Three battles at Panipat decided who held Delhi, in 1526, 1556 and 1761. The third is the one that belongs to Punjab's history.
On 14 January 1761 Ahmad Shah Abdali destroyed the Maratha army under Sadashivrao Bhau. The Maratha dead are usually put at tens of thousands on the day, with a great many more taken as captives on the march back.
Abdali's route to and from Delhi ran through the Punjab, and the Sikh misls, then in their guerrilla period, harried his columns on every crossing. The tradition is that Sikh jathas intercepted the returning column and freed large numbers of Maratha women and children taken as captives, and escorted them south. The episode is central to how the Khalsa of that generation is remembered and it is not documented in any Afghan or Maratha source with the detail the Sikh accounts give it.
The Maratha defeat at Panipat and the Afghan withdrawal that followed left the Punjab without an effective power. The misls filled it within a decade, and by 1765 the Khalsa struck coin at Lahore.
Kabuli Bagh at Panipat is the mosque Babur built after 1526. The tomb of Bu Ali Shah Qalandar is in the same town and draws Punjabi pilgrims still.
Three battles were fought on the plain outside the town, in 1526, 1556 and 1761, and each of them decided who would rule northern India.
The third, in January 1761, destroyed a Maratha army and a generation of its commanders, and it is the reason the Punjab was left to the misls rather than taken by anybody else.
The field is in Haryana and there is a memorial. Three battles that decided the subcontinent were fought within a few miles of each other and there is no single museum or route covering them.