Place · twin battle site · India
Tarain
Also known as First Battle of Tarain, Second Battle of Tarain, Taraori
The two 1191 and 1192 battles on the plain at Tarain in Thanesar district, Haryana, 150 kilometres north of Delhi. In the First Battle of Tarain (1191) the Chauhan king Prithviraj III ('Prithviraj Chauhan') defeated the Ghurid Sultan Muhammad of Ghor and allowed him to withdraw. In the Second Battle of Tarain (1192) Muhammad of Ghor returned with 120,000 horsemen and crushed Prithviraj's cavalry through disciplined mounted archery against Rajput shock charges. Prithviraj was captured and executed. The Second Tarain opened the Delhi Sultanate: Muhammad's slave general Qutb-ud-din Aibak took Delhi within months, built the Qutb Minar, and ruled as the first Sultan from 1206. The Chauhan Rajput dynasty collapsed.
- Date
- 1191 CE
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 29.800, 76.930
Worth knowing
The two battles of Tarain (1191–92) between Prithvīrāj Chauhān and Muhammad of Ghor opened the way to the Delhi Sultanate.
Connections (4)
- Power passed toQutb complex, Delhi
Prithviraj Chauhan beat Muhammad of Ghor at Tarain in 1191; Ghor returned the following year with a better plan and won decisively. Within a few years the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque was going up in Delhi, built from the columns of twenty-seven demolished temples with the carving left visible, and the Qutb Minar beside it. The fourth-century iron pillar that has not rusted stands in the same courtyard, older than both.
- Devotional corpus onĀlhā-Khaṇḍ
The Ālhā cycle ends with Prithviraj Chauhan, and the Rajasthani Prithviraj Raso tells the same decade from the other side — two vernacular epics about one war, each making its own losers into heroes. Prithviraj then lost at Tarain in 1192 to Muhammad of Ghor, which the Ālhā singers treat as the judgement on him. Both poems are sung and neither is history, and between them they are how north India remembers the twelfth century.
- CampaignPrithvīrāja Chauhān
Prithviraja III beat Muhammad of Ghor at Tarain in 1191 and let him go; Ghor returned in 1192 with mounted archers and a feigned retreat and destroyed the Chahamana army. Prithviraj was captured and killed. Ajmer and Delhi passed to the Ghurids and then to Qutbuddin Aibak, and the Delhi Sultanate follows directly from the second of those two battles.
- Power passed toQila Rai Pithora
Qila Rai Pithora was Prithviraj's Delhi, and after 1192 Qutbuddin Aibak garrisoned it and built inside its walls. The Qutb Minar and the Quwwat-ul-Islam stand within the Chahamana circuit, using its temple columns. The transfer is legible in one place: a new sovereignty inside the defeated one's fortification, built out of its material.
On these journeys
Sources
List of wars in the Indian subcontinent; standard reference accounts
Open Tarain in the repository →