Sambhar and Ajmer
The Chāhamānas rose as Gurjara-Pratihāra feudatories around the salt lake of Sambhar and became independent in the tenth century. Ajayarāja founded Ajmer in the twelfth century, and under Vigraharāja IV the dynasty took Delhi from the Tomaras and became the principal power between the Punjab and Malwa.
Vigraharāja was a poet and patron; a Sanskrit play of his composition and another by a court poet were inscribed on stone slabs, later reused in the building of the Adhai Din ka Jhonpra mosque at Ajmer, where fragments survive.
Tarain
Pṛthvīrāja III, who succeeded in 1178, defeated Muhammad of Ghor at Tarain in 1191. Muhammad returned the following year with a larger and better-handled cavalry force, defeated the Rajput army at the same place, and Pṛthvīrāja was captured and killed.
The consequences were immediate and permanent: Delhi and Ajmer fell, and within a decade the Ganga plain as far as Bengal was under Ghurid control. Qutb al-Din Aibak, Muhammad's slave commander, established the sultanate at Delhi in 1206.
Pṛthvīrāja's afterlife in tradition is disproportionate to his reign. The Pṛthvīrāj Rāso, a Braj epic attributed to his bard Chand Bardai, is a very much later composition of doubtful historicity that made him the archetypal Rajput hero; its account of the king killing the sultan by sound after being blinded is legend. The Sanskrit Pṛthvīrājavijaya, written in his lifetime, is the contemporary source and is a court panegyric of a different kind.
Further reading
- Kulke, Hermann. A History of India. Routledge, 2004
- Asher, Catherine B. India Before Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2006
- Hawley, John Stratton. A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement. Harvard University Press, 2015
- Jackson, Peter. The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History. Cambridge University Press, 1999
- Richards, John F. The Mughal Empire. Cambridge University Press, 1993
See also
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.