Panipat, battles of (1399, 1526, 1556, 1761). Panipat is now a town, still with a fort and a wall with fifteen gates, in the Haryana province of northern India, in the Ganges-Jumna basin to the north of Delhi. It lies in a corridor, between the southern foothills of the Himalayas and deserts of Rajasthan, through which the Ganges and Jumna flow, one much used by invaders from Afghanistan and hence of strategic significance. It was the site of four battles, all decisive for the fate of Muslim India.
The first came in 1399, when Timur defeated the sultan of Delhi with great slaughter, and sacked the city. The second was in 1526 when the Turco-Mongol adventurer Babur was invited into Hindustan from Kandahar by dissident members of the Delhi Sultan Ibrahim Lodi's family. In a battle on 20 April, Babur's troops were heavily outnumbered, but he managed to gain a decisive victory, end the 75 years' rule of the Lodi dynasty, and lay the initial foundations for Mughal rule, although this was only consolidated a generation later by his grandson Akbar ‘the Great’. The victory has been attributed to Babur's use of some primitive cannon, lashed together with bull's hide and placed at intervals along a wagon line, and he also had musketeers using matchlocks.
The third battle was on 5 November 1556, when Bayram Khan, on behalf of the newly acceded Akbar, defeated the usurping Hindu minister Hemu, who had assumed the regal title of Raja Vikramaditya. He was then able finally to vanquish the last ruler of the preceding line of Suri sultans and consolidate Mughal power in India.
The fourth battle was fought on 14 January 1761 when the Afghan ruler of Kabul, Ahmad Shah Durrani, entered northern India for the fourth time in an attempt to oust the Hindu, fiercely anti-Muslim Marathas from the Punjab and north-western India, and thereby to preserve the shrinking authority of the Mughal emperors, now essentially reduced to the area round Delhi (which the Marathas had in fact recently occupied). The Afghans crushed Sardashiv Rao, uncle of the Peshwa of the Marathas, inflicting great losses. Although Ahmad Shah returned to Afghanistan and Maratha power revived, being only reduced by the East India Company in the early 19th century, the battle had important and lasting consequences in the rise of a Muslim state in Mysore under Haydar Ali, while the British in Bengal were granted a respite to consolidate their power pour mieux sauter.
Bibliography
- Gupta, Hari Ram, The Marathas and Panipat (Delhi, 1961).
- Irvine, William, The Army of the Indian Moguls (London, 1901).
- Pasokar, R. D., Babur: A Study in Generalship (Poona, 1971).
- Spear, Sir Percival, The Oxford History of Modern India 1740-1947 (Oxford, 1965)
— C. E. Bosworth
