Medieval India through Travellers' Eyes

1. Travellers and their accounts as sources

Read the detailed note →

• People travelled for work, escape from natural disasters, trade, soldiering, priesthood, pilgrimage, or adventure. Most adapted to the different world they met; the exceptional few wrote accounts, generally recording what they found unusual or remarkable.
• The outsider's eye is the core value: travellers from different social-cultural environments noticed everyday practices that indigenous writers took for granted as unworthy of record.
• Built-in caveats: practically no surviving travel accounts by women (though women travelled); accounts vary in subject — court affairs, religion, architecture (e.g. Abdur Razzaq Samarqandi, a diplomat from Herat, left a key 15th-century description of Vijayanagara) — and each was written for a specific audience. Even "internal" travellers existed: Mughal administrators touring the empire recorded popular customs and folklore.
• The chapter centres on three men: Al-Biruni (Uzbekistan, 11th century), Ibn Battuta (Morocco, 14th century), François Bernier (France, 17th century).

2. Al-Biruni: from Khwarizm to the Kitab-ul-Hind

Read the detailed note →

• Born 973 in Khwarizm (present-day Uzbekistan), a centre of learning; educated in Syriac, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew and Sanskrit; knew Plato and Greek philosophy through Arabic translations (no Greek).
• 1017: Sultan Mahmud invaded Khwarizm and carried scholars and poets to Ghazni; Al-Biruni went as a hostage, grew to like the city, and lived there until his death at 70.
• His India interest built on Sanskrit works on astronomy, mathematics and medicine translated into Arabic from the eighth century onwards; when the Punjab came under the Ghaznavids, he spent years with Brahmana priests and scholars learning Sanskrit and studying religious-philosophical texts; probably travelled widely in the Punjab and north India (itinerary unclear).
• Translation both ways: Patanjali's work into Arabic; Euclid into Sanskrit for his Brahmana friends.
• The Kitab-ul-Hind (Arabic; simple, lucid, voluminous):
• 80 chapters — religion and philosophy, festivals, astronomy, alchemy, manners and customs, social life, weights and measures, iconography, laws, metrology (the science of measurement).
• Almost geometric structure (usually): question → description based on Sanskritic traditions → comparison with other cultures — precision scholars link to his mathematical orientation.
• Audience: peoples along the frontiers of the subcontinent, within an established Arabic travel-literature tradition (Sahara to Volga) — few in India read him before 1500, many outside could.

• Stated objectives: "a help to those who want to discuss religious questions with them (the Hindus), and a repertory of information for those who want to associate with them."

• Box fact — "Hindu": an Old Persian word (c. 6th–5th centuries BCE) for the region east of the river Sindhu (Indus); Arabs: al-Hind/Hindi; Turks: people Hindu, land Hindustan, language Hindavi — none religious; religious connotations came much later.

3. Al-Biruni making sense of an alien world

Read the detailed note →

• He identified three "barriers" obstructing understanding: 1. Language — Sanskrit so different from Arabic and Persian that ideas could not easily be translated (he called Sanskrit a language "of an enormous range, both in words and inflections"). 2. Difference in religious beliefs and practices. 3. The self-absorption and insularity of the local population.

• Despite this awareness, he relied almost exclusively on Brahmanical works — the Vedas, Puranas, Bhagavad Gita, Patanjali's works, the Manusmriti — to describe Indian society.

• On caste — a comparative method:
• Sought parallels elsewhere: ancient Persia's four social categories (knights and princes; monks, fire-priests and lawyers; physicians, astronomers and scientists; peasants and artisans) — arguing social divisions were not unique to India — while noting that within Islam all men were equal, differing only in piety.
• Accepted the Brahmanical varna account (the four varnas created from Brahman's head, shoulders-hands, thighs and feet), yet observed that the classes "live together in the same towns and villages, mixed together in the same houses and lodgings".

• Rejected the notion of pollution as contrary to the laws of nature: everything that falls impure strives to regain purity — the sun cleanses the air, sea salt keeps water from putrefying; were it otherwise, life on earth would be impossible.

• The chapter's corrective: his picture came from normative Sanskrit texts written from the Brahmanas' standpoint; in practice the system was less rigid — the antyaja ("born outside the system") supplied inexpensive labour to peasants and zamindars: socially oppressed, yet inside economic networks.

