Al-Biruni, Ibn Battuta and Bernier on India

A recurring trap in this chapter is treating three very different travellers as interchangeable eyewitnesses. Al-Biruni, an eleventh-century scholar from Khwarizm, wrote a systematic study of Indian religion and society without ever claiming to describe the whole subcontinent from personal observation. Ibn Battuta, a fourteenth-century qazi from Morocco, served the Delhi Sultanate from the inside and recorded what he saw with delight at its novelty. Francois Bernier, a seventeenth-century French doctor at the Mughal court, wrote to persuade European readers of India's inferiority, and his best-known claim, that Mughal India had no private property in land, is one the NCERT chapter itself flags as inaccurate. A question can test any of the three names, the book each wrote (Kitab-ul-Hind, the Rihla, Travels in the Mughal Empire), or whether a specific claim, the postal system, the karkhanas, sati, belongs to the right traveller. Getting the attribution and the chapter's own critique of Bernier right is what separates a real answer from a guess.

Al-Biruni: an outsider's methodology

Al-Biruni was born in 973 in Khwarizm, in present-day Uzbekistan, then an important centre of learning. He was fluent in Syriac, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew and Sanskrit, and though he did not know Greek, he had read Plato and other Greek philosophers in Arabic translation. In 1017, when Sultan Mahmud invaded Khwarizm, he took several scholars and poets back to his capital, Ghazni, and Al-Biruni was among them, arriving as a hostage. He nonetheless developed a liking for the city and spent the rest of his life there, until his death at the age of 70.

It was in Ghazni that Al-Biruni developed his interest in India. He spent years in the company of Brahmana priests and scholars, learning Sanskrit and studying religious and philosophical texts. The result was the Kitab-ul-Hind, written in Arabic, a simple and lucid work divided into 80 chapters covering religion, philosophy, festivals, astronomy, alchemy, manners and customs, social life, weights and measures, and law. Each chapter generally follows a distinctive structure: a question, a description drawn from Sanskritic tradition, and a comparison with other cultures, a pattern some scholars attribute to his mathematical training.

Al-Biruni was unusually self-aware about the limits of his method. He named three barriers to understanding India: the difference between Sanskrit and Arabic or Persian, which made ideas hard to translate; the difference in religious belief and practice; and what he saw as the self-absorption and insularity of the local population. Yet, despite naming these barriers, he relied almost exclusively on Brahmanical Sanskrit texts, the Vedas, the Puranas, the Bhagavad Gita, Patanjali, and the Manusmriti, to explain Indian society. His account of the caste system illustrates both the method and its limits. He tried to normalise the varna system by pointing to parallel social divisions in ancient Persia (knights and princes, priests, physicians and scientists, and peasants and artisans), while noting that Islam held all men equal in principle. He recorded the Brahmanical account of the four varnas originating from different parts of Brahman's body, but also disapproved of the idea of ritual pollution, arguing that everything in an impure state eventually regains its purity, just as the sun cleanses the air, so social pollution was, in his view, contrary to the laws of nature. Because his sources were normative Brahmanical texts, his picture was more rigid than social reality: groups labelled antyaja (born outside the caste system) supplied essential labour to both peasants and zamindars and were woven into local economic networks even as they faced social oppression.

Ibn Battuta: Delhi Sultanate India through a qazi's eyes

Ibn Battuta was born in Tangier into a family respected for its expertise in Islamic law. Unlike most of his class, he treated travel itself as a source of knowledge more valuable than books. Before setting off for India in 1332-33, he had already made the pilgrimage to Mecca and travelled through Syria, Iraq, Persia, Yemen, Oman and parts of coastal East Africa. Travelling overland through Central Asia, he reached Sind in 1333 and, drawn by Muhammad bin Tughlaq's reputation as a generous patron of arts and letters, went on to Delhi. The Sultan, impressed by his scholarship, appointed him qazi (judge) of Delhi. He held the post for several years, fell out of favour and was imprisoned, was then restored to imperial service, and in 1342 was sent as the Sultan's envoy to the Mongol ruler of China. His route took him through the Malabar coast, the Maldives (where he again served as qazi for eighteen months), Sri Lanka, Bengal and Assam, and eventually China itself, before he returned home to Morocco in 1354, about thirty years after he had first set out. His book of travels, the Rihla, was dictated on his return to Ibn Juzayy at the order of the Moroccan ruler, and gives an unusually rich account of social and cultural life in fourteenth-century India.

