1576
Battle of Haldighati
The setting
A mountain pass near Gogunda, Rajasthan
A narrow defile in the Aravalli hills, yellow-soiled - haldi, turmeric - which gave the pass its name. Ground chosen because it denied the Mughals room to use numbers.
Reveal the outcome
Recorded sideMewar under Maharana Pratap
Recorded resultwithdrew; Pratap escaped wounded
Tactically indecisive. The Mughals held the ground; Mewar was not subdued and Pratap escaped to fight on for two decades.
How the atlas explains it
Neither side got what it wanted, which is why the battle is coded inconclusive here rather than as a Mughal victory. Pratap chose ground where numbers could not tell and Bhil archers on the slopes could. He failed to break the Mughal line and had to withdraw, but the Mughals could not convert the field into the submission of Mewar, and Pratap's subsequent campaign recovered most of it.
What followed
⚠ The clearest case in the atlas of a battle whose MEANING is actively contested in the present. It is celebrated in Rajasthan as a victory of resistance and recorded in Mughal sources as a Mughal success; a 2017 state textbook revision in Rajasthan reclassified it. The atlas records the outcome as inconclusive and records the dispute rather than adjudicating it. Note also that the Mughal commander was himself a Rajput - this was not a war of Hindu against Muslim, whatever it is now made to mean.