Place · triple battle site · India

Panipat

Also known as First Battle of Panipat, Second Battle of Panipat, Third Battle of Panipat

Date

1526 CE

Function

Military & resistance

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

29.390, 76.970

Worth knowing

Three battles that turned north India were fought on this plain: Bābur's victory of 1526, Akbar's of 1556, and the Marāthā catastrophe of 1761.

Connections (18)

• Succession in timeKhanwa

  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.

• Power passed toHumayun's Tomb

  Babur won at Panipat in 1526 and died four years later; his son Humayun lost the empire to Sher Shah, spent fifteen years in exile in Persia, recovered it in 1555 and fell down a library staircase the following year. His widow built him the first monumental charbagh tomb in India — a Persian garden plan in Indian red sandstone — and it is the direct prototype for the Taj, eighty years later.

• Succession in timeChausa

  Sher Shah drove Humayun out at Chausa and Kannauj in 1539 and 1540, ruled five years and died besieging a fort; the Sur state fell apart within a decade in disputed successions, and Humayun walked back in almost unopposed in 1555. Akbar then had to fight the second Panipat in 1556 against Hemu, a Hindu general of the Suri establishment who had briefly taken Delhi — the Mughal empire's second founding, thirty years after the first.

• Power passed toFatehpur Sīkrī

  Babur's victory at Panipat in 1526, won with field artillery and a flanking manoeuvre against far greater numbers, ended the Delhi Sultanate and began the Mughal state; Akbar, his grandson, built Fatehpur Sikri fifty years later. The line between the two is short and not at all smooth — Humayun lost the empire to Sher Shah and recovered it only just before dying, so the dynasty's survival was a near thing twice over.

• Succession in timePalkhed

  Palkhed in 1728 and the third Panipat in 1761 are the two ends of Maratha expansion. Baji Rao outmanoeuvred the Nizam without a general engagement and made the Marathas the dominant power in India; thirty-three years later, at Panipat, an army that had marched to the Punjab was destroyed by Ahmad Shah Durrani in an afternoon, with perhaps forty thousand killed. The confederacy survived but never again acted as one state.

• Succession in timePlassey (Palāśī)

  The third Panipat in January 1761 destroyed the Maratha army as an instrument of north Indian policy; Plassey had already happened in 1757 and Buxar followed in 1764. The Company moved into a vacuum that the Marathas, the Mughals and the Afghans had emptied between them — and none of the three was in any position to contest Bengal while it did. The decade from 1757 to 1765 settles who would rule India.

• Power passed toLodi Gardens tombs

  Ibrahim Lodi was killed at Panipat on 21 April 1526 and the Delhi sultanate ended with him, three generations after his grandfather Bahlul founded it. Babur's field artillery and the tulughma flanking manoeuvre beat numbers roughly four times his own. The dynasty's monuments in the Lodi gardens are what survives of a state that ended in a single morning.

• Power passed toAgra Fort

  Babur sent Humayun from the battlefield to Agra to seize the Lodi treasury before it could be dispersed, and the Mughal establishment in India was paid for out of it — including the diamond Humayun received there, later identified with the Koh-i-Noor. Agra, not Delhi, was the Mughal capital for most of the next century.

• CampaignHemchandra Vikramāditya (Hemu)

  Bairam Khan marched on Delhi within weeks and met Hemu at Panipat on 5 November 1556. Hemu's elephants and superior numbers were winning until an arrow took him in the eye; his army dissolved when he fell. He was brought before the fourteen-year-old Akbar and executed. Mughal rule in India dates from this battle rather than from 1526.

• CampaignSadāshivrāo Bhāu

  Sadashivrao Bhau took Delhi in July 1760 and Kunjpura in October, then let Abdali cross the Yamuna behind him and sat besieged at Panipat for two months while his supplies ran out. The breakout on 14 January 1761 lost him the battle, his own life, the Peshwa's son and an estimated forty thousand men in a few hours.

• CampaignAhmad Shāh Abdālī

  Abdali's achievement at Panipat was logistical before it was tactical: he held the crossings, cut the Maratha line of supply to the Deccan, and waited. He then withdrew, because his Afghan troops would not stay for a second season. The victory removed the only Indian power capable of succeeding the Mughals without replacing it with another.

• CampaignShaniwarwada, Pune

  The decision to fight for Delhi was taken at Shaniwarwada, and the cost was paid there: the Peshwa Balaji Baji Rao learned of Panipat by a one-line letter and died within six months. Maratha armies returned north under Mahadji Scindia in 1771, but the confederacy never again attempted to be the paramount power in Hindustan on its own account.

• CampaignKandahar

  The road from Kandahar ended at Panipat. Ahmad Shāh Durrānī, elected king at Kandahar in 1747, invaded India repeatedly over the following fourteen years and on 14 January 1761 destroyed the Maratha army on the old battlefield north of Delhi — the heaviest single defeat any Indian power suffered in the eighteenth century, with Baloch levies from Kalat in his line. He then went home. The victory settled nothing for Afghanistan and broke Maratha paramountcy, which left the field to the Company.

• Won battle atZahiruddin Babur

  Babur beat Ibrahim Lodi at Panipat on 21 April 1526 with field artillery and the Central Asian tulughma flanking manoeuvre against twice his numbers, which founded the Mughal state in India. The battle took most of a morning; Ibrahim Lodi was killed on the field and his army dissolved. Babur was in Delhi by the end of the week and Agra within the month, where he found Humayun had already secured the treasury including the Koh-i-Noor.

• Site withinBab-i-Faiz Gate, Panipat

  Bab-i-Faiz is one of the surviving city gates of walled Panipat.

• Site withinKabuli Bagh Mosque, Panipat

  Kabuli Bagh Mosque stands on the plain west of Panipat city, on the First Battle of Panipat ground.

• Site withinIbrahim Lodi's Tomb, Panipat

  Ibrahim Lodhi's battlefield grave is at the eastern edge of Panipat city.

• Site withinKala Amb (Third Battle of Panipat memorial)

  Kala Amb lies about 8 km north of Panipat city on the Third Battle of Panipat field.

On these journeys

• The Grand Trunk Road — Kabul to Chittagong
• The three battles of Panipat
• Rise and crisis of the Mughal state

Sources

List of wars in the Indian subcontinent; standard reference accounts

• Wikipedia