The Second Battle of Panipat was fought amidst the Hindu emperor of North India- Hemu, and the Mughal Emperor Akbar on 5th November 1556.
By conquering the Mughals led by Tardi Beg Khan at the Battle of Delhi, he declared himself Raja Vikramaditya at a crowning in Purana Quila in Delhi. Hemu had captured the states of Delhi and Agra a few weeks before the battle. After learning of Agra and Delhi’s fall, Akbar and his guardian, Bairam Khan, marched to Panipat to regain the lost territories. At Panipat, close to the First Battle of Panipat’s site in 1526, fought the armies of both.
The numerical dominance was retained by Hemu and its forces. He was hit in the middle of the fight by an arrow and fell unconscious. His army, seeing their leader descending, panicked and scattered. Unconscious and nearly dead, Hemu was captured by Bairam Khan and eventually executed. A conclusive Mughal victory ended the war.
Humayun, the successor of Babur, the Mughal Empire founder, lost his inheritance when Sher Shah Suri, who founded the Sur Empire in 1540, chased him out of India. Delhi and Agra fell into Sher Shah’s hands, but he died soon after at Kalinjar in 1545. His son, Islam Shah Suri, who was a competent ruler, succeeded him. However, after he died in 1554, the Sur Empire was caught up in a war of succession. It was ravaged by revolt and provincial withdrawal. To recapture what was lost, Humayun made use of this discord. On 23 July 1555, the Mughals defeated Sikandar Shah Suri and eventually regained control over Delhi and Agra.
The rightful heir of Islam Shah, his 12-year-old son, Firoz Khan, was murdered by his maternal uncle, who took the throne as Adil Shah Suri. However, the new emperor was more interested in the pursuit of leisure than his state’s affairs. Those were largely left to Hemu, Rewari’s old Hindu associate of Sher Shah Suri, who had risen from humble circumstances to become both the Chief Minister of Adil Shah and the Suri army general. He was in Bengal when, on 27 January 1556, Humayun died. The Mughal emperor’s death presented Hemu with a perfect opportunity to overthrow the Mughals and regain lost territories.
From Bengal, Hemu began a rapid march and drove the Mughals from Bayana, Etawah, Bharthana, Bidhuna, Lakhna, Sambhal, Kalpi Narnaul. The governor evacuated the town in Agra and fled without a fight after hearing about Hemu’s imminent invasion. Hemu reached Tughlaqabad, a village just outside Delhi, searching for the governor, where he ran into the forces of Tardi Beg Khan, the Mughal Governor of Delhi, and defeated them in the Battle of Tughlaqabad. After a day’s combat on 7 October 1556, he took possession of Delhi[5]. He asserted royal status, assuming the title of Vikramaditya (or Bikramjit).
Hemu himself started the assault, loosening his elephants between the right and left wings of the Mughals. Instead of fleeing, those soldiers who were able to avoid the rampage decided to veer to the sides and strike the flanks of Hemu’s cavalry, pelting them with their superior archery. Facing a deep ravine, the Mughal center also advanced and took up a defensive position. Both the elephant of Hemu or his horse units could cross the gorge to engage with their opponents and were exposed to the missiles being fired from the other end by the Mughal Army.
In the meantime, the Mughal cavalry had made inroads from the flanks and the rear into the Afghan ranks on their swift mounts. It began attacking the elephants, either hacking at the great beasts’ legs or knocking out their riders. Hemu was forced to pull his elephants back, and the assault on Afghanistan relented.
Seeing the slackening of the Afghan assault, Ali Quli Khan led his cavalry out, circling and dropping from the rear into the Afghan center. Hemu, watching the battlefield from his Howdah on top of Hawaii, rushed to fight this charge immediately.
Also Read, The Flashback of the First Battle of Panipat
He continued to lead counterattacks against the Mughals, running down those who challenged his elephants, even after seeing Shadi Khan Kakkar and another of his able lieutenants, Bhagwan Das, go down. It was a desperately contested fight, but in favor of Hemu, the advantage seemed to have flipped. Both of the Mughal army’s wings were forced back, and Hemu marched forward his contingent of war elephants and cavalry to smash their center. At this point, Hemu was wounded, perhaps at the cusp of victory, when a chance Mughal arrow struck him in the eye, and he collapsed unconscious. In his army, seeing him going down caused a panic that broke the formation and fled.
After some hours of ending the battle, the elephant bearing the unconscious and nearly dead Hemu was apprehended and escorted to the Mughal camp. Bairam Khan asked Akbar, 13, to decapitate Hemu, but he declined to take the sword from the dead man. Akbar was forced to touch Hemu’s head with his sword, after which he was executed by Bairam Khan. Hemu’s head was sent to Kabul to be hanged outside Darwaja, Delhi, while his body was hanging at the gate in Quila, Delhi, Purana, where he had his coronation on October 6.
Several Hemu supporters and families were decapitated, and a minaret was erected later on. The painting of this minaret is one of Akbar’s 56 famous pictures of life in his copy of the Akbarnama. At the place in Panipat where he was decapitated, a memorial was erected for Hemu. It is now known as the Samadhi Sthal of Hemu.
With Hemu’s death, the fortunes of Adil Shah also took a turn for the worse. In April 1557, Khizr Khan, son of Muhammad Khan Sur of Bengal, defeated and killed him. 120 of Hemu’s war elephants included the spoils from the battle at Panipat, whose devastating rampages fascinated the Mughals that the animals quickly became an integral part of their military strategies.
