‘And pray, how will you explain His Majesty’s absence to our own armies? What kind of example will the Maharana be setting?’
‘If each of us, His Majesty’s closest allies and advisers takes his men into confidence, I’ve little doubt that they will understand our strategy and support it fully.’
Rao Viramdev made good sense but Father was not about to tell Silhadi that he refused to be provoked by his needling but would act according to what he felt was best for the future of the confederacy. ‘I thank you all for your concern for my safety but my place is with our forces. No more about the observation tower now, it’s time to retire for the night.’
‘It’s not concern for you, Your Majesty,’ this was the closest I had come to an open disagreement with Father, ‘we need a leader who will lead us, not one who is lost among a lakh and twenty thousand soldiers.’
‘Maharaj Kumar, I did say that the subject was closed, did I not? There are enough capable leaders here who can lead our armies as well as I.’
* * *
March the seventeenth, fifteen twenty-seven. It was cold when I got up. Most of the fires the soldiers had lit the previous night had died down. As I sat up, I may have startled a scarlet minivet which had roosted on a low branch of the tree under which I had spent the night. It took off in that first light, a shrouded scarlet-red meteor rising into the sky instead of hurtling from it. Red would be the colour of the day.
I felt rested. I did not have any anxieties about what lay ahead of us. For a brief moment, I had the feeling that Babur and I were mirror images. Which was the real person and which the reflection? I was sure he, too, was composed and steadfast of intent. He too would be up and bathing with cold water. Perhaps it would not matter if we changed places. I looked around. Is this what they mean when they talk about an ocean of people? Mewari and allied troops were sprawled all the way to the horizon.
Bath, yoga, meditation, breakfast, I got into my armour and was on the battlefield. I could see the cannons in the distance. I wondered why Tej, Shafi, Hem Karan and I hadn’t gone across in the night and rolled them over to our side. Both the armies were in position now. The minivet swept past, east to west with a couple of worms in its beak. It was indifferent to our hectic preparations. War was for fools called men. It had more urgent matters on hand. I had seen two minivet chicks sitting in their nest. All the while their father was away, and he would be gone for a good fifteen minutes at a time, the idiot fledgelings kept their beaks open, ever ready for some delicacy to fall into their mouths. The Moghul armies were barricaded behind an unsightly line of wagons and ditches. Where was the Padshah? Would I recognize the man I knew better than most of my colleagues in Mewar? I rode back to the observation tower which had been set up just in case Father changed his mind. The army carpenters had built it in three parts. The lowest was twenty-five feet high. It was on wheels with a platform on top. The next one was fifteen feet tall, flat-topped and had wheels that could be removed easily. The top section was heavily armoured except for open slits at eye level all around. It looked a trifle awkward but it served its purpose. I climbed up to the top storey.
I had a better view of the battlefield now. There was a hole the size of the eclipse in the centre of my vision. My eyesight fluctuated, sometimes from hour to hour. There was no logic to it. On good days, I could see almost normally; at other times while my peripheral vision was passable, I could only see vague, bleached and burnt images when I looked straight ahead. A fine way to go into battle with Padshah Babur; I would have to request him to step aside so I could see him clearly. I’m sure there will be a school of historians in the future who will put forward the theory that the black sun in my vision was not due to chance or bad luck. Somewhere deep inside me, they would say, I wanted to dissociate myself from the war, which is why I had deliberately arranged an accident. Fortunately, while I will fight to kill as many of the enemy as I always do, our allied forces are packed with some of the fiercest warriors in history, and if I grope and blink and stumble, it shouldn’t make too much of a difference to the outcome of the battle.
Ours was the classic battle formation. It had been the same for I don’t know how many hundreds of years: a semicircle of elephants behind which were ranged three densely packed armies. Mewar’s vassals and feudal chiefs stood in the centre while the allies were massed to the right and left. Behind this impenetrable phalanx were His Majesty, the Mewar and allied generals, and when I climbed down, there would be me. Placed in the middle behind us was another solid block of our back-up soldiers. Somewhere in the centre of the Moghul armies a little before their reserve force was a huddle of men. One of them, I was certain, was Babur.
