All twelve exercise questions from NCERT Themes in Indian History Part II, Chapter 5 “Through the Eyes of Travellers”, in the English edition’s own wording, each with a model answer: five “Answer in 100-150 words” questions, four short essays (about 250-300 words, the last built around a verbatim excerpt from Bernier), one map-work question and two project questions (choose one). After them come the questions the chapter asks inside the text, beside its sources, figures and map and in its Discuss boxes. Write your own answer first, then check it against this one.
The Hindi edition asks the same twelve exercise questions in the same order, so there is no numbering mismatch for the exercise; among the in-text questions, only the English edition asks you to use the map scale (the Hindi map has no scale). Students writing the paper in English should still answer from this, the English edition’s own phrasing, since that is the wording the paper will use.
How to write: Questions 1-5 need four to six solid points each, matching their shorter word limit. Questions 6-9 are short essays, so give them sub-headings and end each with a one-line conclusion. This chapter is built entirely on source criticism, so name which traveller, which source number, and which quotation you are using wherever you can; that is what earns marks here, not just the underlying fact.
1 Answer in 100-150 words
Q. Write a note on the Kitab-ul-Hind.
Answer:
Structure. The Kitab-ul-Hind runs to eighty chapters, written in Arabic, on subjects from religion, philosophy and festivals to astronomy, alchemy, manners, customs, weights and measures, iconography, law and metrology. Most chapters follow a near-geometric structure: a question, a description drawn from Sanskritic tradition, then a comparison with other cultures.
Sources. Al-Biruni drew almost entirely on Sanskrit texts he had learned to read directly during years spent among Brahmana priests: the Vedas, the Puranas, the Bhagavad Gita, the works of Patanjali and the Manusmriti.
Likely audience. Writing in Arabic, and describing his own purpose as “a help to those who want to discuss religious questions with them (the Hindus), and as a repertory of information to those who want to associate with them”, Al-Biruni most likely wrote for literate Arabic readers along the subcontinent’s frontiers who needed reliable, practical knowledge of India, not for Indian readers themselves.
Why it still matters. Because of its careful, comparative method, historians treat it as one of the most valuable outsider accounts of eleventh-century Indian society, while remembering that it reflects an elite, Brahmanical view of that society, not the whole of it.
Q. Compare and contrast the perspectives from which Ibn Battuta and Bernier wrote their accounts of their travels in India.
Answer:
Ibn Battuta’s purpose. He dictated the Rihla after returning to Morocco, for an audience of fellow Muslims moving through a shared world of trade, pilgrimage and scholarship; Ibn Juzayy’s own stated brief was to give “entertainment to the mind and delight to the ears and eyes” as well as “edification”.
Ibn Battuta’s method. He highlighted whatever struck him as unfamiliar, the coconut, the paan, Delhi’s ramparts, the postal system, favouring vivid detail over a systematic survey.
Bernier’s purpose. Bernier wrote for a French and European readership, dedicating his major work to Louis XIV and sending many of his observations as letters to influential officials.
Bernier’s method. He used binary opposition, presenting India as the systematic inverse of Europe, ranking the differences so that India came out inferior, most famously in his false claim that Mughal India had no private property in land.
The contrast. Ibn Battuta wrote to share his fascination with the unfamiliar; Bernier wrote to compare and, almost always, to judge India as lacking. Both accounts are shaped more by their intended readers than by any neutral survey of Indian society.
Q. Discuss the picture of urban centres that emerges from Bernier’s account.
Answer:
Bernier’s own claim. He called Mughal cities “camp towns”, arguing they existed only to serve the moving imperial court and would collapse once it left.
What the chapter says instead. The chapter answers that Bernier was drawing an oversimplified picture. In fact about 15 per cent of the population lived in towns in the seventeenth century, higher on average than in Western Europe at the time, and there were all kinds of towns: manufacturing, trading, port, sacred and pilgrimage towns, not simply extensions of the court.
