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The 500th Anniversary of the First Battle of Panipat

Contrary to popular belief, the Mughals did not bring Islamic rule to India — but their rule did shape India’s military, administrative, and geopolitical landscape in ways that endure to this day.

Mughal musketeers of the 17th century.

Five hundred years ago, on April 21, 1526, two armies clashed near the town of Panipat, some 65 kilometers (40 miles) northwest of Delhi. The battle that ensued — the First Battle of Panipat — would change the course of Indian and world history. The victor, Zahir ud-Din Muhammad Babur, would now found the Mughal Empire on the ruins of the Delhi Sultanate.

Contrary to popular belief, the Mughals did not bring Islamic rule to India — Muslim states had already ruled much of the subcontinent for three centuries prior. The legacy of the empire that Babur founded lay in how it shaped India’s military, administrative, and geopolitical landscape in ways that endure to this day.

Historical Background

Babur, a prince of the Timurid dynasty, was born in Andijan in 1483 CE, in present-day Uzbekistan. He was descended from two great conquerors: Timur from his father’s side and Genghis Khan from his mother’s. After Uzbek attacks forced him to leave his homeland, he wandered around the region, and eventually seized Kabul in 1504, where he ruled before conquering India.

Timur had sacked Delhi in 1398, leading to the sultanate’s decline, which precipitated the political fragmentation of much of North India. Soon after Timur’s invasion, the Sayyid dynasty came to power in Delhi and ruled as Timurid vassals, eschewing royal titles. Therefore, Babur would have had good reason to believe that India was part of his legal patrimony and that the Timurids alone were the fount of political authority there. In 1508, even before arriving in India, Babur took the exalted sovereign title of padishah (emperor), denoting supremacy over emirs and sultans.

By the time Babur arrived on the scene, the Delhi Sultanate was ruled by the Afghan Lodi Dynasty and, though undergoing somewhat of a revival, only controlled a strip of land in the Indo-Gangetic Plains extending from Punjab to Bihar. Unlike the preceding Sayyid dynasty, the Lodi dynasty considered itself sovereign and not subject to the Timurids. The final sultan of the Lodi dynasty, Ibrahim Lodi, was unpopular enough that many conspired against him. In 1524, the governor of Punjab invited Babur to invade India and assume sovereignty. Babur, who had been unable to reestablish a Timurid empire in its homeland, hardly needed convincing to create an empire somewhere else.

The Battle of Panipat

Soon, Babur led an army into India, meeting Ibrahim Lodi’s forces at Panipat, and Babur’s heavily outnumbered forces won. According to Abu’l Fazl, the vizier and biographer of Babur’s grandson, the Emperor Akbar, “Sultan Ibrahim was killed ignominiously in an obscure corner…[and near him] five of six thousand men lay slain.” Fazl viewed Babur’s conquest of India an achievement that surpassed those of the previous three great Islamic invaders of India, Mahmud of Ghanzi, Muhammad of Ghor, and Timur, because Babur defeated Sultan Ibrahim’s “hundred thousand cavalrymen and a thousand war elephants” with “twelve thousand” men.

Of course, Babur’s victory was neither a fluke nor a miracle, because he had a distinct military advantage over his enemies: his army was one of the first in Indian history to deploy gunpowder weapons, having acquired them from the Ottoman Turks.

Noting in his autobiography, the Baburnama, that “this difficult affair was made easy for us,” having won the battle in only a half-day, Babur wrote that some of his troops in the center flank “made good discharge of firingi shots” while those in his left flank “made excellent discharge of zarbzan shots.” A firingi refers to either a small anti-personnel cannon of Portuguese origin or a small Ottoman gun. Zarbzans, also of Ottoman origin, were field cannons that became the most popular guns in India. They had “funnel-shaped mouths,” were “mounted on two-wheeled carts with spoke-less wheels” and “drawn by four pairs of oxen.”

With Ibrahim Lodi slain, soon Delhi and Agra fell into Babur’s hands. Thus, the Mughal Empire was founded, a state that would steadily expand over most of the subcontinent over the next two centuries during the reigns of Babur’s successors Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb.

