Prithviraj Chauhan and Tarain: Two Battles, Two Broken Teeth and the Arrow That Never Flew

A battlefield in what is now Haryana, 1192. The fighting is over. Among the dead lies a Rajput prince who rode into battle on an elephant. He is Govind Rai, ruler of Delhi, who came to fight for his overlord, Prithviraj Chauhan.

His head is brought to the winner, Muhammad of Ghor, the Sultan from the mountains of Afghanistan. A year earlier, on this same field, the two men had met face to face. The Sultan struck Govind Rai in the mouth with his lance and knocked out two of his teeth. Govind Rai answered with a javelin that nearly killed him.

Now, writes the chronicler Minhaj-i-Siraj, the Sultan knew the head by those two broken teeth.

That is the story of Tarain as the record tells it. Two battles, a year apart, on one stretch of plain between Karnal and Thanesar. In the first, in 1191, Prithviraj won. In the second, in 1192, he lost his army, his kingdom and his life. North India changed rulers for centuries.

There is another telling, far better known in India. In it, Prithviraj is carried off to Ghazni and blinded. Yet he still kills the Sultan with a single arrow, aimed by sound. It is a wonderful story. It is also, as we will see, not what happened. Here is the story from both camps, with the legends kept in, and marked as legends.

Prithviraj was the third Chauhan king of that name. Historians call him Prithviraja III; the Persian writers called him Rai Pithora. His family, the Chahamanas, ruled a land called Sapadalaksha from Ajmer, in today’s Rajasthan. Popular memory puts him on the throne of Delhi. But his capital was Ajmer. Delhi was held for him by a feudatory, a lesser ruler who owed him loyalty: Govind Rai.

He was born in Gujarat. His father, Someshvara, had grown up there at the court of his own mother’s family. Prithviraj’s mother, Karpuradevi, was a Kalachuri princess. The poem written at his court gives his birthday but not the year. The historian Dasharatha Sharma worked out 1166 from the stars it describes.

Someshvara died in 1177, when the boy was about eleven. His mother ruled for him as regent, with a council. The chief minister, Kadambavasa, ran the wars. By about 1180, Sharma reckons, the young king was in charge himself.

He spent the next ten years fighting his neighbours. He crushed a revolt by his cousin Nagarjuna. Inscriptions at Madanpur dated 1182 boast that he laid waste the land of the Chandela king Paramardi, in Bundelkhand. He fought the Chaulukyas of Gujarat until the two sides made a treaty, some time before 1187. These wars won him glory. They did not win him friends.

Almost everything we know about these years comes from one damaged book. The Prithviraja Vijaya, ‘Prithviraj’s Victory’, is a Sanskrit poem. It is thought to be by Jayanaka, a Kashmiri poet at his court. It praises Prithviraj as a form of Vishnu and Rama. It mentions his win over the Ghurids in 1191, but not his defeat, so it was probably written between the two battles. Only one copy is known, on birch bark, in the Sharada script. The German scholar Georg Bühler found it in Kashmir in 1875, with whole parts missing.

His full name was Mu’izz al-Din Muhammad ibn Sam. Indians know him as Muhammad of Ghor, or Ghori. He was born around 1144 in Ghur, the mountain country of central Afghanistan. He shared power with his elder brother, Ghiyath al-Din. The brother ruled the west from Firozkoh. Muhammad, based at Ghazni, pushed east.

He did not win every time. He crossed the Indus and took Multan in 1175. In 1178 he tried to break into Gujarat through the desert. Near Mount Abu, at Kasahrada, Rajput chiefs led by the Chaulukya king wounded and routed him. Prithviraj was still a boy king then. His minister advised him to keep out of it, and he did.

So Muhammad came the long way round. He wore down the last Ghaznavid king, Khusrau Malik, and took Lahore in 1186. Now his border touched Prithviraj’s.

He sent an envoy, the chief judge Qiwam-ul-Mulk Rukn-ud-Din Hamza. What happened next depends on whose poet you read. Hasan Nizami, the Ghurid court writer, says the envoy spoke ‘in a refined and graceful manner’. He says Prithviraj was asked to accept Islam, and the Sultan as his overlord. The Prithviraja Vijaya calls Muhammad a beef-eating demon. It describes the envoy as hideously pale, with a voice like the cry of wild birds. Each side’s writer saw what his king wanted seen. Prithviraj refused.

In 1190 or early 1191 the Ghurids took Tabarhindah, a fort on Prithviraj’s north-western border. Most writers say it is Bathinda in Punjab. Dasharatha Sharma argued for Sirhind. The battle that followed, he pointed out, was fought about a hundred miles east of Bathinda, on the road Prithviraj would take from Ajmer to Sirhind. The old manuscripts do not settle it.