Merchant life (the chapter’s evidence, not Bernier’s). Merchants were organised into caste-cum-occupational bodies: in western India, mahajans led by a sheth, with Ahmedabad’s collective head called the nagarsheth; other urban groups included professionals such as physicians (hakim/vaid), teachers, lawyers, painters and musicians. Their existence is an index of the prosperity of merchant communities and professional classes.
The karkhanas. His own description of the imperial karkhanas, halls of embroiderers, goldsmiths, painters and weavers working under a master, shows organised, skilled urban production, even though he frames it as static, comfortable routine rather than genuine enterprise.
Conclusion. Bernier’s account presents Mughal cities as “camp towns” dependent on imperial patronage; the chapter’s wider evidence, and even his own description of the karkhanas, points to a varied and prosperous urban economy that the “camp town” label does not fit.
Q. Analyse the evidence for slavery provided by Ibn Battuta.
Answer:
Buying, selling and gifting. Ibn Battuta describes slaves as an entirely ordinary part of court life: he himself bought “horses, camels and slaves” as gifts for Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlaq, gave the governor of Multan “a slave and horse together with raisins and almonds”, and records the Sultan once rewarding a preacher with “a hundred thousand tankas… and two hundred slaves”.
Varied roles for female slaves. Some, skilled in music and dance, performed at the Sultan’s sister’s wedding; others were used as spies inside noble households, reporting back on the nobles they served; most did domestic labour, including carrying people by palanquin, and were cheap enough that many families kept one or two.
Source of slaves. Most female slaves, the chapter notes, were captured in raids and military expeditions.
What this evidence shows. Slavery was widespread, casual and woven into gift-giving and household life at every level from the Sultan downward, not confined to any one social group.
Q. What were the elements of the practice of sati that drew the attention of Bernier?
Answer:
What he witnessed. At Lahore, Bernier described a “beautiful young widow” he judged “not… more than twelve years of age”, forced onto the pyre.
How it was carried out. Three or four Brahmanas, assisted by an old woman holding her under the arm, forced her toward the pyre and tied her hands and feet “lest she should run away”.
The variation he noted. Bernier observed that some women went to their deaths “cheerfully”, while others, like the girl he described, were clearly forced.
Why this mattered to him. European travellers commonly used the treatment of women as their chief marker of Eastern difference, and sati, being dramatic and alien to Bernier’s own society, became the practice he focused on almost to the exclusion of any other aspect of women’s lives.
2 Write a short essay (about 250-300 words) on the following
Q. Discuss Al-Biruni’s understanding of the caste system.
Answer:
His method. Al-Biruni named three barriers to understanding India, the difficulty of Sanskrit, religious difference, and the insularity of the local population, then built his account of caste almost entirely from Brahmanical Sanskrit texts.
The varna account. He describes the four varnas as created from different parts of Brahman’s body, the Brahmana from the head, the Kshatriya from the shoulders and hands, the Vaishya from the thigh, the Shudra from the feet, while also noting that in practice these groups lived together in the same towns, villages and houses.
Comparative method. He pointed to ancient Persia’s own four broad social categories to argue that social division of this kind was not unique to India, and noted that Islam considered all men equal, differing only in piety.
His one clear disagreement. Although he accepted the Brahmanical ranking of varna, he firmly rejected the idea of permanent ritual pollution, reasoning from nature that anything impure eventually regains its purity.
The limitation historians flag. His account is best read as a record of Brahmanical theory, not of lived practice: antyaja groups, though socially oppressed, were economically indispensable to peasants and zamindars alike, a complexity his fourfold model leaves out entirely.
Q. Do you think Ibn Battuta’s account is useful in arriving at an understanding of life in contemporary urban centres? Give reasons for your answer.
Answer:
Yes, with real value. He records details indigenous writers took for granted: the size of Delhi and Daulatabad, the ramparts and gates of Delhi, bazaars combining a mosque and a temple with space for musicians, the Tarababad singers’ market, and the working of the postal system.
