Rana Sanga

Background and accession

Sangram Singh, remembered as Rana Sanga, belonged to the Sisodia branch of the Guhilot Rajput clan that ruled Mewar from Chittor. He was a grandson of Rana Kumbha, who had fortified Chittor and Kumbhalgarh and made Mewar the dominant Rajput power of the fifteenth century, and a son of Rana Raimal. Accounts of his path to the throne describe a contested succession among Raimal's sons in which Sanga prevailed over rival brothers; he is said to have lost an eye and the use of an arm and a leg in the fighting of his youth, and later tradition made much of a ruler who had survived multiple serious wounds before he ever fought Babur. He acceded around 1508.

Consolidation and wars with the Sultanates

Sanga's reign coincided with a period of weakness among the Sultanates that had traditionally checked Mewar's expansion, and he used it to make Mewar the strongest power in northern and central India outside Delhi itself. He defeated Ibrahim Lodi, the last Delhi Sultan, in engagements remembered as the battles of Khatoli (1518) and Dholpur (1519), checking Lodi expansion into Rajasthan. Against Malwa he defeated, and by most accounts briefly captured, Sultan Mahmud Khilji II at the Battle of Gagron (1519) before releasing him; against Gujarat he fought inconclusively with Sultan Muzaffar Shah II. By the mid-1520s Mewar's writ extended well beyond Rajasthan into parts of present-day Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, and Sanga had built a coalition of allied Rajput and Afghan chiefs, including Medini Rai of Chanderi, Rao Ganga of Marwar and the Afghan noble Hasan Khan Mewati, that gave Mewar a reach no earlier Rajput ruler had matched. Unlike the inter-clan rivalry that had weakened Rajasthan's rulers against earlier invaders, Sanga's diplomacy held together houses that were traditional competitors, briefly giving Rajasthan something close to a unified military command.

Babur and the question of an invitation

Babur's own memoir, the Baburnama, states that he was approached by Indian nobles — among them Daulat Khan Lodi, the disaffected Punjab governor, and, in Babur's account, Rana Sanga — with invitations to intervene against Ibrahim Lodi. Whether Sanga actually sought Babur's help, and on what terms, is disputed: the claim rests on Babur's own testimony rather than any Rajput source, and it sits awkwardly with Sanga's all-out war against Babur within a year of Lodi's defeat at Panipat (1526). One common reading treats any approach from Sanga as a calculated move to weaken Delhi rather than an invitation to conquest, on the assumption that he expected to face a raider who would withdraw, as earlier Central Asian invaders largely had, rather than found a permanent empire.

The Battle of Khanwa

After Babur's victory over Ibrahim Lodi at Panipat in April 1526, Sanga assembled the largest coalition of his career — Rajput contingents from across Rajasthan joined by Hasan Khan Mewati's Afghan forces — and marched on Babur's newly won territory. The two armies met at Khanwa, near Fatehpur Sikri, on 17 March 1527. Babur, heavily outnumbered by most accounts, deployed the tactics that had won Panipat: gun-carts chained together as a defensive line, matchlock and cannon fire, and mounted flanking manoeuvres (tulughma) on both wings. The Rajput cavalry charges could not break the fortified line, and the battle turned into a decisive Mughal victory. Sanga was wounded and carried from the field.

Death and succession

Sanga survived Khanwa and, according to Rajput tradition, intended to renew the war, but died in 1528 — the sources place his death at Kalpi, or in some accounts elsewhere on the road back toward Mewar. Later chronicles, most influentially the colonial-era compiler James Tod's Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, attribute his death to poisoning by nobles who feared further war would ruin Mewar; this account is not independently corroborated and should be read as tradition rather than established fact. He was succeeded, after a brief and troubled interval, by his son Ratan Singh II and later by Vikramaditya and then Udai Singh II, founder of Udaipur; his grandson's generation included Maharana Pratap, whose resistance to Mughal rule under Akbar drew directly on the reputation Sanga had built.

Assessment

Khanwa marked the effective end of any prospect of a unified Rajput or North Indian coalition capable of turning back the Mughals by open battle, and after it Babur's dynasty had no comparably organized rival in Hindustan. Mewar itself, though defeated, was not broken: its resistance under Sanga's descendants, culminating in Pratap's long refusal to submit to Akbar, kept it the one major Rajput state that never fully submitted to Mughal suzerainty in the aftermath of Sanga's own reign.