Minhaj-i-Siraj had a family link to this fort. Its commander, Qazi Ziya-ud-Din of Tulak, was a relative of Minhaj’s own grandfather on his mother’s side. He was left with 1,200 horsemen, all men of Tulak. His orders were to hold the fort for eight months, until the Sultan came back from Ghazni.

The Sultan did not get far. Prithviraj was marching to retake the fort with his feudatories, ‘the whole of the Ranas of Hind’, in Minhaj’s words. Govind Rai of Delhi was among them. Muhammad turned to meet him. The two armies found each other near Tarain.

Tarain is today’s Taraori, a rice-milling town in Karnal district. It lies just off NH-44, about 14 km north of Karnal. The old writers placed it 14 miles from Thanesar. This is the country of Kurukshetra, where the Mahabharata war is said to have been fought.

The battle was probably fought early in 1191. The Ghurid horsemen opened by shooting arrows at the Rajput centre. Then, in the account most historians follow, the Chauhan army struck back from three sides. Sharma reads the same sources differently. He says the Ghurid wings broke first, and the Khalji emirs, or commanders, in the front line ran with them.

Muhammad did not run. He gathered the men around him and rode straight at an elephant. On it was Govind Rai, directing the Rajput front line. The Sultan drove his lance into Govind Rai’s mouth and broke two of his teeth. Govind Rai threw a javelin and hit the Sultan in the upper arm.

The Sultan turned his charger’s head round and receded, and from the agony of the wound he was unable to continue on horseback any longer.Minhaj-i-Siraj, Tabaqat-i-Nasiri (c. 1260), in H.G. Raverty’s translation

He was close to falling. A young Khalji soldier recognised him and sprang up behind him on the horse. He held the Sultan in his arms and rode him out of the fight. The Ghurid army was, in Minhaj’s word, ‘irretrievably routed’. When the runaways stopped, they found the Sultan missing. There was wailing in the camp, until he was carried in on a stretcher made of broken spears.

Not every source tells it this way. Another account, the Za’inul Masir, says Muhammad fainted. His men left him for dead, then came back at night to search the field. No other writer backs that version, so historians prefer Minhaj’s. As for the size of the Rajput army, Firishta, writing around 1600, gives 200,000 horse and 3,000 elephants. Modern historians treat his numbers as an exaggeration.

Then Prithviraj made the choice that his admirers and critics have argued about ever since. He let the beaten army go. It formed up again some distance away and went home in peace. Sharma, no critic of the Chauhans, called this generosity ‘out of date’ against such an enemy. Prithviraj turned instead to Tabarhindah. The fort held out for thirteen months, not eight, before it surrendered on terms.

In Ghazni, Muhammad nursed his wound and his anger. Firishta, writing four centuries later, has him tell an old man that for a year he had not changed his clothes or slept with his wife. He had also refused to see the emirs who deserted him. Another later story says the deserters were paraded through Ghazni with bags of grain tied round their necks. These are good stories, not records. The record from the time says something plainer: he came back.

Minhaj heard the size of the new army from a man who rode in it, Mu’in-ud-Din Oshi. It was 1,20,000 horsemen in armour: Turks, Tajiks and Afghans. Muhammad marched by way of Multan and Lahore. A history of the rajas of Jammu says the Jammu king Vijayaraja sent help. It is summarised by H.G. Raverty, the Victorian scholar who translated Minhaj into English.

What was Prithviraj doing? The poem written at his own court goes silent here. Centuries later, the Prithviraj Raso had an answer. He had eloped with Sanyogita, a princess of Kannauj, and lost himself in love while his kingdom drifted. Hold that thought. We will come back to it.

Before the battle, letters passed between the camps. Prithviraj probably had the larger army, as the historian Kaushik Roy suggests. He offered Muhammad a way out.

It is advisable thou shouldst retire to thine own territory, and we will not follow thee.Prithviraj’s message to Muhammad before the second battle, as translated by H.G. Raverty in his notes to the Tabaqat-i-Nasiri

Muhammad replied that he had come on his brother’s orders. He needed time to send word to him. Perhaps, he suggested, they could agree on a border: Tabarhindah, Punjab and Multan for him, the rest of Hind for Prithviraj. According to Firishta, the Rajput camp took this for a truce and spent the night making merry.