Corroborating economic life. His account of well-stocked markets is read by historians as evidence that towns drew much of their wealth from village surplus, and he describes the subcontinent as well integrated with inter-Asian networks of trade, with Indian manufactures in great demand in both West Asia and Southeast Asia.
But real limits too. He wrote to entertain readers much like himself, so he emphasised the unfamiliar over the routine, moved mainly among elite and scholarly circles, and said almost nothing about ordinary women’s economic lives or the urban poor.
Conclusion. Used carefully and checked against other evidence, yes: it remains one of the richest single accounts of fourteenth-century Indian urban life, though not a complete or unbiased survey on its own.
Q. Discuss the extent to which Bernier’s account enables historians to reconstruct contemporary rural society.
Answer:
Where it helps. His description of poorly cultivated land and peasants losing children as slaves when unable to meet their lords’ demands (Source 11) matches the independent testimony of the Dutch traveller Pelsaert, suggesting real rural hardship existed and was witnessed by more than one outsider.
Where it misleads. His explanation for that hardship, that the crown owned all land, is not supported by any Mughal document; Abu’l Fazl’s own description of land revenue as “remunerations of sovereignty” (a tax on the crop, not rent on state-owned land) offers a different, more accurate explanation for the same high demands.
What it flattens. Bernier presents rural society as a single “undifferentiated mass” of the poor; in reality, rural society was sharply differentiated, from zamindars with superior rights down to landless labourers, with prosperous, commodity-producing peasants and small subsistence peasants in between.
Conclusion. Bernier’s account is useful mainly as first-hand testimony to visible rural distress, not as a reliable explanation of its causes or as a description of the full range of rural society; both need to be cross-checked against local revenue records.
Q. Read this excerpt from Bernier:
“Numerous are the instances of handsome pieces of workmanship made by persons destitute of tools, and who can scarcely be said to have received instruction from a master. Sometimes they imitate so perfectly articles of European manufacture that the difference between the original and copy can hardly be discerned. Among other things, the Indians make excellent muskets, and fowling-pieces, and such beautiful gold ornaments that it may be doubted if the exquisite workmanship of those articles can be exceeded by any European goldsmith. I have often admired the beauty, softness, and delicacy of their paintings.”
List the crafts mentioned in the passage. Compare these with the descriptions of artisanal activity in the chapter.
Answer:
Crafts named in the passage. Firearms (muskets and fowling-pieces), gold ornament-making (goldsmithing), and painting.
The chapter’s own description of artisanal activity. The imperial karkhanas the chapter describes housed embroiderers, goldsmiths, painters, varnishers in lacquer-work, joiners, turners, tailors, shoe-makers, and manufacturers of silk, brocade and fine muslin, each craft working in its own hall under a master’s supervision.
The comparison. Two of the three crafts in this excerpt, gold ornaments (goldsmiths) and paintings (painters), also appear in the karkhana list. Firearms (muskets and fowling-pieces) do not: the karkhana description in Source 14 names no gun-makers. Together the two passages show a skilled and varied artisan class, working both inside and outside the imperial workshops.
The contradiction this exposes. Bernier’s own admiration here, that Indian craftsmen achieved this standard without formal instruction or even proper tools, sits uneasily beside his claim elsewhere in his account that Indian artisans had no incentive to improve their craft because the state took the profit. This is one more instance of Bernier’s own evidence undercutting his general thesis that Mughal India was economically stagnant.
