Chittor
Hammīra Siṃha of the Sisoda branch recovered Chittor in 1326 and re-established the Mewar kingdom. Under Rāṇā Kumbha in the fifteenth century it became the leading power of Rajasthan: he built or rebuilt a great number of forts, including Kumbhalgarh with its enormous perimeter wall, and the Vijaya Stambha, the tower of victory, still stands at Chittor.
Rāṇā Sāṅgā assembled a Rajput confederacy against Babur and was defeated at Khanwa in 1527, a battle as decisive as Panipat the year before in establishing Mughal power. Chittor was stormed twice more, by Bahadur Shah of Gujarat in 1535 and by Akbar in 1568.
Pratāp
Mahārāṇā Pratāp succeeded in 1572 and refused the accommodation with the Mughals that Amber, Marwar and the other Rajput houses had accepted. He fought Akbar's forces at Haldighati in 1576 — an inconclusive engagement in which he escaped — and spent the following years in the Aravalli hills recovering territory piecemeal, dying in 1597 with most of Mewar but not Chittor in his hands.
Mewar's refusal to give daughters in marriage to the Mughal house, maintained when every other major Rajput dynasty had done so, is the basis of its precedence among the Rajput kingdoms, and Pratāp's resistance became the central story of Rajput self-understanding. His son Amar Singh made terms with Jahangir in 1615 on conditions that preserved the marriage prohibition.
Udaipur
Udai Singh II founded Udaipur in 1559 as a capital less exposed than Chittor, and the lake palaces built there over the following centuries are the dynasty's most visible legacy. Mewar declined under Maratha pressure in the eighteenth century, entered British protection in 1818, and acceded to India in 1949.
Colonel James Tod's Annals and Antiquities of Rajast'han, published in the 1820s, drew heavily on Mewar's bardic tradition and shaped the modern image of Rajput history — heroic, chivalric and centred on Mewar. It is a source to be used with care: Tod recorded a living tradition faithfully, but that tradition was itself a construction.
Further reading
- Jackson, Peter. The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History. Cambridge University Press, 1999
- Richards, John F. The Mughal Empire. Cambridge University Press, 1993
- Asher, Catherine B. India Before Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2006
- Gordon, Stewart. The Marathas 1600-1818. Cambridge University Press, 1993
- Stein, Burton. Vijayanagara. Cambridge University Press, 1989
See also
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.