Mewar before the Sisodias
The Guhila house is attested from the seventh century by inscriptions at Nagda and Samoli, which makes it one of the oldest continuously documented dynasties in Rajasthan. It rose under the Gurjara-Pratihāras and became independent as that empire failed, taking Chittor, the great mesa fortress that would define Mewar's history.
Bappa Rāwal, the figure the bardic tradition treats as the dynasty's founding hero, belongs to the eighth century and is credited with the capture of Chittor and with resisting Arab advances. The historical content of the Bappa Rāwal cycle is difficult to isolate from its later accretions.
Chittor, 1303
Alauddin Khalji besieged Chittor in 1303 and took it. The ruler Ratnasiṃha was captured, and Persian sources including Amir Khusrau, who accompanied the campaign, describe the assault and the slaughter that followed.
Two centuries later, Malik Muhammad Jayasi's Avadhi poem Padmāvat made the siege a story of the sultan's desire for Ratnasiṃha's queen Padmāvatī and her self-immolation with the women of the fort. The poem is an allegorical romance, written in 1540, and Padmāvatī does not appear in any contemporary account; it nonetheless became the dominant version, was absorbed into Rajput tradition as history, and has remained politically live into the present.
The Guhila line at Chittor was broken by the conquest. Hammīra, of the Sisoda branch, recovered Mewar within a generation, and the dynasty continued under the Sisodia name.
Further reading
- Kulke, Hermann. A History of India. Routledge, 2004
- Asher, Catherine B. India Before Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2006
- Hawley, John Stratton. A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement. Harvard University Press, 2015
- Jackson, Peter. The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History. Cambridge University Press, 1999
- Richards, John F. The Mughal Empire. Cambridge University Press, 1993
See also
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.