3 Map work
Q. On an outline map of the world mark the countries visited by Ibn Battuta. What are the seas that he may have crossed?
Answer: Mark these on your own outline map of the world, following his journey in order.
| Countries and regions visited (from the chapter) | Sea he may have crossed on the way |
|---|---|
| Morocco (his birthplace, Tangier) and north Africa (Tunis) | Along the Mediterranean coast |
| Mecca (Arabia), Syria, Iraq, Persia (Iran) | The Red Sea (to reach Arabia) |
| Yemen, Oman and the trading ports on the coast of East Africa | The Red Sea, the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf |
| Central Asia and Afghanistan; he may even have visited Russia | By land |
| India (Sind, Multan, Delhi, the Malabar coast, Bengal, Assam) | The Arabian Sea (along the Malabar coast) |
| The Maldives and Sri Lanka | The Indian Ocean |
| Sumatra and China (Zaytun, now Quanzhou, and Beijing) | The Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea |
How to mark it: (1) Shade and name each country or region in the table. (2) Join them in this order with a line: solid over land, dashed over the sea. (3) Write the name of each sea on the dashed part. (4) Add a key and mark Tangier as the starting point.
Seas he may have crossed: the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea.
4 Projects (choose one)
Q. Interview any one of your older relatives (mother/father/grandparents/uncles/aunts) who has travelled outside your town or village. Find out (a) where they went, (b) how they travelled, (c) how long did it take, (d) why did they travel (e) and did they face any difficulties. List as many similarities and differences that they may have noticed between their place of residence and the place they visited, focusing on language, clothes, food, customs, buildings, roads, the lives of men and women. Write a report on your findings.
Answer (how to do the project): Prepare a questionnaire on points (a) to (e), interview your relative and record the answers in their own words. Then make a table with rows for language, clothes, food, customs, buildings, roads and the lives of men and women, and columns for “home” and “place visited”. End the report by comparing with the chapter: which things struck your relative as unfamiliar, as the coconut and paan struck Ibn Battuta, and did they too understand the new place by comparing it with home, as Bernier did with Europe?
Q. For any one of the travellers mentioned in the chapter, find out more about his life and writings. Prepare a report on his travels, noting in particular how he described society, and comparing these descriptions with the excerpts included in the chapter.
Answer (how to do the project): Choose a traveller from the chapter’s timeline (for example Abdur Razzaq Samarqandi, Afanasii Nikitin, Duarte Barbosa, Peter Mundy, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, or one of Al-Biruni, Ibn Battuta and Bernier). In your report cover (1) his life, route and dates, (2) whom he wrote for and why, (3) which aspects of society he described (towns, villages, caste, women, trade, religion), and (4) a comparison with the excerpts in the chapter, showing how his own background shaped what he noticed and how he judged it.
5 In-text questions
The chapter also asks questions inside the text, beside its sources, figures and map and in its Discuss boxes. They are answered here in the order they appear in the book.
Q. Read the excerpt from Al-Biruni (Source 5) and discuss whether his work met these objectives.
Answer: Al-Biruni meant his work as “a help to those who want to discuss religious questions with them (the Hindus), and as a repertory of information to those who want to associate with them”. Source 5 gives a clear, ordered account of the four varnas, their supposed origin from Brahman’s head, shoulders and hands, thigh and feet, their relative status, and the fact that they lived together in the same towns and villages. Information like this would help an outsider understand Hindu society and talk with its members, so the work largely met its objectives. But the account comes from Brahmanical Sanskrit texts; in real life the system was not so rigid, so readers got a normative rather than a complete picture.
Q. If Al-Biruni lived in the twenty-first century, which are the areas of the world where he could have been easily understood, if he still knew the same languages?
Answer: Al-Biruni knew Syriac, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew and Sanskrit. Today Arabic would make him understood across West Asia and north Africa (for example Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Egypt); Persian in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan; Hebrew in Israel; and Syriac among some Christian communities of West Asia. Sanskrit is no longer a spoken language, but scholars and pandits in India would understand him. Since languages have changed over the centuries, he would not be understood with complete ease anywhere.
Q. Are these clothes Greek or Arabian?
Answer: They are Arabian. Solon and his students wear turbans and long, loose robes, typical of Arab dress. The painter of this thirteenth-century Arabic manuscript showed a sixth-century BCE Athenian statesman in the dress of his own society, the clothes he knew.