While the First Battle of Panipat is an interesting historical event in its own right, leading to the creation of a major state, its legacy is more enduring than most battles because the Mughal Empire transformed the Indian subcontinent in deep ways that impacted the region for centuries, shaping the present-day.

First, the Mughal victory at Panipat was the beginning of a military revolution for India. Firearms and cannon gave the Mughals a decisive edge. Soon, most Indian armies would adopt gunpowder weapons and field artillery divisions. Armies would find that they could no longer succeed if they did not use the new technology.

The Mughal forces of Babur followed up their victory at Panipat with another victory over a much larger Rajput army at the Battle of Khanwa in Rajasthan. Babur wrote of that battle that “we imitated the ghazis of Rum [the Ottomans] by posting matchlockmen (tufanchian) and cannoneers (ra‘d-andazan) along the line of carts which were chained to one another in front of us.” Elephants, formerly the “tanks” of Indian warfare, proved to be useless because of their slowness and because cannonfire panicked them. The future lay with more mobile forces.

The incentive to adapt to the new military environment of India was obvious: states that used cannon succeeded on the battlefield and grew, whilst those that didn’t, were destroyed. In South India, the five Deccan sultanates endured decades of defeat by the Hindu power of Vijayanagara. Although Vijayanagara had made use of Portuguese mercenaries with matchlock guns, its rivals, especially the Sultanate of Bijapur invested heavily in cannon technology, adopting many ideas from the Ottomans. The five sultanates crushed Vijayanagara’s forces at the Battle of Talikota in 1565 because of their deployment of gunpowder weapons. According to the historian Richard M. Eaton, the sultanates’ forces “fastened together 600 cannon of different calibres in three rows, with 200 heavy cannon in the front row, intermediate cannon in the middle and swivel cannon at the back….when the infantry [of Vijayanagara] came within close range.…the gunners fired two devastating volleys: the first with cannon balls, the second with copper coins that functioned like shrapnel. This repulse decided the outcome.”

But while gunpowder would initially favor Muslim states in the subcontinent — who had borrowed the technology from the Ottoman Empire — its widespread adoption eventually favored those states, often Hindu, that were willing to mobilize their large, native populations, and provide them with guns. Everywhere in the world, this changed the balance of power. Gunpowder negated the power of trained warriors, knights, and horsemen. Any peasant with a musket could kill an armored, mounted enemy. This led to the decline of feudalism in Europe. In Japan, peasant mobilization with guns was felt to be so threatening to the social order that the Tokugawa Shogunate eventually confiscated most guns and only permitted samurai to carry weapons.

In India, groups that mobilized their peasants gunpowder — enabling people to go back and forth from farming to warfare due to the ease of using a gun — could field larger and more flexible armies. The Marathas, who would take over much of the Mughal Empire in the 18th century, were an example of such a group. They both imported guns — for example, there is a record of an order for 2,000 guns from the Portuguese in 1758 — and established their own foundries.

Administrative Impact

The Mughal Empire also led an administrative revolution in India. It was able to administer its territory more effectively than any previous subcontinental state, by which it was able to tax land more efficiently and implement its laws and provide internal security over large swathes of land.

According to David Ludden, a professor of history at New York University (NYU), the Mughal Empire was different from that of the polities that had preceded it in India because it united more territory more tightly under a bureaucracy than any Indian state had before. Medieval Indian states ruled over their core territories and dispersed islands of control separated by tracts of unproductive and often uncontrolled land. They often ruled over lesser rulers as suzerains rather than as sovereigns. Like many other early modern states, the Mughal Empire imposed a measure of centralization over a feudal landscape, laying the groundwork for India to digest modern institutions.

The Mughal Empire was able to better incorporate local Hindu rulers into its apparatus compared to previous Muslim states. Because the Mughal dynasty partly derived from the Genghisid tradition, it was more inclined to conceive itself as the ruler of a universal empire established by divine mandate in the line of Genghis Khan, rather than as a purely Islamic polity. According to Douglas Streusand, a professor of international relations and the author of Islamic Gunpowder Empires: Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals, the Emperor Akbar “espoused sulh-i kull (peace with all, universal toleration) as  the sovereign cult of the empire….[and he] incorporated both Muslim and Hindu officers and chiefs into a single ruling class.”