• He was no credulous reporter: told of a wooden idol allegedly 216,432 years old, he asked how wood could last that long in damp air and soil — "God knows best!"

4. Ibn Battuta and the Rihla: the itinerary of a globe-trotter

Read the detailed note →

• Ibn Battuta (1304–77), born in Tangier, Morocco, into a respected family of shari'a experts; educated young — but, unusually for his class, held travel experience to be a more important source of knowledge than books. Left home at 22, "as birds forsake their nests".
• Before India (departure 1332–33): pilgrimages to Mecca; Syria, Iraq, Persia, Yemen, Oman, East African trading ports. Reached Sind in 1333 overland through Central Asia.
• Delhi: drawn by Muhammad bin Tughlaq's reputation as a generous patron of arts and letters, came via Multan and Uch; the Sultan made him qazi (judge) of Delhi; he served years, fell from favour and was imprisoned, was restored, and in 1342 was sent as envoy to the Mongol ruler of China.
• Onward: central India → Malabar → Maldives (18 months as qazi) → Sri Lanka → Malabar/Maldives again → Bengal and Assam → ship to Sumatra → the Chinese port Zaytun (Quanzhou) → China as far as Beijing → turned back 1347; home 1354, ~30 years after setting out.
• The Rihla (Arabic): on the ruler's orders his stories were dictated to Ibn Juzayy — education and entertainment. Often compared with Marco Polo (Venice; China and India, late 13th century).
• Travel conditions as data: Multan→Delhi 40 days; Sind→Delhi ~50; Daulatabad→Delhi 40; Gwalior→Delhi 10. Hazards: highway robbers (his Multan–Delhi caravan was attacked — many killed, he was wounded), illness (tied himself to the saddle in fever), loneliness.

5. The excitement of the unfamiliar: Battuta's India

Read the detailed note →

• By his arrival, the subcontinent belonged to a global communication network from China to north-west Africa and Europe; he enjoyed the cosmopolitan urban culture of Arabic, Persian and Turkish speakers. His method: highlight the unfamiliar, explained through familiar analogies:
• The coconut: a tree just like the date-palm; the nut "resembles a man's head" — two eyes, a mouth, fibre like hair — used for ship-sewing cords (instead of iron nails) and cables.

• The paan: a fruitless tree "cultivated like the grape-vine", grown for its leaves, chewed with areca nut and chalk.

• Cities: densely populated and prosperous (barring war and invasion); crowded streets, bright markets stacked with goods. Delhi — "a vast city... the largest in India": rampart wall 11 cubits broad, housing sentries, storing edibles, ammunition, ballistas and siege machines; lower rampart stone, upper brick; 28 gates (darwazas) — Budaun darwaza the greatest, grain market at Mandwi, orchard at Gul. Daulatabad rivalled Delhi in size, with Tarababad, the grand market of male and female singers (chief musician presiding under a cupola each Thursday; Hindu and some Muslim rulers patronised the singers).

• Bazaars were hubs of social and cultural life, not just economic spaces — most had a mosque and a temple, some marked spaces for dancers, musicians and singers.
• Economy through his eyes: soil so fertile it grew two crops a year; historians infer from his account that towns drew wealth by appropriating surplus from villages; India well integrated with inter-Asian trade — textiles (cotton, fine muslins, silks, brocade, satin) in demand in West and Southeast Asia, some muslins wearable only by nobles and the very rich; the state encouraged merchants with inns and guest houses on trade routes.
• The postal system: merchants could send information, remit credit and dispatch goods; Sind→Delhi took 50 days of travel, but spies' news reports reached the Sultan in 5 days.

