Muhammad of Ghor won the Second Battle of Tarain in 11921, defeating the Chahamana king Prithviraj Chauhan near Taraori in modern Haryana. A year after being beaten on the same field, he used mobile mounted archers and repeated feigned retreats to wear down Prithviraj's probably larger army. Prithviraj was captured and killed, and Ghurid power spread across northern India, leading to the Delhi Sultanate founded in 1206.
In 1191 Prithviraj Chauhan, king of Ajmer and Delhi, routed the invading army1 of Muhammad of Ghor at Tarain, and Muhammad himself barely escaped. A year later he returned to the same field with a new army and a new plan, and this time the result shaped the history of northern India for centuries.
Defeat at Tarain, 1191
Muhammad of Ghor, ruler of the Ghurid state in what is now Afghanistan, had been expanding into the Indian plains. At the first battle of Tarain in 1191 Prithviraj's army, with its elephants and Rajput cavalry, broke the Ghurid attack. Muhammad was wounded and his army fled.2
The return
Muhammad spent the following year rebuilding his army, relying above all on fast horse archers from Central Asia2. In 1192 he marched back to Tarain, where Prithviraj again met him, reportedly with a larger force gathered from allied Rajput rulers3.
Mounted archers and false retreats
Instead of a head-on charge, the Ghurids harassed Prithviraj's army with mounted archers, striking its flanks and rear and then pulling back, according to the chroniclers, again and again through the day. The tactic drew the heavier Indian army out of formation and wore it down.
The fall of Prithviraj
When the exhausted army was finally broken by a charge of Muhammad's best cavalry, the battle turned into a rout. Prithviraj was captured as he fled and later killed2; accounts differ, and some say he was briefly kept as a Ghurid vassal before being executed. Later legends added much to his story.4
Why Tarain mattered
The victory opened northern India to Ghurid rule. Muhammad's general and former slave Qutb ud-Din Aibak took Delhi5, and after Muhammad's death in 1206 he founded what became the Delhi Sultanate, which ruled much of northern India for more than three centuries until its defeat at the First Battle of Panipat in 1526. Prithviraj himself became a celebrated hero of Indian legend and poetry.