The Mughal Empire’s main innovation was in establishing a lasting, centralized state that endured for centuries, defying India’s tendency toward regional fragmentation. With the exception of local Hindu rulers that were incorporated into the Mughal system, the Mughal government enacted measures to prevent nobles from building up local power bases. One was the separation of the roles of a province’s governor (subahdar) and its chief financial officer (diwan). Another measure was by ranking Mughal officers — mansabdars — on the efficiency of the service they provided the emperor. The empire’s land revenue was assigned to mansabdars based on their rank, so they could provide a certain number of soldiers to the state, especially cavalry. Mansabdars were assigned to collect revenue, but the revenue (jagirs) that they were assigned were not from the same territory they were overseeing. However, they were frequently reassigned to different places. In this way, the Mughal government could control its officers. All of this necessitated the establishment of a large, effective, revenue-extracting bureaucracy, mostly staffed by local Hindus skilled in the arts of accounting and scrivenery.

Even though this system began to break down at the higher level in the 18th century, and Mughal officers began to assert themselves as independent rulers, the Mughals bequeathed a functioning revenue system to their successors, whether independent governors, the Marathas, or the British. The system continued to function at the local level, enabling newcomers to tap into it to extract large incomes.

The third major way in which the Battle of Panipat impacted Indian history through the creation of the Mughal Empire was the way in which the empire welded together the Indian subcontinent into a single state. Prior to the arrival of the Mughal Empire, India was fragmented into many states, many of which roughly mirrored its primary cultural and geographical regions. In addition to the Delhi Sultanate, India’s states included sultanates in Kashmir, Gujarat, Malwa, Bengal, and the Deccan, independent Rajput kingdoms, particularly Marwar and Mewar, and, of course, the Vijayanagara Empire that dominated southern India. Prior to the establishment of Muslim states in the 12th and 13th centuries, India was similarly fragmented.

All this suggests that India’s political evolution would have otherwise been similar to that of Europe’s after the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire. Between the sixth and twelfth centuries, India’s medium-sized states were increasingly coherent and long-lived. The Delhi Sultanate briefly expanded to control most of the subcontinent in the first few decades of the 14th century, but it collapsed afterward. After the Gupta Empire in the 5th century, no Indian state controlled over half the people and land of India for a sustained period of time until the Mughals.

The creation and endurance of a large, pan-Indian state is the legacy of the Mughals. The Mughals held the belief that the Mughal emperor — and he alone — was the emperor of all of Hindustan or India, the fount of all authority there. And thus, India was to be a single state under Mughal control, not a land of independent sultans and rajas with their many kingdoms. The idea was so enduring that post-Mughal states, such as the Nizamate of Hyderabad, continued to acknowledge the fiction of being part of the Mughal Empire. The Nizamate continued to retain the non-royal title of Nizam (administrator), struck coins in the name of the Mughal emperor, used the emperor’s name in Friday prayers, and claimed nominal allegiance, even after becoming a British protectorate.

The Marathas, who captured Delhi in 1771, continued to rule much of the empire in the Mughal Emperor’s name, collecting revenue known as the chauth (one-fourth) as Mughal officers, despite carving out effectively independent kingdoms in Mughal territory and simultaneously posing as servants of an independent Maratha sovereign (chhatrapati) and the Mughal Emperor.

The British, too, claimed to rule as Mughal officers until the abolishment of the Mughal Empire in 1858. After the British victory at the Battle of Buxar in 1765, they were granted the position of diwan in Bengal, enabling them to legally collect its revenues, theoretically on behalf of the Mughal emperor. For decades after, the British continued to send to Delhi a “ceremonial gift, or nazr — which represented a public confirmation of the status of the British as liegemen of the Emperor.” According to historian William Dalrymple, even in the 1830s, when the British had conquered most of India, British officials “accepted that the British were technically still the feudal inferior of the Mughal, but was determined that given the reality of British power and Mughal weakness, this must no longer be acknowledged in public.” The idea of a united Indian state under a single imperial sovereign continued when the British replaced the last Mughal emperor, the emperor of Hindustan, with Queen Victoria, the Empress of India.

The Mughal Empire bequeathed the idea of a single subcontinental state to its successors. This enduring idea, along with their military and administrative innovations, is the legacy of the First Battle of Panipat, a legacy that has shaped India and its neighbors to this day.

