Person · Delhi Sultan, last of the Lodi dynasty
Ibrahim Lodi
Also known as Ibrāhīm Khān Lodī, Ibrahim Khan Lodi, Ibrahim Lodhi, Sultan Ibrahim Lodi
The last sultan of Delhi, who succeeded his father Sikandar Lodi in 1517 and was killed by Babur's army at the First Battle of Panipat on 21 April 1526. His reign was a run of quarrels with his own Afghan nobles: he hunted down his brother Jalal Khan, imprisoned and killed senior commanders, and lost battles to Rana Sanga of Mewar. Daulat Khan Lodi, governor of Punjab, and Ibrahim's uncle Alam Khan both turned to Babur in Kabul.
- Date
- 1480–1526
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Patron dynasty
- Lodi
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
His grave is not the Shisha Gumbad in Delhi's Lodi Gardens, with which it is often confused, but a plain platform tomb near the tehsil office at Panipat, which the British moved and restored in 1866 while building the Grand Trunk Road.
Wikipedia's article places his decisive defeat on 20 April 1526 in one passage and his death on 21 April in another; the battle article gives 21 April.
Connections (5)
- Buried atIbrahim Lodi's Tomb, Panipat
Ibrahim died on the field at Panipat with some twenty thousand of his men, and he was buried there, not in Delhi. His tomb is a simple rectangular structure on a high platform reached by a flight of steps, near the tehsil office and close to the dargah of the Sufi saint Bu Ali Shah Qalandar. It is often mistaken for the Shisha Gumbad in Delhi's Lodi Gardens. In 1866 the British relocated and renovated it during construction of the Grand Trunk Road and added an inscription recording his death in the battle.
- CampaignPanipat
Ibrahim met Babur at Panipat on 21 April 1526 with an army reported at fifty to seventy thousand and a thousand war elephants, but no gunpowder weapons. Babur's twelve thousand held a line of seven hundred wagons with musketeers between them and fifteen to twenty cannon, with one flank resting on the town. The narrow front kept Ibrahim from using his numbers, the guns panicked his elephants, and horse archers worked round his flanks. His death ended the Lodi dynasty and the independent Delhi Sultanate.
- Succession in timeSikandar Lodi
Ibrahim, Sikandar Lodi's eldest son, came to the throne without opposition after his father's death in late 1517. He first tried sharing power by making his brother Jalal Khan autonomous governor of Jaunpur, then reversed the decision on his courtiers' advice, pursued Jalal through Kalpi, Gwalior and Malwa, and had him executed. The suspicion this bred of his Afghan and Turkish nobles, and the arrests and killings that followed, drove eastern governors such as Bahar Khan Lohani into open revolt and the governor of Punjab towards Babur.
- OpposedRana Sanga
Rana Sanga's advance into north-eastern Rajasthan brought Ibrahim against Mewar in 1517. At Khatoli, on the border of Hadoti, the Lodi army fled and a Lodi prince was taken prisoner, though Sanga lost an arm and was lamed by an arrow. Ibrahim came again in 1518 and 1519 and was beaten at Dholpur, losing his lands in present Rajasthan as Sanga's reach extended towards Agra. After Ibrahim fell at Panipat, his younger brother Mahmud Lodi brought Afghan horsemen to fight beside Sanga at Khanwa.
- CampaignGwalior Fort
Jalal Khan, Ibrahim's rebel brother, had taken shelter with Vikramaditya Tomar at Gwalior, and Ibrahim used the revolt as a pretext to send thirty thousand cavalry and three hundred elephants under Azam Humayun Sarwani against the fort, which fell in 1518 with Vikramaditya's surrender. The last Tomar raja of Gwalior later fell in the same battle as Ibrahim at Panipat in 1526. A memorial near the battlefield, long a place of pilgrimage for the people of Gwalior, was destroyed when the Grand Trunk Road was made.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Ibrahim Khan Lodi"; "First Battle of Panipat"; "Rana Sanga". Peter Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History (2003); Satish Chandra, Medieval India: From Sultanat to the Mughals, Part II (2005).
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