Q. How can you distinguish the travellers from the robbers?
Answer: The robbers carry weapons and are shown attacking, in aggressive postures, seizing or striking people. The travellers are unarmed or defending themselves, some fleeing or fallen on the ground, with bundles and belongings. Weapons and attacking postures mark the robbers; flight and baggage mark the travellers.
Q. Use the scale on the map to calculate the distance in miles between Multan and Delhi.
Answer: Measuring on the textbook’s Map 1 against its scale bar (0 to 300 miles), Multan to Dehli comes to roughly 350 miles in a straight line, and a little more (about 370 miles) along the route the map draws through Ajudahan, Abuhar, Sarasati and Hansi. The map is labelled a sketch map, so this is only an approximate figure; Ibn Battuta himself says the journey took forty days.
Q. Why do you think some of the passengers are carrying arms?
Answer: Travel was arduous, hazardous and insecure: robbers threatened travellers on rivers and seas as well as on land, and Ibn Battuta’s own caravan was attacked on the way from Multan to Delhi. So travellers carried arms to protect themselves, their companions and their goods; some of the armed men may also have been guards hired to protect the boat.
Q. Compare the objectives of Al-Biruni and Ibn Battuta in writing their accounts.
Answer: Similar: both wrote in Arabic about the subcontinent for readers unfamiliar with it. Different: Al-Biruni’s aim was scholarly, a help to those wishing to discuss religion with Hindus and a repertory of information for those wishing to associate with them; so he wrote a systematic eighty-chapter work on religion, philosophy, astronomy, metrology and more, built largely on Sanskrit texts. Ibn Battuta’s aim was to recount his own experiences: on the ruler’s instructions he dictated an account of the cities he had seen, interesting events, rulers and saints, meant to give “entertainment to the mind and delight to the ears and eyes” as well as edification, and so he highlighted whatever was unfamiliar.
Q. What are the things from Bernier’s list that you would take on a journey today?
Answer: (This is a personal choice; one possible answer.) From Bernier’s list I would take a pillow, bedding, napkins, some food (rice, sweet bread, limes, sugar), a water vessel (bottle) and clothes. Horses, a camel, a groom, a cook, a tent, a carpet and a cane bed are not needed today, when vehicles, hotels and eating places are available.
Q. There is a very rich travel literature in Indian languages. Find out about travel writers in the language you use at home. Read one such account and describe the areas visited by the traveller, what s/he saw, and why s/he wrote the account.
Answer (how to do it): This is a research task. Choose any travel account in the language you speak at home (in Hindi, for example, Rahul Sankrityayan’s travel writing is well known). Describe (1) the areas the traveller visited, (2) what they saw: people, languages, customs, buildings, landscapes, and (3) why they wrote: to inform, to entertain, or to persuade their readers of something. Finish by comparing the account with one of the travellers in this chapter.
Q. Compare what Al-Biruni wrote with Source 6, Chapter 3. Do you notice any similarities and differences? Do you think Al-Biruni depended only on Sanskrit texts for his information and understanding of Indian society?
Answer: Chapter 3, Source 6 (“Flexibility with the Social Order”) uses a Rigvedic hymn to show flexibility in occupational roles in early Vedic society: the speaker is a poet, his father a physician and his mother a grinder of corn. Similarity: both come from the Sanskrit textual tradition and speak of different social roles; Al-Biruni too notes that the varnas lived together in the same towns, villages and houses. Difference: Al-Biruni presents the varnas as fixed by birth, created from different parts of Brahman and ranked, while Source 6 shows varied occupations within one family. Only Sanskrit texts? According to the chapter he relied almost exclusively on Brahmanical works (the Vedas, the Puranas, the Bhagavad Gita, the works of Patanjali, the Manusmriti); but he also spent years with Brahmana priests and scholars and travelled in Punjab and northern India, so some of his understanding probably came from conversation and observation too.
