c. tenth to seventeenth century
People travelled for work, to escape disaster, as traders, soldiers, priests, pilgrims, or simply from curiosity, and a rare few wrote down what they saw. Almost none of these surviving accounts are by women, though we know women travelled too. This chapter builds its picture of society from three very different travellers: Al-Biruni (Uzbekistan, eleventh century), Ibn Battuta (Morocco, fourteenth century) and François Bernier (France, seventeenth century). Coming from unfamiliar worlds, they noticed the everyday things indigenous writers took for granted and never bothered to record, which is exactly what makes their accounts valuable, and exactly why each must be read for who they wrote for and why.
1 Al-Biruni and the Kitab-ul-Hind
Born in 973 in Khwarizm (present-day Uzbekistan), a major centre of learning, Al-Biruni knew Syriac, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew and Sanskrit, and had read Plato in Arabic translation though he never learned Greek. In 1017 Sultan Mahmud invaded Khwarizm and took scholars, Al-Biruni among them, back to his capital Ghazni. He arrived a hostage but came to like the city and stayed until his death at 70.
His interest in India grew in Ghazni, helped along by Sanskrit works on astronomy, mathematics and medicine already being translated into Arabic since the eighth century, and by the trust that grew once Punjab became part of the Ghaznavid empire. He spent years among Brahmana priests, learning Sanskrit and studying religious and philosophical texts, and probably travelled widely across Punjab and northern India, though his exact itinerary is unclear.
Al-Biruni translated Sanskrit works, including Patanjali’s grammar, into Arabic, and for his Brahmana friends translated Euclid, the Greek mathematician, into Sanskrit. Knowledge moved in both directions.
1.1 The Kitab-ul-Hind
Written in Arabic, simple and lucid, the Kitab-ul-Hind runs to 80 chapters on religion, philosophy, festivals, astronomy, alchemy, manners, customs, social life, weights and measures, iconography, laws and metrology. Most chapters follow the same near-geometric structure: a question, a description drawn from Sanskritic tradition, then a comparison with other cultures, a precision some scholars link to his mathematical training.
Metrology is the science of measurement. “Hindu” derives from an Old Persian word (c. sixth-fifth centuries BCE) for the region east of the Sindhu (Indus); Arabs called the region al-Hind and its people Hindi, Turks later called the people Hindu, their land Hindustan, their language Hindavi. None of these originally carried any religious meaning; that came much later.
Writing in Arabic, Al-Biruni likely intended his work for people along the subcontinent’s frontiers. He knew existing Arabic translations of Sanskrit, Pali and Prakrit texts, from fables to astronomy, but was critical of them and clearly meant to improve on them.
He described his own 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.”
2 Ibn Battuta’s Rihla
Ibn Battuta, born in Tangier into a family of shari’a legal scholars, valued travel-experience over books, unusual for his class. Before setting off for India in 1332-33 he had already made pilgrimage to Mecca and travelled through Syria, Iraq, Persia, Yemen, Oman and East African ports.
“My departure from Tangier, my birthplace, took place on Thursday… I set out alone, having neither fellow-traveller… nor caravan… but swayed by an overmastering impulse… I braced my resolution to quit all my dear ones… and forsook my home as birds forsake their nests… My age at that time was twenty-two years.” He returned home in 1354, about thirty years later.
By his own account it took forty days from Multan to Delhi, about fifty days from Sind to Delhi, forty days from Daulatabad to Delhi and ten days from Gwalior to Delhi. Robbers attacked his caravan more than once; travelling from Multan to Delhi one raid killed several of his companions and left the survivors, Ibn Battuta included, badly wounded.
Illness struck too: “I was attacked by the fever, and I actually tied myself on the saddle with a turban-cloth in case I should fall off.” Reaching Tunis, nobody greeted him among the crowds welcoming others, “since there was none of them I knew. I felt so sad at heart on account of my loneliness that I could not restrain the tears… and wept bitterly”, until one pilgrim noticed and came over.