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Five hundred years ago, on April 21, 1526, two armies clashed near the town of Panipat, some 65 kilometers (40 miles) northwest of Delhi. The battle that ensued — the First Battle of Panipat — would change the course of Indian and world history. The victor, Zahir ud-Din Muhammad Babur, would now found the Mughal Empire on the ruins of the Delhi Sultanate.

Contrary to popular belief, the Mughals did not bring Islamic rule to India — Muslim states had already ruled much of the subcontinent for three centuries prior. The legacy of the empire that Babur founded lay in how it shaped India’s military, administrative, and geopolitical landscape in ways that endure to this day.

Historical Background

Babur, a prince of the Timurid dynasty, was born in Andijan in 1483 CE, in present-day Uzbekistan. He was descended from two great conquerors: Timur from his father’s side and Genghis Khan from his mother’s. After Uzbek attacks forced him to leave his homeland, he wandered around the region, and eventually seized Kabul in 1504, where he ruled before conquering India.

Timur had sacked Delhi in 1398, leading to the sultanate’s decline, which precipitated the political fragmentation of much of North India. Soon after Timur’s invasion, the Sayyid dynasty came to power in Delhi and ruled as Timurid vassals, eschewing royal titles. Therefore, Babur would have had good reason to believe that India was part of his legal patrimony and that the Timurids alone were the fount of political authority there. In 1508, even before arriving in India, Babur took the exalted sovereign title of padishah (emperor), denoting supremacy over emirs and sultans.

By the time Babur arrived on the scene, the Delhi Sultanate was ruled by the Afghan Lodi Dynasty and, though undergoing somewhat of a revival, only controlled a strip of land in the Indo-Gangetic Plains extending from Punjab to Bihar. Unlike the preceding Sayyid dynasty, the Lodi dynasty considered itself sovereign and not subject to the Timurids. The final sultan of the Lodi dynasty, Ibrahim Lodi, was unpopular enough that many conspired against him. In 1524, the governor of Punjab invited Babur to invade India and assume sovereignty. Babur, who had been unable to reestablish a Timurid empire in its homeland, hardly needed convincing to create an empire somewhere else.

The Battle of Panipat

Soon, Babur led an army into India, meeting Ibrahim Lodi’s forces at Panipat, and Babur’s heavily outnumbered forces won. According to Abu’l Fazl, the vizier and biographer of Babur’s grandson, the Emperor Akbar, “Sultan Ibrahim was killed ignominiously in an obscure corner…[and near him] five of six thousand men lay slain.” Fazl viewed Babur’s conquest of India an achievement that surpassed those of the previous three great Islamic invaders of India, Mahmud of Ghanzi, Muhammad of Ghor, and Timur, because Babur defeated Sultan Ibrahim’s “hundred thousand cavalrymen and a thousand war elephants” with “twelve thousand” men.

Of course, Babur’s victory was neither a fluke nor a miracle, because he had a distinct military advantage over his enemies: his army was one of the first in Indian history to deploy gunpowder weapons, having acquired them from the Ottoman Turks.

Noting in his autobiography, the Baburnama, that “this difficult affair was made easy for us,” having won the battle in only a half-day, Babur wrote that some of his troops in the center flank “made good discharge of firingi shots” while those in his left flank “made excellent discharge of zarbzan shots.” A firingi refers to either a small anti-personnel cannon of Portuguese origin or a small Ottoman gun. Zarbzans, also of Ottoman origin, were field cannons that became the most popular guns in India. They had “funnel-shaped mouths,” were “mounted on two-wheeled carts with spoke-less wheels” and “drawn by four pairs of oxen.”

With Ibrahim Lodi slain, soon Delhi and Agra fell into Babur’s hands. Thus, the Mughal Empire was founded, a state that would steadily expand over most of the subcontinent over the next two centuries during the reigns of Babur’s successors Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb.

While the First Battle of Panipat is an interesting historical event in its own right, leading to the creation of a major state, its legacy is more enduring than most battles because the Mughal Empire transformed the Indian subcontinent in deep ways that impacted the region for centuries, shaping the present-day.