It suddenly occurred to me that I had lost count of the number of years I had been carrying on my conversations with Leelawati. What a pompous ass I was not to have seen what was in front of my nose. I had blamed myself for my sister Sumitra’s death. If only I had taken her limp seriously ... if only I had disobeyed Father and asked the surgeon to amputate her leg ... Leelawati was my expiation, the price I had decided to pay for my guilt. Better late than never. Enough was enough. I didn’t give a damn any longer whether the social mores of Mewar allowed a marriage between a Rajput and a Jain. At worst, there would be a scandal. That would be tough to handle. But my wife had tutored me in such matters. I had better send a courier in the evening to Leelawati telling her that she need no longer be patient with me. I was coming to fetch her from Mandu. Or if I couldn’t get away, Mangal would escort her back.
I climbed down and went back to my post a few hundred yards from Father. It was nine thirty. Suddenly there was an earth-shattering sound and a celestial missile sped towards us like the wrath of God. Its thunderous rumble was accompanied by a thin slithering sound that penetrated the eardrum and lodged in the brain like a vibrating needle which jangled every nerve in the body. Where Rao Raj and Rawat Somnath were, there was now a crater five foot deep and three foot wide. The war had begun but the Rajput armies were petrified in their places. I frankly don’t think they were terrified as much as confused and bewildered. Where were these flying missiles coming from? Six more landed at various points and all we could do was to wait patiently for the one with our names written on it to land in our midst and kill us. Fortunately Rao Medini Rai and Rao Maldev were leading our left front and after the first moment of disorientation took off against Babur’s right wing. That seemed to snap our men out of their paralysis. There was incessant fire from the matchlock battalion of the Padshah. They were not aiming particularly well but the shots picked our men at random in the hundreds. Medini Rai and Maldev made a battering ram of their forces and did not let up the pressure. On the other side Akhil Raj, Raimul Rathod and Hasan Khan Mewati engaged the Padshah’s left wing. Babur’s men had begun to cave in under their relentless attack when one of the Padshah’s flying flanks arrived to their rescue. The two sides were now equally matched and would have been locked together till evening but for the havoc wrought by the matchlocks. Soon the Moghuls were on the offensive and there was a wide crack between the right wing and the centre of the Rajputs.
Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. You can make that sound with your mouth. Not at all scary, is it? Hear one of those cannons shattering your eardrums and you lose all confidence and sense of purpose. It’s worth pointing out that the cannons didn’t do extensive damage to our people; after all, the Padshah had only seven of them and it takes a while before the gunpowder compartment cools and you can clean the barrel, reload it and fire. What pulverized us was the sound of those hot balls flying in the air and landing with a strangely repressed, and hence so much the more fearful, thud as they dug into the earth. Plus the terror of not knowing when and where the next stone-death would fall. What happened then? I have no idea. I was far too preoccupied with the immediate business of galvanizing our men and fighting the Moghul menace through the air and on the ground to have any concept of the overall picture.
The matchlocks kept picking on us, ticking off
one soldier at a time. You rarely knew where the bullet was coming from except when it hit you. In any case, what difference would it have made even if a soldier knew who was firing the musket? His best chance was to hurl his spear at the opponent but before he had extended his arm backwards for leverage, the bullet would have blown his brains away or nestled nicely in his heart or gone right through his upper intestine or if he was lucky, lodged in his thigh.
One bullet at a time, it should take a month or two to kill or cripple a hundred and twenty thousand, give or take a few thousand, Mewari or allied soldiers. But let’s do a little arithmetic here. My guess is that five thousand of Babur’s soldiers had muskets, perhaps seven thousand, but the conservative number will do. I think the Padshah saw our hundred and twenty thousand-headed behemoth ranged against him and said a prayer of thanks to his God. Barring his first line of musketeers, he asked them to point their guns at an angle of 45 degrees. The bullets shot out and curved down at us at 80 to 105 yards per second. Even a bullet flying at barely 65 yards a second will penetrate the skull. No need to aim at all. Just cock your gun and fire.