Reaching Sind in 1333 via Central Asia, he was drawn to Delhi by the reputation of Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlaq as a generous patron, travelling via Multan and Uch. The Sultan, impressed by his scholarship, made him qazi (judge) of Delhi; a falling-out landed him briefly in prison, and once cleared he was sent in 1342 as envoy to the Mongol ruler of China. That mission took him through the Malabar coast, eighteen months in the Maldives as qazi, Sri Lanka, Bengal and Assam, then by ship to Sumatra and on to Zaytun (Quanzhou); he travelled as far as Beijing before returning home in 1347. His account is often compared with Marco Polo’s, a Venetian who had visited China and India in the late thirteenth century.
On his return, the ruler of Morocco ordered his stories recorded. Ibn Juzayy, deputed to write down what Ibn Battuta dictated, explained the brief was an account “of the cities which he had seen… and of the interesting events which had clung to his memory”, meant to give both “entertainment to the mind and delight to the ears and eyes” and “edification”. Between 1400 and 1800, later Persian travelogue writers such as Abdur Razzaq Samarqandi (south India, 1440s), Mahmud Wali Balkhi (1620s, who briefly became a sanyasi) and Shaikh Ali Hazin (1740s, who was disappointed and disgusted) followed in this tradition.
3 François Bernier: a Doctor with a Difference
After the Portuguese arrived around 1500, writers such as Duarte Barbosa described south Indian trade and society; after 1600, Dutch, English and French travellers grew more common, among them the jeweller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier and the doctor Manucci, who settled permanently in India.
François Bernier, a French physician, political philosopher and historian, spent twelve years in India, 1656 to 1668, closely tied to the Mughal court, first as physician to Prince Dara Shukoh, later as an intellectual companion to the Armenian noble Danishmand Khan. He travelled widely, dedicated his major work to Louis XIV, and wrote much else as letters to influential officials, consistently describing India as bleak compared to Europe, an assessment the chapter says was not always accurate.
Bernier’s kit for the march to Kashmir: two Turkoman horses, a Persian camel and driver, a groom, a cook, a water-carrying servant, a tent, a carpet, a portable cane bed, table-cloths, napkins, culinary utensils packed in a leather sack that also held provisions, linen and clothing, plus rice, biscuits, limes, sugar, and a hook for draining dahi, “nothing being considered so refreshing in this country as lemonade and dahi.”
Bernier’s works were published in France in 1670-71 and translated into English, Dutch, German and Italian within five years; his account was reprinted eight times in French between 1670 and 1725, and three times in English by 1684. Arabic and Persian travel accounts, by contrast, circulated as manuscripts and were rarely published before 1800, so Bernier’s version of India reached a far wider audience, far faster.
4 Making Sense of an Alien World: Al-Biruni and the Caste System
Al-Biruni named three barriers to understanding: language (Sanskrit’s structure made translation hard), religious difference, and the self-absorption and insularity of the local population. Yet despite naming these problems, he relied almost entirely on Brahmana texts: the Vedas, Puranas, Bhagavad Gita, Patanjali, the Manusmriti.
“The highest caste are the Brahmana, of whom the books of the Hindus tell us that they were created from the head of Brahman… the Brahmana are the choice part of the whole genus… The next caste are the Kshatriya, who were created… from the shoulders and hands of Brahman… After them follow the Vaishya, who were created from the thigh of Brahman. The Shudra, who were created from his feet…” He adds that despite this ranking, the groups “live together in the same towns and villages, mixed together in the same houses and lodgings.”
Al-Biruni looked for parallels elsewhere: ancient Persia, he noted, also recognised four categories, knights and princes, priests and lawyers, physicians and scientists, and peasants and artisans, so social division was not unique to India. He also pointed out that within Islam all men were considered equal, differing only in piety. And though he accepted the Brahmanical account of varna, he rejected the idea of ritual pollution outright, arguing from nature: the sun cleanses the air, salt keeps the sea from fouling, and everything that becomes impure eventually regains purity, so pollution as a permanent state was, to him, contrary to natural law.