Q. How important is knowledge of the language of the area for a traveller from a different region?
Answer: Very important. Without the language a traveller cannot talk directly with people, understand their practices, beliefs and ideas properly, and has to depend on interpreters, which invites misunderstanding. Al-Biruni himself named language as the first barrier to understanding, since Sanskrit was so different from Arabic and Persian that ideas could not easily be translated; that is why he learnt Sanskrit and could translate texts. Travellers who did not know the local language often fell back on comparisons with their own background, which were not always accurate.
Q. What are the comparisons that Ibn Battuta makes to give his readers an idea about what coconuts looked like? Do you think these are appropriate? How does he convey a sense that this fruit is unusual? How accurate is his description?
Answer: Comparisons: the coconut tree is like a date-palm (differing only in its fruit), and the nut resembles a man’s head, with what look like two eyes and a mouth, an inside like the brain when green, and fibre like hair. Appropriate: yes for his readers, who knew date-palms and could picture a head, so they could imagine an unknown fruit. Unusual: he calls these trees “among the most peculiar trees in kind and most astonishing in habit”, and adds that the fibre is used to make cords and to sew ships instead of using iron nails. Accuracy: broadly accurate (the three eye-like marks, the soft inside, the outer fibre and its use for rope and ship-building are real), though “brain” and “hair” are comparisons to help the reader, not literal descriptions.
Q. Why do you think this attracted Ibn Battuta’s attention? Is there anything you would like to add to this description?
Answer: Paan was completely unfamiliar to him and his readers: a plant with no fruit, grown only for its leaves, chewed with areca nut and a little chalk. Such novelties impressed his audience, so he highlighted them. One could add that paan is often prepared with katha as well as lime (chuna), and that in India it is offered to guests and at festivals and religious occasions.
Q. What were the architectural features that Ibn Battuta noted? Compare this description with the illustrations of the city shown in Figs. 5.8 and 5.9.
Answer: He noted the unparalleled rampart round the city, its wall eleven cubits broad; houses for the night sentry and gate-keepers inside it; store-houses for edibles, magazines, ammunition, ballistas and siege machines; a passage inside the rampart along which horsemen and infantrymen moved from one end of the city to the other; windows opening on the city side; a lower part of stone and an upper part of bricks; many towers close to one another; twenty-eight gates (darwaza), with the Budaun darwaza the greatest; and a cemetery with domed and arched graves. Comparison: Fig. 5.9 shows a massive stone fortification wall with rounded bastions, matching his description of the rampart and its towers, and the arch from Tughlakabad in Fig. 5.8 reflects the arches and gateways he mentions.
Q. Why do you think Ibn Battuta highlighted these activities in his description?
Answer: The singers’ market struck him as novel and fascinating: female singers seated on swings and decked with finery, singing and dancing under the cupola every Thursday, and both Hindu and Muslim rulers stopping to hear them. He set out to highlight whatever was unfamiliar so that his listeners would be impressed and entertained. It also shows that bazaars were not only places of economic exchange but hubs of social and cultural activity, with mosques as well as spaces for public performance.
Q. Do you think the foot-post system could have operated throughout the subcontinent?
Answer: Probably not. It needed a well-populated village every three miles, three stations per mile, and men always ready to run, all organised and paid for by the state. That was possible on the main trade routes and in densely settled areas under the Sultan’s firm control, such as the Sind-Multan-Delhi route, but hard to run in hilly, forested or thinly populated regions, or where the Sultan’s authority was weak.
Q. How did Ibn Battuta handle the problem of describing things or situations to people who had not seen or experienced them?
Answer: He compared the unknown with things his readers knew: the coconut tree with the date-palm and the nut with a man’s head, the betel with the grape-vine, and the areca nut with nutmeg. He gave exact measurements and numbers (a wall eleven cubits broad, twenty-eight gates, horses every four miles), described step by step how something was done (eating paan, the working of the foot-post), and highlighted whatever was unfamiliar so his listeners could picture it.