Our men kept advancing and falling steadily hour after hour. Again it was not the bullets that inflicted such fearful casualties upon us. What the new weapons technology did was to destroy our morale by the middle of the second hour. By itself a cannon ball could kill maybe two or five soldiers at the most, and that, too, if they were huddling together in the path of the ball as it landed. But it was its impact on earth which could be far more deadly. Thousands of tiny, medium and big shards of rocks, roots, branches and jagged chunks of earth were dislodged and flew at great velocities into our midst. We were blinded, knocked down, stupefied. And yet I wouldn’t have minded the pandemonium around me so much if I could have strangled the throats of all the soldiers, mostly ours.
I had never heard the likes of the cries and shrieks and the weeping and the screaming that day. The disbelief of an arm separating from the shoulder and hitting the ground; the horror of a spear twisting spirally in the belly; the appalling pain of a shoulder blade cracking as a sword cleaved through it and continued its progress till it breached the backbone, disconnecting the seventh vertebra from the eighth; the amazement of discovering an arrow that was stuck in the neck like a weather vane; the realization that the hole where the floating ribs and liver should have been was a clear air passage all the way to the back Above all, the gasp of astonishment and the sharp break in the intake of breath as death closed in. I was a veteran of wars and the suffering of the men in this war was no different from that of all the others. Wherefore my surprise and intolerance? Was it because my sight was impaired and my hearing that much keener? Or did I react harshly because every one of those agonizing calls only confirmed our rout?
And now they were coming back, those asphyxiating ten thousand Gujarati soldiers, from the misty marshes and bogs on that early morning, phalanx upon phalanx, ten thousand faces caught timelessly in anguish with soundless open mouths. Smile, I begged them, smile. We are paying for what we did to you. See the hands, legs, hearts, pancreas, kidneys and innards flailing and flung to the winds. Breathe easy now, we have to pay for our karma, sometimes in this very life itself. Take pleasure while you can. This is revenge, my friends, the sweetest satisfaction life can offer. But they did not smile and the twisted faces and the horror would not pass. All day long, as the wounded fell and the dead piled up helter-skelter and graceless, some of them with their chests, stomachs and privates exposed, the ghoulish Gujarati troops watched silently. If not absolution, I yelled, give me oblivion. They did not hear me, or if they did, they were not about to oblige me.
Babur had done his homework carefully. He knew we were not one army but at least fifty armies. He concentrated on ripping open the slight and insecure seams that held together our various forces. He put pressure along these fault lines till we came apart. That was not very difficult. We didn’t have a unified discipline (Shafi, Tej and Hem Karan’s seven or ten thousand men could have been a single lethal force but the men were attached to different divisions), whereas Babur’s twenty thousand had fought at least five wars in India alone and were compact units which the Padshah handled like a master juggler.
Think of a game of chess. At the start we were facing each other, pawns, king, elephants, vazir, horses, on either side. Halfway through the game Babur had moved his pieces so skillfully and swiftly we were under attack on all sides, and losing our men at a staggering pace. Among the leaders Sajja Chundawat, Rawat Jagga Sarangdev, my uncle Lakshman Simha, Rawat Bagh, Sajja Ajja and Karamchand, Chandra Bhan Chauhan, Bhopat Rai, Dalpat and Manik Chandra were all dead. The Moghuls had even captured the Rana’s colours but Karan Simha Dodia rescued them at the cost of his life.
