Big guns arrive

Ibrahim Lodhi, the third ruler of the Lodhi dynasty and the last sultan of Delhi, had not taken long to make enemies. Daulat Khan, a noble with whom he had a fallout, reached out to Babur, the new conqueror of Kabul, to take on Lodhi. Khan thought a severe round of plundering and battering would do Lodhi good. But, he might not have imagined he had just unspooled a saga that would last for three centuries.

Babur, fresh from his conquest of Kabul, was anyway looking eastwards, towards Delhi, which he considered his birthright, on the tenuous connection that his ancestor, Timur, had conquered and plundered it more than a century earlier. He set out towards his destination, quelling resistance in his path. Lodhi, too, marched out of Delhi, and the two confronted each other at Panipat on April 21, 1526.

With a 50,000-strong army and the asset of 400 war elephants, Lodhi’s forces looked mighty. War elephants were their mobile fortresses. Looks, however, can be deceptive. Lodhi’s army was not a single command unit; it was a collection of his own men, as well as armies of his vassals.

Babur’s army of 20,000 men was that lean and mean force that the Indian Army is aspiring to be today. They were fiercely loyal to him. The invader also had a weapon that north India had not seen before—gunpowder. He came with matchlock guns and cannons. “Gunpowder had made its debut in India a few decades before Babur, but that was in the Deccan. Lodhi had no idea of it,” says retired Colonel Harjeet Singh, defence analyst and author of Elephants versus Cannons, which explores the three battles of Panipat.

Babur also came equipped with new techniques—horse archers armed with deadly composite bows, and innovative troop deployment. Knowing that he was numerically weaker, Babur used the landscape of Panipat effectively. He deployed his forces in such a way that his flanks were hemmed in by the town fortifications on one side and a ditch on the other which became the boundaries of the battlefield. There was no way Lodhi’s men could outflank him. In the centre of his formation, he strung up 700 bullock carts as fortification, behind which he arranged his cannons and musketeers. The cart ramparts had passages from which the cavalry could rush out, suddenly and swiftly.

Lodhi lined up his elephants in front of his army, but as Babur’s cannons went off, the mammoths panicked, trampling their own men. Lodhi’s best asset was rendered useless. Lodhi was caught by surprise when he tried to outflank Babur’s men. There was no space for the manoeuvre, with the city walls hemming in the troops. Babur’s men then performed their amazing tulughma manoeuvre, swiftly outflanking the enemy and attacking the rear. Lodhi’s troops were in disarray. Taking advantage of this, Babur pressed all his reserve men into surrounding the enemy, which clustered into a tight knot in the centre, easy pickings for the horse archer.

Lodhi then embarked upon an ill-timed charge at the Mughals. He took down a few of the enemy, but was soon killed, leaving behind a reserve force that had not yet entered the battle. Babur, on the other hand, had deployed every single man he had. It is said had Lodhi managed to last another hour, the day could have been his.

Since all accounts of this battle are from the victor’s perspective, and more laudatory than analytical, we will never know how close the fight was, says Harjeet Singh. History says Babur was impressed by his rival’s bravery and ordered that he be given a decent burial on the field he fell. It is an indicator that it might have been a close fight. The act also fits into the pattern of the invader being impressed by his Indian foe.

So what if Lodhi had won that day? “Islamic rule had already been established in India. Babur was yet another in a series of marauders, and by then, the established trend was that these invaders would settle down to rule,” says Singh. The after-effects of the battle are more important, he says. The battle ushered in Mughal rule in India. Though it took several decades to establish itself firmly, it would last three centuries and become an important chapter in the history of India. The battle also marked the beginning of the gunpowder age on the Indian battlefield and the edging out of elephants as the piece de resistance of the army.

While the Mughal reign brought a renaissance in the Indian landscape, Lodhi, too left behind a legacy that remains wedged in the Indian DNA. Air Commodore Jasjit Singh gave it a name, the Panipat Syndrome. It encapsulates everything that went wrong for Lodhi on that April day—failure to see a nascent threat, lack of strategic thinking, innovation and preparedness, and allowing the enemy to enter deep into the territory, instead of neutralising it at the border.