Post	Name	Working
Horse-post	uluq	royal horses stationed every 4 miles
Foot-post	dawa	3 stations per mile (one-third mile each); runner carries a two-cubit rod with copper bells, relaying letter to the next runner; faster than the horse-post; even used to carry fruits of Khurasan to India

6. Bernier: a doctor with a difference

Read the detailed note →

• The European wave: after the Portuguese arrived (c. 1500) came detailed accounts of Indian customs and religion — the Jesuit Roberto Nobili even translated Indian texts into European languages; the best-known Portuguese writer, Duarte Barbosa, described trade and society in south India. After 1600, growing numbers of Dutch, English and French travellers: Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, French jeweller, at least six visits, fascinated by trading conditions, comparing India with Iran and the Ottomans; the Italian doctor Manucci never returned, settling in India; the Dutchman Pelsaert (early 17th century), shocked by poverty — "the home of stark want and the dwelling place of bitter woe" — blamed state extraction that left peasants scarcely dry bread.
• François Bernier — French doctor, political philosopher and historian — in India 1656–68 (twelve years): physician to Dara Shukoh (Shah Jahan's eldest son), later intellectual-scientist companion of Danishmand Khan, an Armenian noble at the Mughal court.
• His programme: constant comparison of Mughal India with Europe, dedicating his major work to Louis XIV, other writings as letters to influential officials — aiming to influence policy-makers. India appears as Europe's binary inverse, differences ordered hierarchically with India inferior; virtually everything "bleak" — flagged by the chapter as not always accurate.
• Impact came through print: Travels in the Mughal Empire, published in France 1670–71, was translated into English, Dutch, German and Italian within five years, reprinted eight times in French by 1725, three times in English by 1684 — while Arabic and Persian accounts circulated as manuscripts, generally unpublished before 1800. Print made Bernier's India the European image of India.

7. The landownership debate and the "degenerate East"

Read the detailed note →

• Bernier's thesis: the fundamental India–Europe difference was the absence of private property in land. Believing the emperor owned all land and distributed it among nobles, he argued: landholders could not pass land to their children → no long-term investment → no class of "improving landlords" (as in Western Europe) → uniform ruination of agriculture, excessive oppression of the peasantry, declining living standards for all but the ruling aristocracy. (The chapter notes this perception appears in most 16th–17th-century travel accounts, not Bernier alone.)
• Corollaries: society as undifferentiated impoverished masses under a tiny rich class — "There is no middle state in India"; the account framed as a warning to Europe — kings copying the Mughal model would become "kings of deserts and solitudes, of beggars and barbarians". He was intervening in contemporary European debates on state, society and private property.
• The refutation (chapter's counter-evidence):
• No Mughal official document claims the state was sole owner of land. Abu'l Fazl, Akbar's official chronicler, calls the land revenue "remunerations of sovereignty" — a claim for protection provided, not rent on owned land; Europeans likely mistook very high revenue demands for rent; it was actually a tax on the crop.

• Rural society in the 16th–17th centuries showed considerable differentiation: big zamindars with superior land rights; "untouchable" landless labourers; between them big peasants (hired labour, commodity production) and smaller subsistence peasants.

• Afterlife of a flawed idea: Bernier fed Montesquieu's "oriental despotism" (18th c. — Asian rulers with absolute authority over subjects kept in subjugation and poverty, all land royal, no private property), developed further as Karl Marx's "Asiatic mode of production" (19th c. — pre-colonial surplus appropriated by the state; autonomous, internally egalitarian village communities; a stagnant system). The chapter states plainly this picture of rural society was far from true.

8. A more complex social reality: crafts, merchants, towns

Read the detailed note →

• Bernier contradicts himself — and the contradictions are evidence:
• Artisans, he claimed, had no incentive to improve manufactures since the state took the profits — yet he conceded that the world's precious metals flowed into India for manufactured exports, gold and silver "swallowed up, lost in some measure, in Hindustan", and noted a prosperous merchant community in long-distance trade.

• He is perhaps the only historian to describe the imperial karkhanas (workshops) in detail: halls of embroiderers, goldsmiths, painters, lacquer varnishers, joiners, turners, tailors, shoemakers, silk-brocade-muslin makers — artisans coming each morning, returning each evening, "no one aspiring for any improvement in the condition of life wherein he happens to be born".

• Urbanisation: in the 17th century about 15% of India's population lived in towns — on average higher than Western Europe's at the time. Bernier still branded Mughal cities "camp towns" — living and dying by the imperial camp. Oversimplified: there were manufacturing, trading, port, sacred-centre and pilgrimage towns — an index of prosperous merchant and professional classes.

