Through the Eyes of Travellers

People travelled for work, trade, war, pilgrimage, to escape disasters, or out of curiosity. A few wrote accounts, usually of what they found unusual. Some focus on courts, others on religion or monuments; some — like Mughal administrators touring the empire — travelled within their own land. NCERT notes that we have practically no travel accounts by women, though women travelled. The chapter follows three men: Al-Biruni from Uzbekistan (11th century), Ibn Battuta from Morocco (14th century) and the Frenchman François Bernier (17th century). Because they came from very different worlds, they recorded everyday practices that Indian writers took for granted — which is what makes them valuable, and also what makes them partial.

• Links in this book: Abdur Razzaq’s description of Vijayanagara (Chapter 7 in NCERT’s numbering — our lehs203), the Mughal agrarian world that tests Bernier’s claims (Chapter 8 — lehs204), and Bhakti–Sufi traditions of the same centuries (lehs202).
• Earlier reading: Themes I, Theme 2 (Megasthenes and Xuan Zang as earlier foreign observers) and Theme 3 (varna in Brahmanical texts — compare Al-Biruni’s account); Class 7 Our Pasts II on the Delhi Sultans (Muhammad bin Tughlaq) and the Mughals (Shah Jahan, Dara Shukoh, Aurangzeb).
• UPSC: Prelims asks traveller–ruler–region matches (Nikitin, Ibn Battuta, Tavernier, Hawkins, Roe, Manucci, Nuniz, Abdur Razzaq); GS1 Mains asked in 2018 how far Chinese and Arab travellers’ accounts help reconstruct Indian history — this chapter is the method for that answer.

• Travellers record what is unusual to them — so they notice everyday things local writers took for granted; but their context and audience shape what they see.
• Al-Biruni (Khwarizm, 973; Ghazni from 1017): Kitab-ul-Hind in Arabic, 80 chapters; method: question → Sanskritic description → comparison; three barriers; relied on Brahmana texts.
• His caste account follows the texts (varnas from Brahman’s head, shoulders, thigh, feet), compares ancient Persia, notes Islamic equality, and rejects pollution as against nature.
• Ibn Battuta (Tangier): Sind 1333, qazi of Delhi under Muhammad bin Tughlaq, envoy to China 1342; Rihla dictated on return; coconut, paan, cities, uluq and dawa post.
• Bernier (1656–68; physician to Dara Shukoh): India as Europe’s inverse; crown ownership of land → ruin; ‘no middle state’; ‘camp towns’ → Montesquieu’s oriental despotism, Marx’s Asiatic mode.
• Reality was more complex: ~15% urban, many kinds of towns, mahajans and the nagarsheth, professionals, karkhanas; women’s labour mattered beyond sati; slaves were widely traded.

From Khwarizm to the Punjab. Al-Biruni was born in 973 in Khwarizm (in present-day Uzbekistan), an important centre of learning. He knew Syriac, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew and Sanskrit; he did not know Greek but had read Plato and other Greek philosophers in Arabic translation. In 1017, when Sultan Mahmud invaded Khwarizm, he carried several scholars and poets to his capital, Ghazni; Al-Biruni arrived as a hostage, came to like the city, and spent the rest of his life there.

His interest in India was not unusual: Sanskrit works on astronomy, mathematics and medicine had been translated into Arabic since the eighth century. When the Punjab became part of the Ghaznavid empire, contacts with local people built trust; Al-Biruni spent years with Brahmana priests and scholars, learning Sanskrit and studying religious and philosophical texts. His itinerary is unclear, but he probably travelled widely in the Punjab and parts of north India. Arabic travel literature was already established — covering lands from the Sahara to the Volga — so while few in India would have read him before 1500, many outside India may have.

The Kitab-ul-Hind. Written in Arabic, simple and lucid, it is a large work in 80 chapters on religion and philosophy, festivals, astronomy, alchemy, manners and customs, social life, weights and measures, iconography, laws and metrology (the science of measurement). Generally — not always — each chapter begins with a question, follows with a description based on Sanskritic traditions, and ends with a comparison with other cultures. Some present-day scholars link this almost geometric precision to his mathematical training. He probably wrote for peoples living along the frontiers of the subcontinent; he knew Arabic versions of Sanskrit, Pali and Prakrit texts, from fables to astronomy and medicine, was critical of how they were written, and wanted to improve on them.

