The Ghurid army was routed and Muhammad of Ghor, badly wounded, barely escaped.
01The battle
Muhammad had taken Tabarhindah, Bathinda, a Chahamana fort, and was marching back when Prithviraj came up with a large army and elephants. The Rajput wings closed around the Ghurid flanks. Minhaj-us-Siraj tells the rest from the Ghurid side: the Sultan charged Govindaraja, Govind Rai of Delhi, who sat on an elephant, and struck him with a lance in the mouth; Govindaraja hurled his own lance and wounded the Sultan in the arm. Muhammad reeled in the saddle, and a young Khalji soldier leapt up behind him and rode him out of the battle.
02The chance not taken
The Ghurid army scattered toward the Punjab. Prithviraj did not pursue across the Sutlej; he turned to Bathinda and besieged its garrison for thirteen months before it surrendered. Muhammad went back to Ghazni, by Firishta’s account disgraced the nobles who had fled, and spent the next year rebuilding his army around mounted archers. Later bardic poems, the Prithviraj Raso above all, tell of many earlier victories and of Prithviraj sparing Ghori more than once; these are told as the bards’ tradition, not as record.
It was the most complete defeat a Turkic army suffered in north India, and the last great Rajput victory before the Sultanate.