Q. What, according to Bernier, were the problems faced by peasants in the subcontinent? Do you think his description would have served to strengthen his case?
Answer: Problems: much of the country was sand or barren mountains, badly cultivated and thinly populated; even good land lay untilled for want of labourers, many of whom died from the bad treatment of governors; when the poor could not meet the demands of their rapacious lords they were deprived of the means of subsistence and lost their children, carried away as slaves; and, driven to despair, the peasantry abandoned the country. Strengthening his case: yes, that was its purpose. Bernier was taking part in European debates, arguing that crown ownership of land and the absence of private property caused such ruin; his description was meant as a warning to Europeans who did not accept the “virtues” of private property. For the same reason it is one-sided, as Source 13 shows.
Q. How does Bernier depict a scenario of doom? Come back to this description after you have read Chapters 8 and 9 and assess it.
Answer: He warns that if European kings followed the Mughal model, their kingdoms would no longer be well tilled, peopled, built, rich and flourishing; the kings would become “kings of deserts and solitudes, of beggars and barbarians”; the great cities and towns would be “rendered uninhabitable because of ill air” and fall to ruin with no one caring to repair them; and the fields would be “overspread with bushes” or “pestilential marishes”. All of this he blames on crown ownership of land. After Chapters 8 and 9 the picture looks exaggerated: no official Mughal document suggests the state was the sole owner of land, and rural society was differentiated and productive, from big zamindars to landless labourers.
Q. In what ways is the description in this excerpt different from that in Source 11?
Answer: Source 11 shows sandy or barren land, bad cultivation, thin population and despairing peasants abandoning the country. Source 13 says instead that a large part of the country is extremely fertile: Bengal surpasses Egypt in rice, corn and other necessities and in commercial crops such as silk, cotton and indigo; many parts are well populated and well cultivated; artisans make carpets, brocades, embroideries, gold and silver cloths and silk and cotton goods used at home and exported; and the world’s gold and silver end up “swallowed up” in Hindustan. Source 13 thus pictures a rich, productive, trading economy that does not fit Bernier’s own thesis.
Q. How does Bernier convey a sense that although there was a great deal of activity, there was little progress?
Answer: On the one hand he describes hall after hall of the karkhanas busy with embroiderers, goldsmiths, painters, lacquer varnishers, joiners, turners, tailors, shoe-makers and makers of silk, brocade and fine muslin, working all day. On the other he says they come every morning and go home in the evening, passing their time in “this tranquil regularity”, with “no one aspiring for any improvement in the condition of life wherein he happens to be born”. Placing constant activity beside the absence of any wish for improvement gives the sense of much activity but little progress.
Q. Why do you think scholars like Bernier chose to compare India with Europe?
Answer: Bernier understood India through his own background, Europe and especially France, so comparison came naturally. But he went further: he wanted to influence policy-makers and the intelligentsia to make what he considered the “right” decisions. By presenting India as the inverse of Europe and ranking it lower, he stressed Europe’s superiority and the virtues of private property, and warned European rulers that adopting the Mughal model would ruin their kingdoms. His major work was dedicated to Louis XIV, and many of his writings were letters to influential officials.
Q. Why do you think the lives of ordinary women workers did not attract the attention of travellers such as Ibn Battuta and Bernier?
Answer: These travellers were men who moved mostly among courts, rulers, scholars and cities, with little contact with ordinary working women. They recorded what struck them as unusual or served their argument, such as slave women and sati; for European travellers the treatment of women was a marker of difference between Western and Eastern societies. Women’s labour in farming and craft production was routine, so it did not seem worth recording, and the travellers sometimes accepted social inequities as “natural”. Yet the chapter notes that women’s labour was crucial in both agricultural and non-agricultural production.
Q. What are the various modes of transport that are shown?
Answer: The sculpted panel from Mathura shows travellers riding horses, a covered carriage on wheels drawn by horses, and people walking on foot: horseback, an animal-drawn vehicle and travel on foot.