Journey
The three battles of Panipat
One field seventy miles north of Delhi, on the road every army from the north-west takes, where the order of upper India changed hands three times: in 1526 from the Lodis to Babur, in 1556 from Hemu to Akbar's regents, and in 1761 from the Marathas to Ahmad Shah Abdali — and then to neither of them.
Stops (9)
- Lodi Gardens tombs · the dynasty that ended in 1526
The Lodi tombs stand in what is now a public garden in New Delhi: Sikandar Lodi's octagonal tomb, the Bara Gumbad and the Sheesh Gumbad. This is the architecture of the last Delhi sultanate, whose final ruler Ibrahim rode out to Panipat with a hundred thousand men and did not come back.
- Panipat · 1526 · 1556 · 1761
A flat plain with the Yamuna to one side and no natural obstacle, at the point where the road from the passes reaches the Delhi doab. Three times an army marching on Delhi was met here rather than at the city, and three times the result settled who ruled the north.
- Agra Fort · April 1526
Babur sent Humayun ahead to Agra to secure the Lodi treasury while the battlefield was still being cleared, and the Mughal state was funded from it. Akbar rebuilt the fort in red sandstone, Shah Jahan in marble, and Shah Jahan was then imprisoned in it by his own son for eight years.
- Hemchandra Vikramāditya (Hemu) · crowned 1556
A Rewari saltpetre trader who became Adil Shah Suri's wazir, won twenty-two engagements in succession, took Agra and then Delhi, and had himself crowned as Vikramaditya — the only non-dynastic claimant to hold the throne between the Lodis and the Mughals. He was captured wounded at Panipat a month later and killed.
- Indraprastha / Purana Qila · October 1556
Humayun's Dinpanah, which Sher Shah had taken and rebuilt as Shergarh, is where Hemu was proclaimed emperor after driving Akbar's governor out of Delhi in October 1556. Akbar was thirteen and had been on the throne for eight months; the capital was lost and recovered inside five weeks, and the reign that followed lasted half a century.
- Shaniwarwada, Pune · 1760
The Peshwas' palace fort in Pune, from which the decision to send an army eight hundred miles north to hold Delhi was taken. It was the high point of Maratha ambition and the limit of Maratha supply: the army that marched from here could not be fed once Abdali cut the road behind it.
- Sadāshivrāo Bhāu · commander, 1761
Cousin of the Peshwa and commander of the northern expedition, who took Delhi and stormed Kunjpura, then found himself encircled on the wrong side of the Yamuna with a hundred thousand mouths and no grain. He broke out on 14 January 1761 and was killed with most of the Maratha command.
- Ahmad Shāh Abdālī · victor, 1761
A commander of Nader Shah's guard elected head of the Afghan confederacy at Kandahar in 1747, who invaded India nine times and won the greatest victory of the century here. He could not hold any of it: his army mutinied for arrears, he withdrew, and the Punjab was in Sikh hands within a decade.
- Red Fort, Delhi · after 1761
Panipat left no successor to the Mughals. The emperor Shah Alam II wandered for a decade and was brought back to this fort in 1772 under Maratha escort, blinded by a Rohilla in 1788, and made a Company pensioner in 1803. The vacuum the battle created was filled from Calcutta.