• Urban society his account misses: merchants in caste-cum-occupational bodies — western India's mahajans, each headed by a sheth; in Ahmedabad the collective chief was the nagarsheth — and professional classes: physicians (hakim/vaid), teachers (pundit/mulla), lawyers (wakil), painters, architects, musicians, calligraphers — some on imperial patronage, many serving other patrons or bazaar customers.

9. Women through travellers' eyes: slaves, sati, labourers

Read the detailed note →

• Travellers were men, often intrigued by the condition of women, and often took social inequities as a "natural" state of affairs.
• Ibn Battuta on slavery: slaves openly sold in markets and regularly exchanged as gifts — he bought "horses, camels and slaves" as gifts for Muhammad bin Tughlaq; presented Multan's governor a slave and horse with raisins and almonds; the Sultan rewarded the preacher Nasiruddin with 100,000 tankas and 200 slaves. Differentiation: some female slaves expert in music and dance (performing at the wedding of the Sultan's sister); female slaves employed by the Sultan to spy on nobles (relaying via female scavengers who entered houses unannounced); most did domestic labour, indispensable for carrying palanquins (dola); domestic female slaves were very cheap — most families who could kept one or two; most were captured in raids and expeditions.
• Bernier on sati: European travellers made the treatment of women a crucial marker of East–West difference; Bernier's set-piece is the child widow at Lahore — about twelve, weeping, forced to the pyre by Brahmanas and an old woman — though he noted some women seemed to embrace death cheerfully while others were forced.
• The chapter's counterweight: women's labour was crucial in agricultural and non-agricultural production; women of merchant families participated in commerce and even took mercantile disputes to court — unlikely, then, that women were confined to private domestic space. The travellers' silence on ordinary working women is itself a finding about their gaze.

10. The wider corpus and the circulation of images of India

Read the detailed note →

• Indo-Persian travel writing, 1400–1800 — successors who had sometimes read Al-Biruni and Ibn Battuta:
• Abdur Razzaq Samarqandi (visited south India in the 1440s): at Calicut, disgust — "a strange nation... the likes of whom I had never imagined"; near Mangalore, awe at a bronze-covered temple with a gold statue with ruby eyes — "What craft and artisanship!"
• Mahmud Wali Balkhi (travelled widely, 1620s) — so taken with India he became a sort of sanyasi for a time.
• Shaikh Ali Hazin (north India, 1740s) — disappointed, even disgusted, having expected red-carpet treatment. Most such writers saw India as a land of wonders.

Traveller	Origin	Period	Known for
Al-Biruni (973–1048)	Khwarizm (Uzbekistan)	11th c.	Kitab-ul-Hind (Arabic) — caste analysis
Marco Polo (1254–1323)	Venice	13th c.	China and India
Ibn Battuta (1304–77)	Tangier, Morocco	14th c.	Rihla (Arabic) — Delhi, cities, post
Abdur Razzaq (1413–82)	Samarqand (from Herat)	15th c.	Vijayanagara diplomat
Afanasii Nikitin (in India 1466–72)	Russia	15th c.	—
Duarte Barbosa (d. 1521; visit 1518)	Portugal	16th c.	south Indian trade and society
Seydi Ali Reis (d. 1562) / Monserrate (1536–1600)	Turkey / Spain	16th c.	—
Mahmud Wali Balkhi (in India 1626–31)	Balkh	17th c.	traveller-turned-sanyasi
Peter Mundy (1600–67)	England	17th c.	—
Tavernier (1605–89) / Bernier (1620–88)	France	17th c.	jeweller, six visits / Travels in the Mughal Empire

• Two-way traffic in images: European travel writing, printed and circulated, produced an image of India for Europeans. After 1750, Indian travellers to Europe — Shaikh Itisamuddin and Mirza Abu Talib — confronted that image and produced their own versions to influence it.
• The chapter's verdict: travellers' accounts give a tantalising glimpse of medieval lives, but their observations were shaped by the contexts they came from, and many aspects of social life escaped their notice — rich evidence, always partial; the experiences of Indians travelling abroad remain a largely open field for historians.