Ibn Battuta was born in Tangier (Morocco) into a respected, educated family known for expertise in shari‘a, and received a literary and scholastic education. Unlike most of his class, he valued experience gained through travel above books. Before setting off for India in 1332–33 he had made pilgrimages to Mecca and travelled in Syria, Iraq, Persia, Yemen, Oman and trading ports of East Africa.

Travelling overland through Central Asia, he reached Sind in 1333. Drawn by the reputation of Muhammad bin Tughlaq, Sultan of Delhi, as a generous patron of arts and letters, he went to Delhi via Multan and Uch. The Sultan, impressed by his scholarship, made him qazi (judge) of Delhi. After several years he fell out of favour and was imprisoned; once the misunderstanding was cleared he was restored, and in 1342 sent as the Sultan’s envoy to the Mongol ruler of China. He went through central India to the Malabar coast, then to the Maldives (qazi for 18 months), to Sri Lanka, back to Malabar and the Maldives, then to Bengal and Assam, by ship to Sumatra and on to the Chinese port of Zaytun (Quanzhou). He went as far as Beijing but decided to return home in 1347. His account is often compared with that of Marco Polo, who visited China (and India) from Venice in the late 13th century.

Hazards of travel. Travel in the 14th century was slow and dangerous. Ibn Battuta says it took 40 days from Multan to Delhi, about 50 days from Sind to Delhi, 40 days from Daulatabad and 10 days from Gwalior. He was attacked by robbers several times; he preferred caravans, but on the Multan–Delhi road his caravan was attacked, many died, and the survivors, including him, were badly wounded.

The ‘enjoyment of curiosities’. Ibn Battuta spent years travelling through north Africa, West Asia, parts of Central Asia (he may even have visited Russia), the subcontinent and China. When he returned, the local ruler ordered that his stories be recorded.

Europeans arrive. After the Portuguese reached India around 1500, several wrote detailed accounts of Indian customs and religious practices; a few, such as the Jesuit Roberto Nobili, translated Indian texts into European languages. The best-known Portuguese writer is Duarte Barbosa, on trade and society in south India. After 1600 came growing numbers of Dutch, English and French travellers — among them the French jeweller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, who travelled to India at least six times, was fascinated by trading conditions and compared India with Iran and the Ottoman empire. Some, like the Italian doctor Manucci, never returned to Europe and settled in India.

Bernier, a Frenchman, was a doctor, political philosopher and historian. He came to the Mughal Empire in search of opportunities and stayed twelve years, 1656–1668, closely associated with the court — as physician to Prince Dara Shukoh, eldest son of Emperor Shah Jahan, and later as an intellectual and scientist with Danishmand Khan, a noble at the Mughal court. He travelled widely and constantly compared India with Europe. He dedicated his major work to Louis XIV, and wrote many others as letters to influential officials and ministers. In virtually every case he described India as bleak compared with Europe — an assessment that, NCERT says, was not always accurate — yet his books became extremely popular.

Print versus manuscript. Bernier’s works were published in France in 1670–71 and translated into English, Dutch, German and Italian within five years. Between 1670 and 1725 they were reprinted eight times in French, and by 1684 three times in English. By contrast, accounts in Arabic and Persian circulated as manuscripts and were generally not printed before 1800.

Barriers to understanding. Travellers compared what they saw with what they knew, and each had a strategy. Al-Biruni named three barriers: first language — Sanskrit was so different from Arabic and Persian that ideas did not translate easily; second, differences in religious beliefs and practices; third, what he saw as the self-absorption and insularity of the local population. Yet, though aware of these, he depended almost exclusively on works of Brahmanas, often quoting the Vedas, Puranas, Bhagavad Gita, Patanjali and the Manusmriti.

