts, with his matchlock infantry and field guns positioned in the centre and on the wings. Sanga, like Ibrahim Lodi at Panipat, chose to attack the centre directly, hoping to overwhelm the entrenched position with the weight of his cavalry.
The battle opened with a series of heavy Rajput charges against the laager. The matchlock fire and the field guns stopped the first charges, but the Rajput army was not so easily broken. The fighting continued for several hours, and the Rajputs were at one point able to penetrate the laager and reach the Mughal centre, where Babur himself was directing the defence. At a critical moment, the Muslim contingents in Sanga’s army, including the Afghans under Hasan Khan Mewati, began to waver and, in some accounts, to negotiate with Babur’s officers. The details of this episode are obscure, but the battle’s outcome turned in part on the failure of these contingents to commit fully to the Rajput attack.
The Role of Hasan Khan Mewati
Hasan Khan Mewati, the Afghan chief of Mewat, was a long-standing enemy of the Delhi sultans and a recent adherent of Rana Sanga. His contingent at Khanwa was a substantial one, and his position on the Rajput left flank was tactically significant. According to the principal Mughal sources, and to the longer account given in the Baburnama, Hasan Khan’s forces failed to press the attack at a critical moment of the battle, and in some accounts entered into clandestine communication with Babur’s officers. The episode is treated with caution by modern historians, but the broad outline of Afghan defection during the battle is well established.
The Death of the Rajput Generals
The Rajput army suffered very heavy losses at Khanwa. Among the most prominent Rajput chiefs killed in the battle were Rana Sanga’s principal commanders, including the chieftains of several major Rajput clans. The death of these leaders, and the loss of a very substantial proportion of the Rajput fighting men, broke the political and military power of the Mewar confederacy for a generation. Rana Sanga himself escaped the field, mortally wounded, and died shortly afterwards at Chitor, although the exact circumstances of his death are debated.
The Establishment of Mughal Authority in Rajputana
The political and military consequences of Khanwa are also examined in the broader Mughal military overview and the famous battles of the Mughals pages. The full arc of Mughal expansion in this period is sketched in the Mughal Empire overview.
Casualties and Historical Significance
The casualties at Khanwa were unusually heavy, in part because the Rajput army refused to break and fought on in small parties long after the outcome of the battle was decided. The most cautious modern estimates place the Rajput dead at between 8,000 and 15,000, with a comparable number of wounded. Babur’s losses were also substantial, probably in the range of 2,000 to 4,000.
The historical significance of the battle lies in the establishment of Mughal authority in Rajputana and in the demonstration, for the first time, that the Rajput warrior tradition could be defeated by the new gunpowder tactics that Babur had refined at Panipat. The battle thus marks the beginning of a long process of political integration that culminated, in the next generation, in the systematic incorporation of the Rajput polities into the imperial service. The Rajput military presence in the Mughal army would, in the seventeenth century, become one of the defining features of the empire, and the place of the Rajputs in the imperial elite is examined on the Mughal administration overview and the mansabdari system pages.
Sources
- Babur, Baburnama, trans. Thackston (1993), pp. 343–57.
- Satish Chandra, Medieval India (2004), pp. 88–90.