Do not treat Al-Biruni’s account as simply accurate. It reflects the Brahmanical, textual view of caste, not necessarily how it worked day to day. Groups labelled antyaja (“born outside the system”) were socially oppressed, yet economically indispensable, supplying cheap labour to peasants and zamindars alike, so real practice was messier than the fourfold model he described.
5 Ibn Battuta and the Excitement of the Unfamiliar
By the fourteenth century the subcontinent sat inside a communication network running from China to north-west Africa and Europe. Ibn Battuta moved through this world visiting shrines, meeting scholars and rulers, and mixing in cities where Arabic, Persian, Turkish and other languages were all in use, gathering stories of pious men, cruel and generous kings, and ordinary lives, always highlighting whatever was unfamiliar to hold his audience.
5.1 The coconut and the paan
Coconut trees, he wrote, “look exactly like date-palms… except that the one produces nuts as its fruits and the other produces dates. The nut of a coconut tree resembles a man’s head, for in it are what look like two eyes and a mouth, and the inside of it when it is green looks like the brain, and attached to it is a fibre which looks like hair.” He notes the fibre is used to sew ships and make cables.
Source 7 · the paan. “The betel is a tree which is cultivated in the same manner as the grape-vine… The betel has no fruit and is grown only for the sake of its leaves… before eating it one takes areca nut… breaks it up… places these in his mouth and chews them. Then he takes the leaves of betel, puts a little chalk on them, and masticates them along with the betel.”
5.2 Ibn Battuta and Indian cities
He found subcontinental cities densely populated, prosperous, crowded and colourfully stocked, disrupted only occasionally by war. Delhi he called the largest city in India; Daulatabad rivalled it in size.
“The rampart round the city is without parallel. The breadth of its wall is eleven cubits… store-houses for storing edibles, magazines, ammunition, ballistas and siege machines… The lower part of the rampart is built of stone; the upper part of bricks… twenty eight gates… the Budaun darwaza is the greatest; inside the Mandwi darwaza there is a grain market… It has a fine cemetery in which graves have domes over them… and flowers blossom there in all seasons.”
Bazaars combined trade with social life: most had both a mosque and a temple, and some set aside space for dancers, musicians and singers. Historians read Ibn Battuta’s account as evidence that towns drew much of their wealth from village surplus. He found agriculture very productive, with two crops a year, and the subcontinent well tied into inter-Asian trade: Indian textiles, cotton, fine muslin, silk, brocade and satin, sold well across West and Southeast Asia, some muslins so costly only nobles could afford them.
Daulatabad’s Tarababad, its singers’ bazaar: “every shop has a door which leads into the house of the owner… at the centre of a shop there is a swing on which sits the female singer… decked with all kinds of finery.” A cupola at the market’s centre hosted the chief musician every Thursday after dawn prayers, with “female singers” performing “until dusk”, and both Hindu and Muslim rulers stopped there when passing.
5.3 A unique system of communication
Trade routes were well supplied with inns and rest-houses, and Ibn Battuta was amazed by the postal system, which moved information, credit and urgent goods across long distances.
“The horse-post, called uluq, is run by royal horses stationed at a distance of every four miles. The foot-post has three stations per mile; it is called dawa…” A courier ran with a bell-topped rod; men waiting at each station heard the bell, took the letter, and ran on. It was so efficient that while the journey from Sind to Delhi took fifty days, spies’ reports reached the Sultan by post in just five days.
Writing in the 1440s, Abdur Razzaq disliked the port of Calicut, calling its people “a strange nation… the likes of whom I had never imagined.” But near Mangalore he was struck with admiration by a temple: “an idol-house the likes of which is not to be found in all the world… covered with cast bronze… a statue in the likeness of a human being, full stature, made of gold. It had two red rubies for eyes… What craft and artisanship!”