Al-Biruni and caste. He explained caste by looking for parallels. In ancient Persia, he noted, four categories were recognised: knights and princes; monks, fire-priests and lawyers; physicians, astronomers and other scientists; and peasants and artisans — so social divisions were not unique to India. He also pointed out that within Islam all men were considered equal, differing only in their observance of piety. Although he accepted the Brahmanical description of caste, he disapproved of the notion of pollution: everything that becomes impure strives to regain purity — the sun cleanses the air and salt keeps the sea from being polluted; otherwise life on earth would be impossible. Social pollution, he argued, was contrary to the laws of nature.

Texts versus practice. His description was deeply shaped by normative Sanskrit texts written from the Brahmanas’ viewpoint. In real life the system was less rigid: groups called antyaja (‘born outside the system’) were expected to provide inexpensive labour to peasants and zamindars — socially oppressed, but included in economic networks (see Chapter 8).

By the time Ibn Battuta reached Delhi, the subcontinent was part of a global network of communication from China to north-west Africa and Europe. He moved through it visiting shrines, spending time with scholars and rulers, often serving as qazi, and enjoying cosmopolitan towns where Arabic, Persian, Turkish and other languages were spoken. Stories of pious men, cruel-yet-generous kings and ordinary lives were exchanged; anything unfamiliar was highlighted so that listeners and readers would be impressed by distant yet accessible worlds.

Cities. Ibn Battuta found Indian cities full of opportunity for those with drive, resources and skill — densely populated and prosperous, apart from disruptions by war and invasion, with crowded streets and bright markets full of goods. Delhi was a vast city with a great population, the largest in India; Daulatabad (in Maharashtra) easily rivalled it in size.

Bazaars and wealth. Bazaars were hubs of social and cultural life as well as trade: most had a mosque and a temple, and some had spaces for dancers, musicians and singers. Ibn Battuta did not explain why towns were prosperous, but historians use his account to suggest that towns drew much wealth by appropriating surplus from villages. He found agriculture very productive — fertile soil allowed two crops a year. The subcontinent was integrated into inter-Asian trade; Indian manufactures were in great demand in West and Southeast Asia, bringing large profits. Textiles — cotton cloth, fine muslins, silks, brocade and satin — were prized; some fine muslins were so costly that only nobles and the very rich could wear them.

A unique system of communication. The state took special measures to encourage merchants: almost all trade routes had inns and guest houses. Ibn Battuta was amazed by the postal system, which let merchants send information, remit credit over long distances and dispatch goods at short notice. While a traveller took 50 days from Sind to Delhi, spies’ reports reached the Sultan by post in 5 days.

Where Ibn Battuta described what excited him, Bernier belonged to a different intellectual tradition: he compared India with Europe, especially France, and dwelt on what he found depressing, hoping to influence policy-makers and intellectuals to make the ‘right’ decisions. His Travels in the Mughal Empire is full of detailed observation and reflection and tries to place Mughal history in a universal framework. But it works on a model of binary opposition — India as the inverse of Europe — and orders the differences hierarchically, so that India appears inferior.

Crown ownership. For Bernier, a basic difference was the lack of private property in land in Mughal India. A firm believer in private property, he thought the emperor owned all the land and distributed it among his nobles — with disastrous effects. (Most 16th–17th-century travellers shared this view.) Since holders could not pass land to their children, he argued, they avoided long-term investment; there was no class of ‘improving’ landlords as in Western Europe; the result was ruined agriculture, excessive oppression of peasants and declining living standards for all except the ruling aristocracy.

Bernier described Indian society as undifferentiated masses of poor people ruled by a tiny, very rich minority, with no class worth the name in between: ‘There is no middle state in India.’ The Mughal king, in his picture, ruled ‘beggars and barbarians’; cities were ruined by ‘ill air’; fields were ‘overspread with bushes’ and full of ‘pestilential marishes’ — all because of crown ownership.

What Mughal sources say. Curiously, no Mughal official document suggests the state was the sole owner of land. Abu’l Fazl, Akbar’s official chronicler, called land revenue ‘remunerations of sovereignty’ — the ruler’s claim for the protection he gave, not rent on land he owned. Europeans may have read it as rent because demands were often very high, but it was neither rent nor a land tax: it was a tax on the crop (Chapter 8).

