The Mughal-Afghan-Rajput Triangle

Battle of Khanwa, 1527 — one year after Panipat I, Babur faced a formidable confederacy led by Rana Sanga of Mewar, who had initially hoped Babur would weaken the Lodis and then withdraw to Kabul as earlier raiders had, only to find Babur intent on staying. At Khanwa, near Agra, Babur again used his artillery-and-cart-fort tactics to grind down a much larger Rajput force; Rana Sanga was wounded and the confederacy broke. This, not Panipat I, is arguably the battle that truly secures Mughal rule against the strongest remaining indigenous Indian power, since Ibrahim Lodi's Afghan nobles at Panipat were already weakened by internal revolt before Babur ever arrived — Khanwa is where Babur beat India's power on its own terms.

Battle of Chausa (1539) and Battle of Kannauj/Bilgram (1540) — the Afghan noble Sher Shah Suri, steadily building a base of power in Bihar, first ambushed and routed Humayun's army at Chausa on the Ganga in 1539 (Humayun himself barely escaped by swimming the river), and then finished the job at Kannauj/Bilgram in 1540, where Humayun's demoralised and depleted forces collapsed entirely. The two defeats forced Humayun into fifteen years of exile in Persia, and installed Sher Shah as emperor, founding the short-lived but administratively important Sur dynasty ("Sur interregnum," 1540–1555) — remembered for the Grand Trunk Road, currency reforms (the rupiya), and an efficient revenue system that the Mughals themselves would later borrow from — before Humayun finally reclaimed Delhi in 1555, just a year before his own death.

Siege of Chittorgarh, 1568 — Akbar, consolidating Mughal control over Rajasthan, laid siege to the massive hill-fort of Chittorgarh, the traditional capital of Mewar. The ruling Rana, Udai Singh II, had withdrawn from the fort to found a new capital at Udaipur, leaving the defence to two commanders, Jaimal Rathore and Patta (Fatta) Sisodia, who held out for months against Akbar's siege guns and mining operations. When the fort's fall became inevitable, the Rajput defenders followed the traditions of jauhar (the mass self-immolation of the women and children to avoid capture) and saka (the male defenders' final suicidal charge against the besieging army) — a pattern of resistance the exam associates specifically with Chittorgarh among Akbar's Rajput campaigns. Akbar took the fort and was so struck by the defenders' valour that he had statues of Jaimal and Patta, mounted on elephants, installed at the gates of Agra Fort — a rare gesture of respect for a defeated enemy. Politically, the fall of Chittorgarh broke Mewar's centuries-old prestige as Rajasthan's premier power, even though Mewar under the Sisodias (notably Maharana Pratap after 1572) would continue to resist Mughal authority for decades more.

Battle of Haldighati, 1576 — Maharana Pratap of Mewar, having refused the submission his fellow Rajput rulers had already made to Akbar, faced a Mughal force led by Man Singh I of Amber (a Rajput himself, serving Akbar) in the narrow Haldighati pass. Tactically the Mughals held the field after a fierce engagement, but Pratap escaped into the Aravalli hills and was never fully subdued, continuing a guerrilla resistance from the hills for the rest of his life and even recovering most of his territory except Chittorgarh and Mandalgarh before he died in 1597. This is the classic "won the battle, lost the war" case study, paired narratively with Pratap's loyal horse Chetak, which carried him to safety and died from wounds sustained in the escape — Chetak's chhatri (memorial) near Haldighati remains a fixture of the story as told in Indian textbooks.