Battle of Khanwa

Babur had beaten the Delhi Sultanate at Panipat the year before, but the power that could actually have thrown him out of India was Rana Sanga's Rajput confederacy, and in March 1527 it came for him. Babur used the same system that had worked at Panipat: a defensive line of carts lashed together with gaps for guns, matchlocks behind it, and cavalry held back to swing around the flanks once the Rajput charge had spent itself. The charge came repeatedly and broke each time. Sanga was carried wounded from the field and died within a year, and the confederacy never reassembled. Panipat won Babur a throne; Khanwa is what let his family keep it.

Khanwa is unusually well documented for a sixteenth century Indian battle because Babur wrote about it himself in the Baburnama, one of the very few autobiographies by a founder of a major dynasty, and one candid enough to record his own fear and his own propaganda. That candour cuts both ways: the jihad framing he adopted before the battle sits awkwardly against his long practice of fighting Muslim rivals and allying with Hindu ones, and historians generally read it as a morale device aimed at a shaky army rather than a statement of programme. Indian historiography has argued for a century over whether Panipat or Khanwa founded the Mughal empire, with the weight of opinion now on Khanwa as the battle that removed the only rival capable of reversing it. The battlefield itself has never been securely located, and the identification with the modern village rests largely on the name.