A long afterlife. Bernier’s descriptions influenced Western theorists from the 18th century. Montesquieu used them to develop oriental despotism: Asian rulers held absolute power over subjects kept in subjugation and poverty, because all land belonged to the king and private property did not exist. Karl Marx, in the 19th century, developed the Asiatic mode of production: before colonialism the state appropriated the surplus; society was made of many autonomous, internally egalitarian village communities, presided over by a court that respected their autonomy so long as surplus flowed — a stagnant system. In fact (Chapter 8), 16th–17th-century rural society showed marked differentiation: big zamindars with superior rights, ‘untouchable’ landless labourers, and between them big peasants using hired labour for commodity production and small peasants barely producing for subsistence.

Bernier’s urge to show the Mughal state as tyrannical is obvious, but his writings hint at a more complex reality. He thought artisans had no incentive to improve their goods because the state took the profits, so manufactures were declining everywhere — yet he conceded that vast quantities of the world’s gold and silver flowed into India in exchange for exported manufactures, and noticed a prosperous merchant community engaged in long-distance trade.

Towns. In the 17th century about 15 per cent of the population lived in towns — on average higher than in Western Europe at the time. Yet Bernier called Mughal cities ‘camp towns’: towns that owed their existence to the imperial camp, rising when the court arrived and declining when it left, without viable social and economic foundations. This, too, was oversimplified. There were manufacturing towns, trading towns, port towns, sacred centres and pilgrimage towns — an index of the prosperity of merchants and professionals.

Merchants and professionals. Merchants often had strong community or kin ties and formed caste-cum-occupational bodies: in western India, mahajans, headed by a sheth; in cities such as Ahmedabad, the mahajans were collectively represented by the nagarsheth. Other urban groups included physicians (hakim or vaid), teachers (pundit or mulla), lawyers (wakil), painters, architects, musicians and calligraphers. Some depended on imperial patronage; many served other patrons or ordinary people in crowded bazaars.

The travellers who left written accounts were men, interested and sometimes intrigued by the condition of women. Sometimes they took social inequities for granted as ‘natural’. Slaves were openly sold in markets and regularly exchanged as gifts: in Sind, Ibn Battuta bought ‘horses, camels and slaves’ as gifts for Muhammad bin Tughlaq; in Multan he gave the governor ‘a slave and horse’ with raisins and almonds; the Sultan, pleased with a preacher named Nasiruddin, gave him ‘a hundred thousand tankas and two hundred slaves’.

Ibn Battuta’s account shows differentiation among slaves: some female slaves in the Sultan’s service were expert in music and dance (he enjoyed their performance at the wedding of the Sultan’s sister); others were used to watch the nobles. Slaves were generally used for domestic labour, and he found them indispensable for carrying people in palanquins (dola). Female domestic slaves were very cheap, and most families who could afford it kept one or two.

Sati. European travellers often treated the treatment of women as a key marker of difference between Western and Eastern societies. Bernier described sati in detail, noting that while some women seemed to embrace death cheerfully, others were forced to die.

Beyond sati. Women’s lives involved much more. Their labour was crucial in agricultural and non-agricultural production; women of merchant families took part in commerce, sometimes even taking mercantile disputes to court. So it seems unlikely that women were confined to their homes. Travellers’ accounts give a tantalising glimpse of men’s and women’s lives, but their observations were shaped by the contexts they came from, and they missed much. Also little known are the experiences of people from the subcontinent who travelled abroad — questions NCERT hopes historians will take up.

• Strengths: outsiders notice the everyday (paan, bazaars, the post, marches, karkhanas) that insiders took for granted; they give dates, distances, prices and numbers; they compare across cultures.
• Limits: language barriers and reliance on particular informants or texts (Al-Biruni); the pull of the marvellous and a dictated, edited text (Ibn Battuta); a thesis to prove and an audience to persuade (Bernier); all were men, so women’s work is barely seen.
• Method: ask who wrote, when, in what language, for whom and why; separate observation from judgement; check against other sources — Mughal documents (Abu’l Fazl), inscriptions, buildings and objects (Figs. 5.8–5.12).

