your bridge home
True Valor
Chittor’s walls had held against everything for two and a half centuries. They had not been designed for artillery.
Rana Sanga died in 1528, and Mewar was left with children on the throne and a woman running the state.
Rani Karnavati was Sanga's widow and regent for her sons, the elder a boy, the younger, Udai Singh, an infant. Mewar had been the leading Rajput power under her husband and had been badly beaten at Khanwa the year before he died. Everyone in the region knew the state was being held by a regency.
Bahadur Shah of Gujarat came for it.
Bahadur Shah came in 1533, and put Chittor under siege.
And Karnavati did the unromantic thing. Which was almost certainly the correct one. She bought him off. A ransom was paid, terms were agreed, and the Gujarat army withdrew on 28 March 1533.
It is worth pausing on that, because it is the part the ballads skip. A regent with a weakened army, and two small children to protect, assessed her position.
And she paid. Rather than fight a battle she would probably lose. That is not cowardice; it is what a state does when the alternative is annihilation, and it bought Mewar two years.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.