Muhammad of Ghor was heavily defeated and turned back to Ghazni across the desert.
01The queen mother’s army
Mularaja II had come to the throne of Anhilwara as a child after his father Ajayapala’s death. Muhammad of Ghor, having taken Multan and Uch, marched through the desert to attack Gujarat in 1178. Naiki Devi, daughter of a Kadamba king of Goa by Merutunga’s account, took the field with her son, joined by the Paramara of Abu and the Chahamanas of Nadol. They met the Ghurid army in the pass at Kasahrada below Abu, where the hills narrowed its front. Merutunga says the queen fought with the child in her lap.
02Both sides agree
The Persian chronicler Minhaj-us-Siraj, who wrote for the Delhi Sultans, says plainly that the Rai of Nahrwala had many elephants, that the army of Islam was defeated and put to flight, and that the Sultan returned without achieving his aim. Merutunga’s Prabandha Chintamani gives the victory to Mularaja’s side, and Gujarat’s inscriptions praise the boy king as the one who defeated the ruler of the Turushkas. Muhammad never came that way again; his next attempt on India went through the Punjab, to Tarain.
It closed the Gujarat road to the Ghurids and kept the Chaulukya kingdom free for another century.