Second Battle of Tarain

To avenge his defeat Muhammad raised at Ghazni an army of 120,000 armoured horsemen, according to an eyewitness quoted by Minhaj, and marched by way of Peshawar, Multan and Lahore; his envoy summoned Prithviraja to accept Islam and Ghurid supremacy, and was rebuffed. Prithviraja again gathered a great host with Govindaraja of Delhi and many other princes — Firishta’s figure of 300,000 horse and 3,000 elephants is considered an exaggeration — though his general Skanda was campaigning elsewhere. According to the Muslim chroniclers, Muhammad lulled him with talk of a truce, left fires burning in his camp and fell on the Chahamana army at dawn. When this first blow was parried, he divided his cavalry into five bodies: according to later writers, four of them, each of 10,000 lightly armed horsemen, attacked the enemy from every side and feigned flight whenever they were charged, until in the afternoon, with the Indian army exhausted, the sultan led the fifth, of 12,000 horsemen, in a decisive attack. Govindaraja fell — he was recognised, the chroniclers say, by the two teeth broken the year before — and Prithviraja, fleeing on horseback, was overtaken and captured near Sursuti — the Sarasvati river or the town of that name, perhaps modern Sirsa.

Muhammad took Hansi and other strongholds and marched on Ajmer, where, according to the near-contemporary Hasan Nizami, he placed Prithviraja’s son on the throne as a tributary and put Prithviraja himself to death for conspiring against him; the story of the much later Prithviraj Raso, in which the captive king is blinded at Ghazni and shoots the sultan, has no support in historical evidence. The sultan left his general Qutb al-Din Aibak in India; Aibak made Delhi his capital early in 1193, Muhammad routed Jayachandra of Kannauj at Chandawar in 1193 or 1194, and Prithviraja’s brother Hariraja held Ajmer at least until 1194, after which Aibak took it. The panic of the time is recorded by the Jain scholar Ashadhara, who fled with his family to Malwa when the Chahamana lands were conquered. Historians regard the battle as a turning point that laid the foundation of Muslim rule in northern India and of the Delhi Sultanate, which Aibak founded in 1206.