6 Bernier and the “Degenerate” East
Where Ibn Battuta wrote to share his excitement at the unfamiliar, Bernier wrote to compare, and almost always to find India wanting. His method was binary opposition: India presented as the systematic inverse of Europe, and the differences ranked so India came out inferior.
6.1 The question of landownership
Bernier’s central claim was that Mughal India had no private property in land: the emperor owned everything and distributed it to nobles. He believed private property was essential to good government, so crown ownership, in his view, meant landholders could not pass land to their children, killing any incentive for long-term investment. That, he argued, blocked the rise of an “improving” landlord class like Western Europe’s, and produced uniform agricultural ruin, peasant oppression and falling living standards for everyone except the ruling aristocracy. This view was common among his contemporaries, not unique to him.
“Many are little more than sand, or barren mountains, badly cultivated, and thinly populated… The poor people, when they become incapable of discharging the demands of their rapacious lords, are not only often deprived of the means of subsistence, but are also made to lose their children, who are carried away as slaves. Thus, it happens that the peasantry, driven to despair by so excessive a tyranny, abandon the country.”
The Dutch traveller Pelsaert, visiting in the early seventeenth century, was similarly shocked: “poverty so great and miserable that the life of the people can be depicted or accurately described only as the home of stark want and the dwelling place of bitter woe.” Holding the state responsible, he added: “So much is wrung from the peasants that even dry bread is scarcely left to fill their stomachs.” Bernier’s view of rural India, in other words, was shared by other European travellers of the period, not his alone.
Bernier went further: India had, in his telling, no middle ground at all, only an “undifferentiated mass” of the poor beneath a tiny, immensely rich ruling class. “There is no middle state in India”, as he put it, describing the emperor as king of “beggars and barbarians”, its towns “ruined and contaminated with ill air”, its fields “overspread with bushes” and “pestilential marishes”, all blamed on crown land ownership.
Do not repeat Bernier’s claim as fact. No Mughal official document actually says the state was the sole owner of land. Abu’l Fazl, Akbar’s chronicler, describes land revenue as “remunerations of sovereignty”, a payment for the ruler’s protection, not rent on land he owned. European travellers likely read the very high revenue demand as rent, when it was actually a tax on the crop, not on the land itself.
Bernier’s picture influenced later theory. Montesquieu built the idea of oriental despotism on it, that Asian rulers held absolute authority with no private property at all; Karl Marx later developed this into the Asiatic mode of production, a supposedly stagnant system of self-sufficient village communities skimmed by the state. As Theme 8 will show, rural society was actually sharply differentiated, from big zamindars with superior land rights down to landless “untouchable” labourers, with big commodity-producing peasants and small subsistence peasants in between, nothing like Bernier’s flattened picture.
Bernier’s own evidence sometimes undercuts his thesis. He argued artisans had no incentive to improve their craft since the state took the profit, yet he also admitted that vast quantities of the world’s gold and silver flowed into India in exchange for its manufactures, and noticed a genuinely prosperous, long-distance merchant community.
“Bengale… surpassing Egypt itself, not only in the production of rice, corn, and other necessaries of life, but of innumerable articles of commerce which are not cultivated in Egypt; such as silks, cotton, and indigo… gold and silver, after circulating in every other quarter of the globe, come at length to be swallowed up, lost in some measure, in Hindustan.”
About 15 per cent of the population lived in towns during the seventeenth century, higher on average than Western Europe at the time. Yet Bernier called Mughal cities “camp towns”, claiming they existed only to serve the moving imperial court and would collapse once it left. In fact towns came in many kinds, manufacturing, trading, port, sacred and pilgrimage, each a sign of real merchant and professional prosperity. Merchants organised through kin and caste-based bodies: in western India, mahajans led by a sheth, with Ahmedabad’s collective head called the nagarsheth. Other urban professionals included physicians (hakim/vaid), teachers (pundit/mulla), lawyers (wakil), painters, architects, musicians and calligraphers, some on imperial patronage, others serving other patrons or ordinary market customers.