Muhammad Aufi, who wrote under the Delhi sultans a generation later, describes the trick. Muhammad had every man pile wood in front of his tent. At night a party stayed behind to keep the fires burning, so the enemy would think the Ghurids were still in camp. The rest of the army marched off in the dark and came round behind the Rajputs.

They struck at dawn. Many Rajput soldiers had left the lines for their morning wash. Several accounts, most of them Indian, agree that Prithviraj himself was asleep, as Sharma notes.

The Sultan left his heavy centre, his baggage and his elephants miles behind. He split his light horsemen, the mounted archers, into four divisions of 10,000. Each was to work on one side of the Rajput army. Their orders were not to stand and fight.

when their elephants, horsemen, and foot advance to the attack, you are to face about and keep the distance of a horse’s course in front of them.Muhammad of Ghor’s orders to his mounted archers, as reported by Minhaj-i-Siraj, in Raverty’s translation

It was the old way of war of the steppe, the open grasslands of Central Asia: shoot, ride away, turn and shoot again. Rajput charges hit empty air. By one account Raverty quotes, the pretend retreats went on from about nine in the morning until the time of afternoon prayer. By then the Rajput army was strung out and worn out. Muhammad led his last division, about 12,000 of his best horsemen, in a final charge. The Chauhan army broke.

Govind Rai was killed. Hasan Nizami claims ‘an hundred thousand’ Hindus died; that is a court poet’s boast, not a count. Prithviraj got down from his elephant, mounted a horse and fled. He was caught near Sursuti, probably today’s Sirsa.

Aibak, the former slave who kept the Sultan’s horses, was at Muhammad’s side in the centre that day. Soon he would be running the conquest.

Here the sources split, and nobody can say for sure what happened. Minhaj gives one line: Prithviraj was taken prisoner, and ‘they despatched him to hell’. Some historians, such as Satish Chandra, read that as execution on the spot. Others, like R.B. Singh, say it proves no such thing.

Hasan Nizami, who was alive at the time, says more. The Rai of Ajmer was captured, he writes, but his life was spared. The army went on to Ajmer. There, in Nizami’s words, the Sultan ‘destroyed the pillars and foundations of the idol temples’. Prithviraj’s ‘ancient hatred’ for the Muslims, Nizami goes on, was ‘deeply rooted and concealed in the bottom of his heart’. He was caught in some plot, never explained, and beheaded.

Later Jain writers each added their own ending. In the Prabandha Chintamani, Muhammad means to keep him as a vassal, a king who rules under him. Then he sees paintings in Prithviraj’s gallery of pigs killing Muslims, and beheads him in a rage. In the Hammira Mahakavya, Prithviraj refuses food and dies a prisoner. In the Prithviraja Prabandha, he tries to shoot the Sultan from his cell. He hits a metal statue put in the Sultan’s place, and is stoned to death. One Hindu text says he died in the battle itself.

Most of these agree on one thing. He died in India, probably at or near Ajmer, in 1192, aged about 26. None of the early accounts takes him to Ghazni.

One curious clue hints that he may have lived on for a while as a vassal: coins. Prithviraj’s money was the jital, a small coin with a bull on one side and a horseman on the other. Earlier rulers of the region had used the same design, the Tomaras of Delhi among them. Sharma pointed to a rare coin, recorded by the coin expert Edward Thomas, from the Delhi mint. It carries both Prithviraj’s name and that of Muhammad bin Sam. To Sharma, such a coin could only have been struck after Prithviraj lost and agreed to rule under the Sultan.

There is another explanation. The new rulers did not rush to change the money. For years, Ghurid coins in north India kept the old designs: the bull and horseman, or the Hindu goddess Lakshmi. They carried the Sultan’s name in Nagari letters, ‘Sri Muhamdada Same’, and the title ‘Shri Hammirah’, a Sanskrit form of the Arabic amir. Historians such as Finbarr Barry Flood and Sunil Kumar see this as practical. Bankers and traders trusted the coins they knew. A coin with both names may simply be part of that changeover. Either way, it is a rare thing: a conqueror’s name and a beaten king’s, side by side on one small disc of metal.

Muhammad did not take direct rule at once. He put Prithviraj’s young son, Govindaraja IV, on the throne of Ajmer as a vassal who paid heavy tribute. Prithviraj’s brother Hariraja would not accept it. He drove the boy out, took back Ajmer and sent a force towards Delhi. The Ghurid general crushed him. Hasan Nizami says Hariraja’s commander Jaitra ‘sacrificed himself in the flames of a fire’. The Jain Hammira Mahakavya says Hariraja and his family took their own lives. The Chauhan line lived on only at Ranthambore, where Govindaraja made a new home.

