Capture of Baran (Bulandshahr)

01The fall of the doab towns

Hasan Nizami’s Taj al-Maasir, the court chronicle of Aibak’s campaigns, and Minhaj’s Tabaqat-i-Nasiri both record that after the victory at Tarain Aibak took Meerut and Baran before he secured Delhi itself. Baran was the seat of a Dor Rajput family whose earlier ruler had faced Mahmud of Ghazni in 1018. Local tradition remembers the defender of 1192 as Chandrasena Dor and tells of a hard siege; the Persian sources give no name.

02Holding the doab

Baran became an iqta, a military assignment, of the new Delhi state and stayed one for two centuries; Ziauddin Barani, the historian of the Tughluq age, was born there. But the doab was never quiet. Its Rajput clans revolted again and again through the thirteenth century, and the sultans had to campaign there repeatedly, a sign that the conquest of 1192 was the beginning of a long struggle rather than its end.