First, the Mughal victory at Panipat was the beginning of a military revolution for India. Firearms and cannon gave the Mughals a decisive edge. Soon, most Indian armies would adopt gunpowder weapons and field artillery divisions. Armies would find that they could no longer succeed if they did not use the new technology.

The Mughal forces of Babur followed up their victory at Panipat with another victory over a much larger Rajput army at the Battle of Khanwa in Rajasthan. Babur wrote of that battle that “we imitated the ghazis of Rum [the Ottomans] by posting matchlockmen (tufanchian) and cannoneers (ra‘d-andazan) along the line of carts which were chained to one another in front of us.” Elephants, formerly the “tanks” of Indian warfare, proved to be useless because of their slowness and because cannonfire panicked them. The future lay with more mobile forces.

The incentive to adapt to the new military environment of India was obvious: states that used cannon succeeded on the battlefield and grew, whilst those that didn’t, were destroyed. In South India, the five Deccan sultanates endured decades of defeat by the Hindu power of Vijayanagara. Although Vijayanagara had made use of Portuguese mercenaries with matchlock guns, its rivals, especially the Sultanate of Bijapur invested heavily in cannon technology, adopting many ideas from the Ottomans. The five sultanates crushed Vijayanagara’s forces at the Battle of Talikota in 1565 because of their deployment of gunpowder weapons. According to the historian Richard M. Eaton, the sultanates’ forces “fastened together 600 cannon of different calibres in three rows, with 200 heavy cannon in the front row, intermediate cannon in the middle and swivel cannon at the back….when the infantry [of Vijayanagara] came within close range.…the gunners fired two devastating volleys: the first with cannon balls, the second with copper coins that functioned like shrapnel. This repulse decided the outcome.”

But while gunpowder would initially favor Muslim states in the subcontinent — who had borrowed the technology from the Ottoman Empire — its widespread adoption eventually favored those states, often Hindu, that were willing to mobilize their large, native populations, and provide them with guns. Everywhere in the world, this changed the balance of power. Gunpowder negated the power of trained warriors, knights, and horsemen. Any peasant with a musket could kill an armored, mounted enemy. This led to the decline of feudalism in Europe. In Japan, peasant mobilization with guns was felt to be so threatening to the social order that the Tokugawa Shogunate eventually confiscated most guns and only permitted samurai to carry weapons.

In India, groups that mobilized their peasants gunpowder — enabling people to go back and forth from farming to warfare due to the ease of using a gun — could field larger and more flexible armies. The Marathas, who would take over much of the Mughal Empire in the 18th century, were an example of such a group. They both imported guns — for example, there is a record of an order for 2,000 guns from the Portuguese in 1758 — and established their own foundries.

Administrative Impact

The Mughal Empire also led an administrative revolution in India. It was able to administer its territory more effectively than any previous subcontinental state, by which it was able to tax land more efficiently and implement its laws and provide internal security over large swathes of land.

According to David Ludden, a professor of history at New York University (NYU), the Mughal Empire was different from that of the polities that had preceded it in India because it united more territory more tightly under a bureaucracy than any Indian state had before. Medieval Indian states ruled over their core territories and dispersed islands of control separated by tracts of unproductive and often uncontrolled land. They often ruled over lesser rulers as suzerains rather than as sovereigns. Like many other early modern states, the Mughal Empire imposed a measure of centralization over a feudal landscape, laying the groundwork for India to digest modern institutions.

The Mughal Empire was able to better incorporate local Hindu rulers into its apparatus compared to previous Muslim states. Because the Mughal dynasty partly derived from the Genghisid tradition, it was more inclined to conceive itself as the ruler of a universal empire established by divine mandate in the line of Genghis Khan, rather than as a purely Islamic polity. According to Douglas Streusand, a professor of international relations and the author of Islamic Gunpowder Empires: Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals, the Emperor Akbar “espoused sulh-i kull (peace with all, universal toleration) as  the sovereign cult of the empire….[and he] incorporated both Muslim and Hindu officers and chiefs into a single ruling class.”