“Large halls are seen at many places, called karkhanas or workshops for the artisans. In one hall, embroiderers are busily employed, superintended by a master. In another, you see the goldsmiths; in a third, painters; in a fourth, varnishers in lacquer-work; in a fifth, joiners, turners, tailors and shoe-makers; in a sixth, manufacturers of silk, brocade and fine muslins…” Bernier frames this as static, comfortable routine: “no one aspiring for any improvement in the condition of life wherein he happens to be born.”
7 Women: Slaves, Sati and Labourers
Almost every surviving account is by a man, and social inequities such as slavery were often simply taken for granted. Slaves were sold openly and exchanged as gifts: Ibn Battuta 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 reports the Sultan once rewarded a preacher with “a hundred thousand tankas… and two hundred slaves.” Female slaves varied widely in role: some, skilled in music and dance, performed at the Sultan’s sister’s wedding; others were used as spies inside noble households; most did domestic labour, including carrying people by palanquin, and were cheap enough that many families kept one or two.
“It is the habit of the emperor… to keep with every noble, great or small, one of his slaves who spies on the nobles. He also appoints female scavengers who enter the houses unannounced; and to them the slave girls communicate all the information they possess.” Most female slaves, the chapter notes, were captured in raids and military expeditions.
European travellers often used the treatment of women as their chief marker of Eastern difference, and Bernier’s attention went straight to sati.
“At Lahore I saw a most beautiful young widow sacrificed, who could not, I think, have been more than twelve years of age… three or four of the Brahmanas, assisted by an old woman who held her under the arm, forced the unwilling victim toward the fatal spot, seated her on the wood, tied her hands and feet, lest she should run away, and in that situation the innocent creature was burnt alive.” Bernier notes some women went to their deaths “cheerfully”, others were forced.
What barely appears in any of these accounts is the ordinary economic life of women: their essential labour in farming and craft production, and merchant-family women who took part in trade and, at times, brought commercial disputes to court. Confining these accounts to sati and slavery, in other words, misses most of what women’s lives actually involved. Also missing entirely from the historical record are the experiences of subcontinental men and women who themselves travelled beyond India, questions historians have only begun addressing.
8 Timeline and Revision
| Some travellers who left accounts | |
|---|---|
| 973-1048 | Al-Biruni (Uzbekistan) |
| 1254-1323 | Marco Polo (Italy) |
| 1304-77 | Ibn Battuta (Morocco) |
| 1413-82 | Abdur Razzaq Samarqandi |
| 1466-72 (years in India) | Afanasii Nikitin (Russia) |
| 1518 (visit) | Duarte Barbosa (Portugal, d. 1521) |
| 1562 (death) | Seydi Ali Reis (Turkey) |
| 1536-1600 | Antonio Monserrate (Spain) |
| 1626-31 (years in India) | Mahmud Wali Balkhi |
| 1600-67 | Peter Mundy (England) |
| 1605-89 | Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (France) |
| 1620-88 | François Bernier (France) |
- Three anchor travellers: Al-Biruni (Kitab-ul-Hind, eleventh century), Ibn Battuta (Rihla, fourteenth century), Bernier (Travels in the Mughal Empire, seventeenth century).
- Al-Biruni named three barriers to understanding India (language, religion, insularity) but leaned almost entirely on Brahmanical texts anyway.
- His varna account matches Brahmanical theory; real practice, especially for antyaja groups, was economically more integrated than the theory allowed.
- Ibn Battuta valued travel-experience over books, served as qazi in Delhi and the Maldives, and highlighted whatever was unfamiliar: the coconut, the paan, Delhi’s ramparts, the postal system.