---

Exam angles

Prelims:

• Traveller–origin–century–work triples: Al-Biruni — Khwarizm/Uzbekistan — 11th c. — Kitab-ul-Hind (Arabic, 80 chapters); Ibn Battuta — Tangier/Morocco — 14th c. — Rihla (Arabic, dictated to Ibn Juzayy); Bernier — France — 17th c. — Travels in the Mughal Empire (dedicated to Louis XIV); Abdur Razzaq — from Herat — 15th c. — Vijayanagara; Barbosa — Portugal — south Indian trade; Tavernier — French jeweller, six visits; Manucci — Italian doctor who never returned; Pelsaert — Dutch — "stark want"; Nobili — Jesuit translator of Indian texts.
• Traveller–patron pairings: Al-Biruni — Mahmud of Ghazni (hostage, 1017); Ibn Battuta — Muhammad bin Tughlaq (qazi of Delhi; 1342 envoy to China; qazi of the Maldives 18 months); Bernier — Dara Shukoh (physician) and Danishmand Khan (Armenian noble).
• Who described what: caste via Brahmanical texts + pollution critique — Al-Biruni; coconut, paan, Delhi's 28 darwazas, Tarababad, uluq/dawa post, slavery — Ibn Battuta; sati (Lahore child widow), karkhanas (only detailed account), crown-ownership thesis, "no middle state", "camp towns" — Bernier; poverty indictment — Pelsaert; Calicut "strange nation" + Mangalore temple — Abdur Razzaq.
• Terms: uluq (horse-post, every 4 miles) vs dawa (foot-post, 3 stations/mile, faster); tanka; dola; karkhana; mahajan/sheth/nagarsheth (Ahmedabad); hakim/vaid, pundit/mulla, wakil; antyaja (outside the varna system, inside economic networks); qazi; metrology.
• Kitab-ul-Hind facts: Arabic; 80 chapters; question→description→comparison structure; sources = Vedas, Puranas, Bhagavad Gita, Patanjali, Manusmriti; three barriers (language, religion, insularity); Patanjali into Arabic, Euclid into Sanskrit.
• "Hindu" etymology chain: Old Persian (6th–5th c. BCE, land east of the Sindhu) → Arabic al-Hind/Hindi → Turkish Hindu/Hindustan/Hindavi; religious meaning much later — classic statement question.
• Chronological ordering: Al-Biruni → Marco Polo → Ibn Battuta → Abdur Razzaq → Nikitin → Barbosa → Monserrate → Tavernier/Bernier.
• Idea-lineage: Bernier → Montesquieu (oriental despotism) → Marx (Asiatic mode of production).
• Trap statements (mark FALSE): "Al-Biruni came as a merchant" (hostage-scholar); "Ibn Battuta wrote in Persian" (Arabic); "the horse-post was faster than the foot-post" (reverse); "Mughal documents call the emperor owner of all land" (none do — Abu'l Fazl: remuneration of sovereignty); "17th-century India was less urbanised than Western Europe" (~15%, higher on average); "Bernier's account circulated only in manuscript" (printed and reprinted — the Persian/Arabic accounts were the manuscripts).

Mains:

• Travellers' accounts as historical sources: strengths (the outsider's eye records what indigenous writers take for granted) and limits (male authorship, home audiences, preconceptions, silences on women and ordinary labour) — argue with all three authors.
• Al-Biruni's method: the three barriers, the comparative (Persia/Islam) framework, dependence on Brahmanical normative texts — what his caste account reveals (textual ideal, his pollution critique) and conceals (antyaja inside economic networks; practice less rigid than shastra).
• Bernier's landownership thesis and its refutation (Abu'l Fazl on revenue, rural differentiation, ~15% urbanisation, prosperous merchants) — how a flawed but printed account shaped European theory (Montesquieu, Marx) about a "stagnant" East.
• Urban and economic life of the Sultanate and Mughal periods reconstructed from Ibn Battuta and Bernier: cities and bazaars, textiles in inter-Asian trade, the uluq/dawa communication system, karkhanas, mahajans and professional classes.
• Slavery and the condition of women as seen by travellers (Ibn Battuta's slave markets and spy-slaves; Bernier's sati) — and why these depictions need corroboration against evidence of women's productive and commercial roles.
• The circulation of images: print gave European accounts reach that Persian manuscripts lacked; Indian counter-writing after 1750 (Itisamuddin, Abu Talib) as an early "writing back" to Europe.