The Mughal Empire’s main innovation was in establishing a lasting, centralized state that endured for centuries, defying India’s tendency toward regional fragmentation. With the exception of local Hindu rulers that were incorporated into the Mughal system, the Mughal government enacted measures to prevent nobles from building up local power bases. One was the separation of the roles of a province’s governor (subahdar) and its chief financial officer (diwan). Another measure was by ranking Mughal officers — mansabdars — on the efficiency of the service they provided the emperor. The empire’s land revenue was assigned to mansabdars based on their rank, so they could provide a certain number of soldiers to the state, especially cavalry. Mansabdars were assigned to collect revenue, but the revenue (jagirs) that they were assigned were not from the same territory they were overseeing. However, they were frequently reassigned to different places. In this way, the Mughal government could control its officers. All of this necessitated the establishment of a large, effective, revenue-extracting bureaucracy, mostly staffed by local Hindus skilled in the arts of accounting and scrivenery.

Even though this system began to break down at the higher level in the 18th century, and Mughal officers began to assert themselves as independent rulers, the Mughals bequeathed a functioning revenue system to their successors, whether independent governors, the Marathas, or the British. The system continued to function at the local level, enabling newcomers to tap into it to extract large incomes.

The third major way in which the Battle of Panipat impacted Indian history through the creation of the Mughal Empire was the way in which the empire welded together the Indian subcontinent into a single state. Prior to the arrival of the Mughal Empire, India was fragmented into many states, many of which roughly mirrored its primary cultural and geographical regions. In addition to the Delhi Sultanate, India’s states included sultanates in Kashmir, Gujarat, Malwa, Bengal, and the Deccan, independent Rajput kingdoms, particularly Marwar and Mewar, and, of course, the Vijayanagara Empire that dominated southern India. Prior to the establishment of Muslim states in the 12th and 13th centuries, India was similarly fragmented.

All this suggests that India’s political evolution would have otherwise been similar to that of Europe’s after the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire. Between the sixth and twelfth centuries, India’s medium-sized states were increasingly coherent and long-lived. The Delhi Sultanate briefly expanded to control most of the subcontinent in the first few decades of the 14th century, but it collapsed afterward. After the Gupta Empire in the 5th century, no Indian state controlled over half the people and land of India for a sustained period of time until the Mughals.

The creation and endurance of a large, pan-Indian state is the legacy of the Mughals. The Mughals held the belief that the Mughal emperor — and he alone — was the emperor of all of Hindustan or India, the fount of all authority there. And thus, India was to be a single state under Mughal control, not a land of independent sultans and rajas with their many kingdoms. The idea was so enduring that post-Mughal states, such as the Nizamate of Hyderabad, continued to acknowledge the fiction of being part of the Mughal Empire. The Nizamate continued to retain the non-royal title of Nizam (administrator), struck coins in the name of the Mughal emperor, used the emperor’s name in Friday prayers, and claimed nominal allegiance, even after becoming a British protectorate.

The Marathas, who captured Delhi in 1771, continued to rule much of the empire in the Mughal Emperor’s name, collecting revenue known as the chauth (one-fourth) as Mughal officers, despite carving out effectively independent kingdoms in Mughal territory and simultaneously posing as servants of an independent Maratha sovereign (chhatrapati) and the Mughal Emperor.

The British, too, claimed to rule as Mughal officers until the abolishment of the Mughal Empire in 1858. After the British victory at the Battle of Buxar in 1765, they were granted the position of diwan in Bengal, enabling them to legally collect its revenues, theoretically on behalf of the Mughal emperor. For decades after, the British continued to send to Delhi a “ceremonial gift, or nazr — which represented a public confirmation of the status of the British as liegemen of the Emperor.” According to historian William Dalrymple, even in the 1830s, when the British had conquered most of India, British officials “accepted that the British were technically still the feudal inferior of the Mughal, but was determined that given the reality of British power and Mughal weakness, this must no longer be acknowledged in public.” The idea of a united Indian state under a single imperial sovereign continued when the British replaced the last Mughal emperor, the emperor of Hindustan, with Queen Victoria, the Empress of India.

The Mughal Empire bequeathed the idea of a single subcontinental state to its successors. This enduring idea, along with their military and administrative innovations, is the legacy of the First Battle of Panipat, a legacy that has shaped India and its neighbors to this day.

Akhilesh Pillalamarri

Akhilesh Pillalamarri is a writer and attorney focused on civilization, geopolitics, security, and governance in Asia.

Mughal administration

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