Place · battle · India
Khanwa
The 17 March 1527 battle at Khanua in Bharatpur district, Rajasthan, where Babur defeated the Rajput confederacy led by Rana Sanga of Mewar — the single most important Mughal battle after Panipat. Rana Sanga's confederation of 100,000+ with Mahmud Lodi (brother of the deceased Ibrahim), Hasan Khan Mewati and multiple Rajput princes was the first serious attempt to roll back the Mughal conquest. Babur's victory, using the same tulughma and artillery tactics as at Panipat, broke the Rajput challenge for a generation. Khanua, more than Panipat, is what made the Mughal position in north India stick — Panipat displaced the Lodi dynasty, Khanua defeated the aristocratic Rajput order that could otherwise have replaced them.
- Date
- 1527 CE
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 27.050, 77.600
Connections (4)
- Succession in timePanipat
Panipat in 1526 won Babur the throne of Delhi; Khanwa the following year, against Rana Sanga's Rajput confederacy, is what let him keep it. Khanwa was the harder fight — Babur had his men break their wine jars and swear off drink before it — and it removed the only Indian power capable of contesting the north. A dynasty that had won one battle in 1526 had won an empire by 1527.
- CampaignChittorgarh
Rana Sanga of Mewar brought the Rajput confederacy to Khanwa in 1527 with contingents from Amber, Marwar, Gwalior and the Afghan claimant Mahmud Lodi, and lost. He died the following year. Chittorgarh was besieged and taken by Bahadur Shah of Gujarat in 1535 and by Akbar in 1567, and Mewar's capital moved to Udaipur rather than being recovered.
- Site adjacencyGurugrām (Gurgaon)
Gurugram is the teacher's village of the Mahabharata, granted to Drona by his pupils, and Kurukshetra where they then fought each other is a hundred and thirty kilometres north on the same plain, with Khanwa and Panipat on the road between. The Delhi doab carries the epic's schoolroom and three of its successors' decisive battlefields inside one afternoon's drive.
- Won battle atZahiruddin Babur
Babur beat Rana Sanga's Rajput confederacy at Khanwa on 16 March 1527 — a battle he treated in the Baburnama as the one that actually made the Mughal state, more consequential than Panipat because it defeated the surviving Rajput coalition that still threatened the sultanate he had just inherited. He took the title Ghazi after Khanwa and declared the Mughal state's permanent character; the pre-battle vow against alcohol is one of the Baburnama's set-piece passages.
On these journeys
Sources
List of wars in the Indian subcontinent; standard reference accounts
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