- Bernier read India through binary opposition with Europe, built his whole argument on the false claim of “no private property in land”, and this fed directly into Montesquieu’s oriental despotism and Marx’s Asiatic mode of production.
- Bernier’s own account contradicts his thesis in places: he admits gold and silver flowed into India and describes a thriving merchant community.
- Publishing history mattered: Bernier’s French account was printed and translated fast across Europe; Arabic and Persian travel writing stayed in manuscript, reaching far fewer readers before 1800.
- Women appear in these accounts mainly as slaves or as sati victims; their everyday economic and legal lives are almost entirely absent.
- 1 markIn how many chapters is the Kitab-ul-Hind divided?
- 1 markWhat is metrology?
- 1 markWhat position did Ibn Battuta hold in Delhi?
- 1 markWhom did Bernier dedicate his major work to?
- 1 markWhat were mahajanas and the sheth, in western India’s merchant organisation?
- 2 marksName the three barriers to understanding that Al-Biruni identified.
- 2 marksWhat is oriental despotism, and who developed the idea?
- 2 marksHow did Ibn Battuta describe the working of the postal system?
- 2 marksWhat is the Asiatic mode of production?
- 3 marksCompare and contrast the perspectives from which Ibn Battuta and Bernier wrote their accounts.
- 3 marksWhat were the elements of the practice of sati that drew Bernier’s attention?
- 3 marksAnalyse the evidence for slavery provided by Ibn Battuta.
- 3 marksWhy did Al-Biruni disapprove of the notion of ritual pollution?
- 3 marksWhat does Abu’l Fazl’s description of land revenue reveal about the accuracy of Bernier’s claim on landownership?
- 3 marksDiscuss the picture of urban centres that emerges from Bernier’s account.
- 3 marksWhy do you think ordinary women’s economic lives did not attract the attention of travellers like Ibn Battuta and Bernier?
- 5 marksWrite a note on the Kitab-ul-Hind: its structure, sources and likely intended audience.
- 5 marksDiscuss Al-Biruni’s understanding of the caste system.
- 5 marksDo you think Ibn Battuta’s account is useful for understanding life in contemporary urban centres? Give reasons.
- 5 marksDiscuss the extent to which Bernier’s account enables historians to reconstruct contemporary rural society.
- 5 marksTrace how Bernier’s description of Mughal India influenced Montesquieu and Marx.
- 5 marksCompare Al-Biruni, Ibn Battuta and Bernier on who they wrote for and why, and how that shaped what each chose to record.
- 5 marksOn an outline map of the world, mark the countries visited by Ibn Battuta and the seas he may have crossed.
- 1 markAl-Biruni was taken to Ghazni after Sultan Mahmud invaded:
(a) Punjab(b) Khwarizm(c) Baghdad(d) Samarqand - 1 markIbn Battuta was appointed qazi of Delhi by:
(a) Alauddin Khalji(b) Firuz Shah Tughlaq(c) Muhammad bin Tughlaq(d) Balban - 1 markThe Tarababad, described by Ibn Battuta, was a market for:
(a) horses(b) male and female singers(c) textiles(d) spices - 1 markBernier was physician to which Mughal prince?
(a) Aurangzeb(b) Dara Shukoh(c) Murad(d) Shah Shuja - 1 markThe chief of a merchant body in Ahmedabad was called:
(a) sheth(b) nagarsheth(c) mahajan(d) wakil - 1 markApproximately what share of the population lived in towns in seventeenth-century Mughal India?
(a) 5 per cent(b) 15 per cent(c) 30 per cent(d) 50 per cent
Choose: (a) both A and R are true and R explains A; (b) both true but R does not explain A; (c) A true, R false; (d) A false, R true.
Reason (R): No Mughal official document describes the state as the sole owner of all land; land revenue was a tax on the crop, not rent.
Reason (R): He relied almost entirely on Brahmanical Sanskrit texts, which described the system from the Brahmana point of view.