Journey
Rise and crisis of the Mughal state
Two hundred and thirteen years in five battles. Panipat and Khanwa made the state, Chausa unmade it for fifteen years and handed it the trunk road, the revenue survey and the rupee it later ran on, Samugarh decided its direction, and Karnal showed everyone watching that the centre could no longer defend itself.
Stops (10)
- Panipat · 21 April 1526
Babur's twelve thousand beat Ibrahim Lodi's far larger army with field artillery, matchlocks behind carts, and a flanking manoeuvre learned on the steppe. He had taken Kabul twenty-two years earlier and had failed three times to hold anything in India. The Sultanate ends and the Mughal state begins on this field.
- Khanwa · 17 March 1527
Against Rana Sanga's Rajput confederacy, which was the real military power in the north and had beaten every Lodi army sent against it. Khanwa, more than Panipat, is what made the Mughal position stick: after it no Indian coalition contested the Doab for a generation, and Babur's men stopped asking to be taken home to Kabul.
- Chausa · 1539–1540
Sher Shah Suri broke Humayun at Chausa in 1539 and again at Kannauj in 1540, and drove him out of India for fifteen years. The interregnum was not an interruption but a foundation: the revenue survey, the silver rupiya and the trunk road all belong to the man who won here.
- Indraprastha / Purana Qila · Dinpanah 1533 · Shergarh 1540
Humayun's new city on the Yamuna, begun in 1533 and lost seven years later. Sher Shah took it, rebuilt it as Shergarh and added the Qila-i-Kuhna mosque, which is the best building of the Suri interregnum. Humayun recovered it in 1555 and died the next year falling down its library stairs.
- Sasaram · 1545
Sher Shah's tomb stands on a plinth in the middle of an artificial lake at Sasaram, a domed octagon in the older Indo-Islamic manner and the largest tomb of its century in India. He came from this part of Bihar, and the mausoleum of a five-year reign is finer than most of a dynasty's.
- Samugarh · 29 May 1658
Aurangzeb and Murad beat Dara Shukoh outside Agra and the war of succession was effectively decided. Dara was hunted down and executed the next year; Shah Jahan, still alive and still emperor, was confined. The empire's direction turned here from the syncretic court Dara represented to a different reading of what a Muslim sovereign owed.
- Agra Fort · 1658–1666
Shah Jahan spent his last eight years a prisoner in the fort he had rebuilt, in apartments looking downriver at the tomb he had built for his wife. It is the clearest illustration of what the Mughal succession actually cost: no rule of primogeniture, so every transfer was a war, and the loser was killed or walled up.
- Karnal · 24 February 1739
Nader Shah destroyed a Mughal army three times the size of his own in about three hours, using mounted musketry against elephants and heavy artillery. Muhammad Shah was taken into the Persian camp and escorted to his own capital as a prisoner. The battle lasted an afternoon and the empire never recovered its credit.
- Nāder Shāh · 1739
The Persian ruler who had already taken Kandahar and Ghazni came through the passes, won at Karnal, and occupied Delhi for fifty-seven days. He left with the Peacock Throne, the Koh-i-Noor, the Timurid crown jewels and an estimated seven hundred million rupees, and demanded no territory at all — which told every regional governor what the centre was now worth.
- Red Fort, Delhi · March 1739
Nader Shah sat in the Diwan-i-Khas while his troops sacked Shahjahanabad for three days after a rumour of his death; the dead are usually counted in tens of thousands. The fort's silver ceiling went with the Peacock Throne. Delhi was sacked again in 1757 and 1761, and the Mughal writ never ran outside its walls again.