First Battle of Tarain

Muhammad of Ghor (Mu‘izz al-Din Muhammad ibn Sam, also called Shihab al-Din), whom his elder brother Sultan Ghiyath al-Din had made governor of Ghazni in 1173, took Multan and Uch in 1175. After his army was routed near Mount Abu by the Chaulukya king Mularaja II of Gujarat in 1178, he turned to the north, taking Peshawar, Sialkot and, in 1186, Lahore from Khusrav Malik, the last of the Ghaznavids; P. Saran and R. C. Majumdar saw in his campaigns an attempt to emulate Mahmud of Ghazni. This brought him to the frontier of the Chahamana kingdom. He stormed the fort of Tabarhindah — Sirhind in D. C. Ganguly’s view, Bathinda in others’ — and left there, according to the chronicler Minhaj, 1,200 horsemen under the qazi Ziya al-Din of Tulak, who were to hold it for eight months. Prithviraja, joined by Govindaraja, the governor of Delhi, and other princes, marched against him, and the armies met at Tarain, 14 miles from Thanesar and 80 from Delhi.

According to the chroniclers, the wings of the Ghurid army gave way. The sultan charged the elephant of Govindaraja and broke two of his teeth with a lance, but was badly wounded in the arm by Govindaraja’s javelin and would have fallen had a young Khalaj soldier not carried him out of the battle; seeing their leader gone, his troops fled. Prithviraja then besieged Tabarhindah, which capitulated after thirteen months, but he did not pursue the defeated Ghurids into the Punjab — the lost opportunity for which Ganguly reproached him. The year 1191 follows later chronicles, which date the battle to the Hijri year 587; the History and Culture of the Indian People gives 1190–1191.