Mewar and the Mughals

By the early 1500s the Delhi Sultanate was weak under Ibrahim Lodi. Two things followed:

• Babur (Zahiruddin Muhammad) from Central Asia invaded, and in 1526 beat the Lodi army at Panipat (the First Battle of Panipat), which ended the Sultanate.
• Indian rulers began to assert their own power: in 1527, Rana Sanga (Rana Sangram Singh I) of Mewar led a Rajput confederacy (an alliance) against Babur at Khanua. The battle went in Babur's favour; the book calls it a turning point.

Allies or rivals? Relations between Rajputs and Mughals changed over time. Some, like the Kachhwahas of Amber, made cooperative arrangements. The Mughals needed the Rajputs' military strength, loyalty and administrative skill, so they gave them mansabs. Mansab means rank; Akbar's mansabdari system joined army ranks with civil administration, a bit like the stars that show a police officer's rank. Others, above all Mewar, kept up stiff resistance.

Mewar's long resistance, step by step:

• 1567-1568: Akbar besieged Chittor. Under Rana Udai Singh the Rajputs held out for over five months; only then did the fort fall. Udai Singh then made a strategic retreat to the Aravalli Hills with many of his people: a decision to fight on another day, not a surrender.
• 1576: Maharana Pratap, Udai Singh's son, fought the Mughals at Haldighati. Afterwards he changed his strategy to guerrilla warfare: surprise attacks, raids and ambushes from the rugged Aravallis. In the 1580s he won back most of his ancestral lands.
• 1582: the Battle of Dewair, near Udaipur, broke key Mughal outposts in Mewar.
• His son Maharana Amar Singh kept resisting; Jahangir's advances in 1605, 1608 and 1609 were all countered.

The Bhils were Mewar's vital partners: they knew the Aravallis, were skilled archers and guerrilla fighters, and acted as guides. This alliance was later shown on Mewar's coat of arms: a Bhil warrior and a Rajput warrior side by side, with the deity Eklingji (Shiva) in the middle.

In the end the Mughals, who also valued Mewar's position on the trade routes to the port of Surat, made a treaty: Mewar's ruler did not have to attend the Mughal court in person, which recognised Mewar's autonomy.

The poet Dursa Arha praised Pratap: his horses were never branded with the Mughal mark, his head never bowed, and he never joined the Mughal Nauroz festival or stood guard at the emperor's Jharokha Darshan.