That Ghurid general was Aibak. He was born around 1150 in Turkestan and sold as a child in the slave market of Nishapur. A qazi, a judge, bought him and had him taught archery, riding and the Quran. Then he was sold on to Muhammad in Ghazni. After Tarain the Sultan posted him at Kuhram, in Punjab, and left him to carry on the war. In 1193 Aibak removed the Tomara ruler left in Delhi and took the city himself.

In 1194 Muhammad came back for the other great king of the north: Jayachandra of Kannauj, the Jaichand of the legends. The Ghurids crossed the Yamuna. At Chandawar, Jayachandra was killed and his army cut down. Varanasi was looted, and many of its temples destroyed.

In Ajmer, Aibak had a mosque built, now called the Adhai Din ka Jhonpra. It was made partly from the stones of destroyed Hindu and Jain temples. In Delhi, around 1199, he began the great tower now known as the Qutb Minar. His successor Iltutmish raised it higher.

Muhammad of Ghor outlived Prithviraj by fourteen years. His brother died in 1203, and he became sole sultan. In 1204 the Khwarazmian Turks and their Qara Khitai allies smashed his army at Andkhud, far to the north. Rebels rose across his empire. In Punjab the Khokhars cut the road from Ghazni to Lahore.

He came down to the Salt Range to deal with them. Minhaj says the fighting near the Jhelum lasted a full day. The Ghurids were close to giving way when a young officer, Iltutmish, arrived with the reserve. The Khokhars were massacred. Then the Sultan turned back towards Ghazni.

At a halting place called Dhamiak, in 1206, he was killed. The Taj al-Ma’athir says his tent stood in a green meadow by a stream. It was the time of evening prayer. As he bowed his head, assassins cut down an armour-bearer and two attendants and reached him. Minhaj blames followers of the Ismailis, a sect the Sultan had fought against. Ibn al-Athir says Khokhars, with two Muslims among them. Akbar’s Tarikh-i-Alfi and Firishta say Khokhars, avenging their dead. The date usually given is 15 March 1206.

Dhamiak is in today’s Jhelum district, in Pakistani Punjab. Not Ghazni. Not by an arrow. Not at Prithviraj’s hand. His body was carried to Ghazni. In the 1990s the Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan built a shrine at Dhamiak. Pakistan has named its Ghauri missiles after the Sultan.

His empire broke up among his slave generals. Aibak took power at Lahore in 1206, the start of what we call the Delhi Sultanate. He died there in 1210. He fell from his horse during a game of chaugan, an early form of polo, and the pommel of his saddle pierced his ribs. Iltutmish, the hero of the Khokhar battle and Aibak’s son-in-law, built the Sultanate into a state that lasted. It ran under five dynasties until Babur came in 1526.

The Delhi Sultanate that grew out of Tarain ended at Panipat in 1526, when Babur beat Ibrahim Lodi. That story is in <a href="/news/mughals-panipat-to-taj-mahal-full-story">The Mughals, From Panipat to the Taj Mahal</a>.

If the record is so clear, where did the blind archer come from? From a poem.

The Prithviraj Raso is a poem in Brajbhasha, an old form of Hindi. It is said to be by Chand Bardai, Prithviraj’s court poet and friend, who rode with him to every battle. Tradition says Chand came from Lahore. The poem’s last canto, or chapter, tells of the deaths of king and poet. It is credited to Chand’s son Jalha.

Most scholars no longer believe Chand wrote it in the twelfth century. The oldest known manuscript, of the shortest version, is dated 1610. Scholars including Namvar Singh and Cynthia Talbot date the poem to the sixteenth century, around Akbar’s reign. That is when summaries of its plot first appear, in Abul Fazl’s Ain-i-Akbari and the Sanskrit Surjana Charita. Others, including some Rajasthani scholars, believe an older core from about the thirteenth century lies underneath. Prithviraj’s court did have a royal bard named Prithvibhata, and some identify him with Chand.

What is certain is that the poem kept growing. Talbot listed nearly 170 manuscripts. Those whose patrons are known were made for Rajput royal families. The longest, compiled for the Mewar court around 1703, has 16,306 stanzas. It makes Samar Singh of Mewar Prithviraj’s bravest friend and brother-in-law. Yet Samar Singh’s own inscriptions date from 1273 to 1299, nearly a century later.

