CHITOR AND RANTHAMBOR
Rajput willingness to accept Mughal hegemony was not won without force. In the early I560s the most prestigious Rajput ruler, the Rana of Mewar, remained defiant. Udai Singh (1540-1572) was descended from the Sisodia ruler Rana Sanga who had died fighting Babur at the battle of Kanua in 1527. As head of the Sisodia clan he possessed the highest ritual status of all the Rajput rajas and chiefs scattered across the landscape of North and Central India. Unless Udai Singh were reduced to submission, the imperial authority of the Timurids would be lessened in Rajput eyes. Akbar, at this early period, was still enthusiastically devoted to the cause of Islam and sought to impress the superiority of his faith over the most prestigious warriors in Brahminical Hinduism.
Udai Singh's son was in uneasy residence in Akbar's court. When asked by Akbar (in jest as Abul Fazl claims) as to whether he would support his father or the emperor in a confrontation, the young Rajput prince fled back to Mewar. Akbar was enraged and determined on war. In September, 1567, the emperor led his armies in a holy war or jihad toward Chitor, the capital of Mewar, a fortified city rising 200 meters above the Rajasthan plain. As the imperial armies approached, Udai Singh's advisers in council concluded that the Sisodia army could not face the Mughals in open battle. Instead, Udai Singh left a 5,000 man garrison in Chitor with supplies to withstand a protracted siege and retreated to a subordinate fortress in the hills. Within a month Akbar laid his siege lines completely around Chitor. His raiding parties devastated the countryside and captured Udaipur, the other leading city.
After initial assaults on the walls failed, taking heavy casualties, the besieging army set up three large batteries to bombard the fort. Simultaneously, imperial sappers commenced digging tunnels for two mines and an approach trench (sabat). The artillerymen cast a large siege cannon on site to be used for breaching the walls when the sabat reached its objective. At this point the garrison tried to negotiate a surrender on terms; Akbar rejected this overture.
Fifty-eight days into the siege, the sappers had reached the walls and exploded the first of the mines. When the second mine went off it killed about 200 of the assault force caught in the breach. The defenders sealed up the walls. Akbar then pushed ahead with his covered trench to bring his siege cannon within range of the walls. On the night of 22 February, the Mughals made several breaches in the wall and began a general assault. During the melee, Akbar killed Jaimal, the Rajput commander of Chitor, with a well-aimed musket shot, whose death broke the morale of the defenders. Rising pillars of smoke soon signalled the rite of jauhar as the Rajputs killed their families and prepared to die in a supreme sacrifice. In a day filled with hand-tohand struggles virtually all the defenders died. The Mughal troops slaughtered another 20-25,000 ordinary persons, inhabitants of the town and peasants from the surrounding area on the grounds that they had actively helped in the resistance. Only an audacious body of one thousand musketeers, men of Kalpi who had done much damage to the Mughals in the siege, managed to escape Akbar's wrath. They bound their wives and children and marched them right through the imperial lines as if they were Mughal troops carrying off prisoners.
Although the imperial armies found little treasure to seize, the fortress was destroyed to the point that it remained deserted thereafter. A victory proclamation (fath nama) issued in early March celebrates the successful prosecution of the holy war against the polytheists by the Timurid ruler." Udai Singh, however, remained at large, uncaptured by the Mughals until his death four years later. Akbar, for his part, fulfilled an earlier vow by marching on foot to Ajmer in pilgrimage to the shrine of Khwaja Muin-ud-din Chishti. There, during the month of Ramazan, Akbar circumambulated the shrine, gave gifts to the poor and pious, and after ten days returned to Agra.
The next year, in February, 1569, Akbar led his army to an assault on the massive fortress at Ranthambor which, together with Chitor, controlled the major trade corridor to the sea. Rai Surjan, of the Hada lineage, held the fort and its territory as a vassal of Udai Singh. At Ranthambor, the Mughals employed hundreds of bullocks and dozens of elephants to drag fifteen massive siege guns to a hill overlooking the fortress. When, after only a month, these guns started bombarding the fortress and the covered way had reached the walls, the garrison surrendered on terms. Rai Surjan accepted imperial service in return for retention of his ancestral holdings.
The sieges of Chitor and Ranthambor were spectacular public events. The fall of these great forts demonstrated the reality of Mughal power for every warrior in North India. Outright defiance to the Mughal emperor was not possible; submission or death was the only choice.
Source:
John F. Richards, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 25-27.