We were in desperate straits. Perhaps it might have been a good idea to use strategy three from Shafi’s book of retreats: ‘Slowly and unobtrusively back out, scatter and meet at a predetermined place where the enemy would not pursue you. Then if all is not lost, take a long detour, mass behind the enemy and attack.’ No one among our leaders, however, had taken into account a defeat, let alone a retreat, so there was no question of a premeditated and orderly withdrawal. In the meantime, His Majesty saw the dismal fate of our troops and decided to commit the most foolish blunder of his life. He took it upon himself to rally and inspire them. He exposed himself between two divisions when a random arrow laid him low. It was a mortal blow but you forget that after eighty-seven or ninety wounds to his person, His Majesty was immortal. We raised him gently from the ground, he was unconscious and losing a lot of blood, and transported him in a litter to a distant place called Baswa just in case Babur himself came looking for him or sent someone else to finish him.
I have only two more things to report. We had removed Father in as clandestine a manner as possible because we did not wish either of the armies, ours or Babur’s to know about His Majesty’s departure. The elders appointed Raja Rana Ajja, Chunder of Halwad, to lead the battle in Father’s absence. They hoped that once Raja Rana Ajja was seated on Father’s elephant, no one would notice the difference. It is difficult for anyone to impersonate Father, you would have to lose an eye and have a few dead limbs. I had my doubts if Rana Ajja could double for the real Rana but anything was worth a try and I was all for it. All the emblems of sovereignty including the chhatra were in place on Father’s elephant and war was resumed. We had hoped that since we had acted quickly, word of Father’s injury would not get around. It was at precisely this moment that Silhadi deserted us and joined Babur. He also did us the favour of telling the Padshah that a makeshift pretender was sitting on the Rana’s elephant. I should have been incensed by his treachery but I took the news matter-of-factly. Silhadi liked being on the winning side. Besides, his presence or absence wasn’t going to make much difference. The end was nigh.
In the evening the Padshah ordered the heads of the enemy to be gathered and raised in a column. I was not there to see this ghastly victory tower but they told me that it was a little higher than the fifty foot tall observation tower I had built for His Majesty and just as secure.
Chapter
48
I reached the palace on the hill at Baswa late at night. There weren’t too many people with Father. Perhaps it made sense to abandon ship, if I may use a maritime image for a land-bound conflict. Even the few people who were there looked coldly at me and gave me a wide berth. (Is my unconscious switch to seafaring imagery trying to tell me something? Do I wish to leave the shores of this land for good?) Since I had been so insistent that we postpone the battle of Khanua by a year or two and they had all vetoed my arguments, I’m somehow or other held responsible for today’s rout.
‘We were worried about you. I’m so thankful that you could make it in one piece,’ Rao Medini Rai greeted me.
‘How’s Father?’
‘Considering the injuries he’s suffered, very well indeed. When he came to, he wanted his armour and horse, so he could get back to the battle. He
’s very weak but has been asking for you every five minutes.’
‘I told Prince Hem Karan, Tej and Shafi to arrange for the wounded to be moved here once the Padshah’s men leave the field. They should be with us by morning at the latest.’
Father suddenly looks so frail and small. His lips and skin were ashen and his pulse uneven. I sat numbly next to him. My tongue seemed to have gone dead.
‘Are you disappointed in your father, son?’
I would prefer His Majesty to be distant and curt with me. ‘I will be disappointed if you are not up in the next seven days. There’s a great deal of work to be done before we take on the Padshah again.’
‘You warned me at every step but I would not listen to you.’
‘Do you know the kind of people I can’t stand the sight of? The I-had-told-you-so types.’
‘So what do you suggest we do now?’
‘I’m in earnest, Your Majesty. I’ll nurse you back to good health in a week’s time, or ten days on the outside. We’ll be back in Chittor in fifteen days and get down to work.’
‘I’m not going to Chittor.’ I almost didn’t hear him.
‘Not now, Your Majesty. A little later when you are feeling better. We need to look at our finances. We’ll have to come to some kind of terms with the Padshah. I suggest we be friendly with him from now on for a year or two. By next July or August we’ll have got the field-cannons. Six months or a year’s practice with them and the matchlocks, and some sound rethinking about how to deploy our forces and we’ll be ready for Babur.’
Who was I trying to cheer up? Father or myself? And yet I meant every word I said.
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