In the Raso, Jaichand of Kannauj holds a swayamvara for his daughter Sanyogita: a gathering where a princess chooses her husband. He leaves Prithviraj out. In the popular telling he even sets up a statue of Prithviraj as a doorkeeper. Sanyogita walks past the kings and garlands the statue. Prithviraj has come with a hundred warriors. He carries her off, and two-thirds of his men die covering the escape to Delhi. Then he forgets his kingdom for love. He is beaten by ‘Sahabdin’, as the poem calls Muhammad, and blinded in Ghazni.

Chand follows his master to Ghazni. He works his way into the Sultan’s favour and boasts of the blind king’s archery, until the Sultan wants to see it. Prithviraj is given a bow. Chand tells him where the Sultan sits. One arrow, aimed by sound, kills the Sultan: the shabdbhedi baan, the arrow that finds its mark by sound. Then king and poet kill each other. Raverty recorded the same story as the Hindi bards told it.

Everyone in north India knows the couplet Chand is supposed to have spoken. It is written on a Mewar painting of the scene made around 1860:

Char Bans Chaubi Gaj, ungal asat parman; Ta upar sultan hai, mat chuke Chauhan.Couplet inscribed on a Mewar painting of about 1860, attributed to the artist Tara; popularly credited to Chand Bardai

Roughly: four bamboos, twenty-four gaj and eight finger-widths away, there sits the Sultan. Do not miss, Chauhan.

The story did not start with the Raso. The older Jain Prithviraja Prabandha already has a captive Prithviraj, who seems to be blind, trying to shoot the Sultan. There he hits a statue and fails. Frances Pritchett of Columbia University points out how the Raso shapes the tale. Early on, Prithviraj shoots his minister Kaymas in the dark. At the end, he shoots blind. The king who was blind to danger, lost in love, is made blind in fact, and wins anyway.

James Tod, the British officer who brought the Raso to Western readers in the nineteenth century, treated it as history. The doubts came from Rajasthan itself. In 1886 Kaviraj Shyamaldas found that its dates did not add up. A Mewar official, Mohanlal Vishnu Pandya, tried to defend it with forged documents. Scholars such as G.H. Ojha rejected his arguments. By the end of the nineteenth century, few historians took it as a record of events. Here is how the best-known claims stand.

Prithviraj won the first battle so well that the second needs explaining. Historians have given very different answers, and they still do.

The historian Cynthia Talbot asked a different question. Not what Prithviraj did, but why he is remembered, and by whom. Her book The Last Hindu Emperor (Cambridge University Press) follows his story through more than 800 years of texts. Her argument, in short: memory turned a clan’s hero into a community’s, and in the end a nation’s.

Oddly enough, the Persian chroniclers started it. Hasan Nizami and Minhaj made Prithviraj’s defeat the opening of Muslim rule in India, so they made him big. Jain writers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries made him a bungling king who brought ruin on himself. The Raso, sung in Rajput courts, made him a romantic hero. Tod, in British India, made him ‘the last Hindu emperor’. In the nationalist age he became a patriotic Hindu hero. He was even issue No. 25 of Amar Chitra Katha, the comic-book series.

In 2022 he became a Bollywood blockbuster that wasn’t. Samrat Prithviraj, directed by Chandraprakash Dwivedi and starring Akshay Kumar, was based on the Raso: blinded king, Ghazni arrow and all. Before release the film was simply called Prithviraj. In May 2022 Dwivedi said that name was historically correct; neither the Raso nor the Prithviraja Vijaya calls him ‘Samrat’, or emperor. On 27 May, after a petition by the Shree Rajput Karni Sena, Yash Raj Films wrote that it would change the title to Samrat Prithviraj.

A Gurjar group went to the Delhi High Court, claiming Prithviraj was a Gurjar, not a Rajput king. The makers said the film was caste neutral, and the court closed the case. Akshay Kumar complained that his school books had ‘only three-four lines about Samrat Prithviraj’ and many chapters on the Mughals. Historians answered back. Ali Nadeem Rezavi of Aligarh Muslim University told ThePrint that the Prithviraj story is built on bardic poems, which exaggerate.

The film opened on 3 June 2022, and several states declared it tax-free. It was reported to have cost between ₹150 crore and ₹300 crore. It grossed about ₹90 crore worldwide.

At Taraori, where it all happened, there is no grand memorial. In 2015 Haryana’s then Chief Minister, Manohar Lal Khattar, promised a monument and research centre there. In 2021 The Tribune reported that the land had still not been found. The old fort was crumbling, with families living in it.

Eight centuries on, the real Prithviraj is hard to see through the stories. He was a young, brave, ambitious king. He won a great battle, made an enemy and did not finish him, and lost everything a year later on the same field. That is drama enough. The blind arrow is a poet’s gift to a king who did not get a second chance.