The 450th anniversary of the battle of Haldighati — the majority but not unanimous view is that the date of the battle is June 21, 1576 — is only one reason to reflect on its history and contemporary resonance. But there are others. Haldighati remains in the crosshairs of political controversy, the target of historical revisionism, and even the rewriting of history. This has been so for almost two centuries now ever since James Tod in Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan had cast the battle in a grand historical mould and described it as “the Thermopylae of Mewar”. This contest was presented along the lines of the Persians versus the Greeks in 480 BCE, itself an enormously significant milestone in the evolution of the West as a self-defined idea.
Nevertheless, a recent statement by the deputy chief minister of Rajasthan merits a pause. She claims credit for the change made in the signage and plaques in Haldighati to show that Rana Pratap was the victor in the battle on June 2, 1576. This was not a simple intertwining of politics and history: by this, the achievements of the deputy chief minister’s own direct ancestor, Raja Man Singh, the prince of Amber, were being erased. He commanded the Mughal army, which, according to the dominant and the conventional belief, carried the day in the battle.
The Haldighati battle has long been part of the Indian nationalist project, but within it different narratives have battled each other. Numerous writers and poets, from Bankim Chandra Chatterjee to Kazi Nazrul Islam, evoked Haldighati and celebrated Mewar’s resistance to the Mughals, thus transforming Rana Pratap into a national icon. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was present at the 400th anniversary in 1976. According to news reports, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s Sarsangchalak will preside over a function to commemorate the 450th anniversary of the battle.
Earlier it was possible to acclaim both combatants as standing for honourable principles and, in that sense, both were victorious. Rana Pratap stood for patriotism, one who was unwilling to sacrifice his small but still highly-valued sovereignty to the mighty Mughals. Conversely, Man Singh, at the head of the Mughal army, also represented a principle, that of a larger Hindustan in which the Rajputs were also stakeholders.
The narrative shift in Indian politics means that extolling both sides is more difficult. The battle of Haldighati thus becomes a more straightforward Rajput versus Mughal or Muslim contest. Our political polarisations have also meant that an older position
which celebrates both combatants has receded. To question Rana Pratap’s victory becomes less than patriotic.
The great historian, Jadunath Sarkar, had also seen this battle as having an epic quality, calling it “the Thermopylae of Rajasthan” as a variant to Tod. In his treatment, what comes through as having collided at Haldighati were two opposing ideas of India but with a Rajput leading each side. While Man Singh may have won in tactical terms and Rana Pratap lost, it was a “barren victory” for the Maharana lived on to keep fighting, his kingdom and his dynasty outlived the Mughals, and his name became a byword for the spirit of national resistance. To quote Sarkar, “the name of the general who lost Haldighati will live to sustain and uplift the spirit of man at every arduous call of duty so long as the history of India is read.”
This epic quality to Rana Pratap’s patriotism and resistance was however matched by the values that Man Singh, the prince of Amber, brought to battle. To Sarkar, “he was the greater statesman of the two.” This was because “He lent his help to uniting India under one sceptre and imposing an imperial peace on the hundreds of petty potentates eternally wrangling and raiding one others territory, each eagerly cherishing the independence of his small plot as the sole object of his life.” It was only by sweeping all this away that a united India could emerge “and an Indian nation could be dreamt of”. “Man Singh”, wrote Sarkar, “devoted his life to the first honest and conscious effort at realizing such a dream.”
Later historians are careful to distance themselves from the grand narratives surrounding Haldighati. They see its epic quality telling us more about the emergence of Indian nationalism from the second half of the nineteenth century than about the second half of the sixteenth when the Mewar-Mughal contestation actually took place. In such treatments, it is pointed out that pre-nineteenth-century accounts had cast the battle as being of a much smaller scale with the Sisodia/Mewar versus Kachhwaha/ Amber rivalry being one of its principal axis.
In our own times, instances abound of how larger narratives emerge from a conflict and then go on to redefine it in such a manner that the lines between victory and defeat get blurred. In the continuing Russia-Ukraine war, there is no clear answer to either of the narrative issues that frame the conflict or to the question of who has won so far. Is it a war and a full-scale invasion as Ukraine claims? Or is it a ‘special military operation’ as Russia terms it? Much the same issues are raised even more pointedly in the Israel-cum-US concert against Iran. Is there a victor at all in these conflicts and, if so, who is it? Clearly, in a broader sense of the term, Iran and Ukraine have redefined the meanings of victory and defeat by just fighting on under David versus Goliath circumstances and not submitting to a superior force.
The asymmetries in these conflicts certainly recall the Mewar versus the Mughals equation, and the absence of a clear-cut victory also suggests that the side with the greater staying power is also the victor both in strategic terms and in terms of the judgement of history. This does not require any change of the historical record, nor a need to deny the empirical record. As Sarkar noted, “Rana Pratap is still a name to conjure with” for it was “the losing side who have made
that yellow defile a haunted holy ground for pilgrims of Indian patriotism.”
T.C.A. Raghavan is a former High Commissioner to Pakistan and Singapore