Siege of Chittorgarh (1567-68)

Background

Chittorgarh was the capital of Mewar under the Sisodia Rajput dynasty and, at roughly 700 acres atop a 180-metre plateau, is often described as the largest fort complex in India. It had already fallen twice before: to Alauddin Khilji of the Delhi Sultanate in 1303, an episode later fused in popular memory with the legendary jauhar of Rani Padmini as told in Malik Muhammad Jayasi's 1540 poem Padmavat, a work of literature rather than a contemporary chronicle; and to Bahadur Shah of Gujarat in 1535, when Rani Karnavati, ruling as regent for the young Udai Singh II, led a jauhar of her own. By the time Akbar turned his attention to Mewar, Chittor's fall had already become a recurring marker in Rajput memory rather than a novel catastrophe.

Akbar, consolidating Mughal control of northern and western India after his grandfather Babur's and father Humayun's conquests, had brought most major Rajput houses into alliance through marriage and negotiated submission — Amber (Jaipur) under Raja Bharmal from 1562 being the model case. Mewar alone refused. Udai Singh II declined Akbar's offers of accommodation, and Chittor also sat astride routes Akbar needed secure for his planned advance into Gujarat and Malwa, giving the campaign both strategic and symbolic weight.

The Siege

Mughal Siege Works

Akbar arrived in person in October 1567 with a large force, reportedly around 80,000 troops, against a garrison the Akbarnama numbers at roughly 8,000 fighting men, and began systematic siege engineering rather than direct assault. Mughal sappers dug a sabat — a fortified covered approach trench wide enough to move cannon and men under cover — up to the walls, alongside earthen ramps (pashebs) built to bring artillery to bear on the ramparts. Because moving heavy ordnance overland was slow and difficult, part of the siege train, including large cannon, was cast on site rather than hauled from Agra, a practice Akbar also used at later sieges such as Ranthambore. Heavy bombardment worked at breaching Chittor's walls over months, while mining operations, in which tunnels were packed with gunpowder and detonated beneath the fortifications, caused heavy casualties on both sides, including among the besiegers when at least one charge is recorded as having exploded prematurely.

Udai Singh II had already withdrawn into the Aravalli hills to preserve the dynastic line, leaving the defense to two commanders, Jaimal Rathore of Merta and Patta Sisodia of Kelwa. The Rajput garrison, badly outnumbered, used the fort's natural defenses and repeated sorties to disrupt Mughal siege operations, but could not prevent the slow collapse of the walls.

Death of Jaimal and the Final Assault

By February 1568 Mughal artillery had opened significant breaches. On the night of 23 February, Akbar himself, firing a matchlock from a raised gun position, shot and killed Jaimal, reportedly without at first knowing who he had hit; the Akbarnama treats the shot as decisive, since Jaimal's death broke the coordination of the defense. With the fort no longer defensible, the Rajputs inside chose the customary response to certain defeat.

Jauhar and Saka

On the eve of the final assault, the women of the fort performed jauhar, mass self-immolation to avoid capture — the third such event recorded at Chittor, after 1303 and 1535. The following morning the surviving male defenders, led now by Patta since Jaimal was dead, dressed in saffron and rode out for the saka, a final sortie fought without any expectation of survival, until they were killed.

Aftermath

The Akbarnama states that some 30,000 people, including non-combatants who had taken refuge in the fort, were killed after its fall — a figure modern historians treat as an order-of-magnitude indicator of a policy of mass reprisal rather than a precise count. Later chroniclers record that Akbar, in a gesture toward the courage of the defeated commanders, ordered stone statues of Jaimal and Patta mounted on elephants placed at the gates of Agra Fort.

Udai Singh II, in the fort's absence, established a new capital at Udaipur, sited among the Aravalli lakes for defensibility rather than symbolic weight. Mewar itself was not annexed: his son and successor Maharana Pratap continued armed resistance to the Mughals for decades, most famously at the Battle of Haldighati in 1576, where the Mughal force was commanded by Raja Man Singh of Amber — a Rajput serving Akbar against a fellow Rajput, a reminder that Mewar's defiance was not shared by every Rajput house. Chittor itself remained in Mughal hands until 1615, when it was restored to Mewar under Jahangir following Rana Amar Singh I's submission, on the condition that the fort not be refortified.

Historiography and Legacy

The main narrative source is the Akbarnama, Abu'l-Fazl's official chronicle of Akbar's reign, written decades after the events from court records and participant testimony, and consequently favorable to Akbar. Rajput-side memory survives chiefly through later bardic chronicles (khyats), such as Muhnot Nainsi's seventeenth-century Khyat, composed after the fact and shaped by heroic convention rather than contemporary record. The version of the siege most familiar to modern readers, with its emphasis on chivalric sacrifice, owes a great deal to Colonel James Tod's Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (1829–32), a British administrator's compilation of Rajput oral and bardic tradition that shaped nineteenth- and twentieth-century retellings far more than the terser Mughal court record, and whose romanticized framing modern historians treat with some caution even as they draw on the material it preserved.

Chittorgarh, together with five other Rajasthani forts, was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site (Hill Forts of Rajasthan) in 2013. The 1568 siege, alongside the Padmini legend and the Battle of Haldighati, remains one of the most frequently invoked episodes in Rajput regional memory and in broader Indian narratives of resistance to conquest.