Q1–5: 100–150 words. Q6–9: short essays of 250–300 words. Try each first.

Numbers

One-liners

• Al-Biruni: Kitab-ul-Hind, Arabic, 80 chapters; question → Sanskrit texts → comparison.
• Three barriers: language, religion, insularity — yet he relied on Brahmana texts.
• He accepted the varna scheme but called pollution against the laws of nature.
• Ibn Battuta: Tangier → Sind 1333 → qazi of Delhi → envoy 1342 → home 1354; Rihla dictated to Ibn Juzayy.
• Uluq = horse-post; dawa = foot-post; the foot-post was faster.
• Bernier: physician to Dara Shukoh; India as Europe’s inverse; crown ownership; ‘no middle state’; ‘camp towns’.
• Abu’l Fazl: land revenue = ‘remunerations of sovereignty’; a tax on the crop, not rent.
• Montesquieu → oriental despotism; Marx → Asiatic mode of production.
• Mahajan → sheth; city-wide → nagarsheth (Ahmedabad).
• Travellers were men: they saw slaves and sati, not women’s daily labour.

Traps to avoid

• The Kitab-ul-Hind was written in Arabic, not Persian or Sanskrit.
• Al-Biruni came to Ghazni as a hostage (1017), not as an invader’s historian on campaign.
• ‘Hindu’ began as a geographical term (Old Persian, east of the Indus), not a religious one.
• NCERT: Al-Biruni died ‘aged 70’ but dates him 973–1048 — use ‘born 973, died c. 1048’.
• Ibn Battuta was qazi of Delhi under Muhammad bin Tughlaq — not under Alauddin Khalji or Firuz Shah.
• Uluq = horse (every 4 miles); dawa = foot (every third of a mile); foot-post faster.
• ‘Remunerations of sovereignty’ is Abu’l Fazl’s phrase; oriental despotism is Montesquieu’s; Asiatic mode is Marx’s.
• Diamonds and diamond mines = Tavernier, not Bernier (UPSC 2018).
• NCERT calls Danishmand Khan ‘Armenian’; standard sources: a Persian noble — say ‘Mughal noble’.
• Map 1 says ‘not to scale’ but has a scale bar — treat the Multan–Delhi distance as an estimate.

Prelims — what UPSC asks

• Who visited whom: Nikitin, the Russian in the Deccan (1992); Ibn Battuta as the great pre-modern traveller (1993); Tavernier and diamonds (2018); order of European visitors Acquaviva → Roe → Tavernier (1990); traveller–emperor pairs Hawkins, Roe, Tavernier, Manucci (1999). Build a table: traveller · origin · century · ruler · region · work.
• Neighbouring questions: Nuniz on Vijayanagara women (2021) belongs with lehs203; Al-Biruni’s description of Somnath appeared as one statement in a 2022 Somnath question; Muhammad bin Tughlaq’s coinage (2006) and administration are Sultanate topics — know that Ibn Battuta is the source, not the subject.
• Terms likely in statement questions: Kitab-ul-Hind, Rihla, qazi, uluq, dawa, karkhana, mahajan, nagarsheth, ‘remunerations of sovereignty’, oriental despotism.

Mains — where it appears and how to answer

• GS1 2018: importance of the accounts of Chinese and Arab travellers — value (outsider’s eye, everyday detail, numbers, comparison; Al-Biruni on society and science, Ibn Battuta on Tughlaq Delhi, trade, post, slavery) and limits (language, informants, normative texts, love of the marvellous, dictation); add Fa Xian and Xuan Zang from Themes I; conclude on corroboration.
• Likely angles: European travellers and the image of India (Bernier → Montesquieu → Marx); Mughal urbanisation and merchant organisation; source criticism — use the three-lens grid in section 9.
• Frame: who wrote → for whom → what they noticed → what shaped it → what other evidence says.

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