Ibn Battuta found Indian cities densely populated and prosperous, apart from occasional disruption by war. He described Delhi as a vast city with the largest population in India, its rampart wall eleven cubits thick, pierced by twenty-eight gates, with storehouses for grain and munitions built into the wall itself. Daulatabad, he wrote, rivalled Delhi in size. Bazaars in both cities functioned as more than marketplaces: most had a mosque and a temple, and some, such as Daulatabad's Tarababad market, had spaces set aside for public performances by musicians and dancers. He judged Indian agriculture highly productive, noting that fertile soil let farmers grow two crops a year, and recorded that Indian textiles, fine muslins, silks, and cotton cloth, were in such demand across West Asia and Southeast Asia that some muslin varieties were affordable only to nobles.

The detail most tested from this chapter is Ibn Battuta's account of the Delhi Sultanate's communication system, which he found remarkably efficient. It ran on two parallel networks: the horse-post (uluq), using royal horses stationed roughly every four miles, and the foot-post (dawa), with runners stationed at intervals of about a third of a mile who relayed a message, carrying a bell-topped rod, from one runner to the next. Merchants used this system to send information and remit credit over long distances. Its real significance, though, was strategic: while the trade route from Sind to Delhi took fifty days to travel, reports from the Sultan's spies reached him over the same distance through the postal relay in just five days, making it as much an intelligence network as a communication service. Ibn Battuta also left vivid descriptions of things unfamiliar to his readers, comparing the coconut to a man's head, with two eyes, a mouth, and hair-like fibre used to sew ships and make cables, and describing how paan was prepared and chewed with areca nut and chalk. He recorded evidence of a functioning slave trade as well, presenting "horses, camels and slaves" as gifts to the Sultan and noting that female slaves served the court variously as performers, as spies who informed on the nobility, and, for a very low price, as domestic labour that most families who could afford it kept at least one of.

Francois Bernier: a disputed lens on Mughal India

Bernier, a French doctor, political philosopher and historian, spent twelve years in India, from 1656 to 1668. He served first as physician to Prince Dara Shukoh, Shah Jahan's eldest son, and later as an intellectual attached to Danishmand Khan, an Armenian noble at the Mughal court. His Travels in the Mughal Empire, published in France in 1670-71 and dedicated to Louis XIV, was translated into English, Dutch, German and Italian within five years, and reprinted eight times in French by 1725 and three times in English by 1684, a circulation the NCERT chapter contrasts with Arabic and Persian travel accounts, which mostly stayed in manuscript and were rarely published before 1800. This asymmetry in print circulation is itself part of why Bernier's version of India shaped European ideas about Asia far more than any Mughal-era account did.

Bernier's writing constantly compares Mughal India with Europe on a model of binary opposition, ordering the differences hierarchically so that India appears inferior. His central claim was that the fundamental difference between Mughal India and Europe was landownership: he believed the emperor owned all land and merely distributed it among his nobles, so that landholders, unable to pass land to their children, had no incentive for long-term investment. This, he argued, blocked the emergence of a class of "improving" landlords of the kind found in Western Europe, and caused the uniform ruination of agriculture and the impoverishment of the peasantry, except for the ruling aristocracy. He called the Mughal ruler a king of "beggars and barbarians" and famously asserted that "there is no middle state in India". He also described Mughal cities as mere "camp towns", which he believed sprang up when the imperial court arrived and decayed once it moved on, with no independent social or economic base. Separately, Bernier is the only traveller in this chapter to leave a detailed account of the imperial karkhanas, workshops where artisans, goldsmiths, embroiderers, painters and weavers among them, worked daily under a master's supervision, which he used to argue that Mughal India had activity without genuine progress. His account of landlessness and Mughal despotism went on to shape European political thought directly: Montesquieu drew on it to develop the idea of oriental despotism, later developed further by Karl Marx as the Asiatic mode of production, the theory that pre-colonial Asian states appropriated all agrarian surplus, leaving behind stagnant, self-contained village communities.

The NCERT chapter itself, rather than simply reporting Bernier, sets out why historians now dispute his generalisations point by point. On landownership, it notes that no Mughal official document actually claims the state was the sole owner of land: Abu'l Fazl, Akbar's chronicler, described land revenue as "remunerations of sovereignty", a claim on subjects in return for the ruler's protection, not rent on land the state owned, and what looked like rent to European observers was, in fact, a tax on the crop rather than on land ownership. The wider scholarly rebuttal comes from Irfan Habib's The Agrarian System of Mughal India, a study built on Mughal revenue records, which documents zamindars holding extensive and heritable rights in land across the empire, directly at odds with a crown monopoly on ownership. On rural society, the chapter states plainly that the picture of an unchanging, internally egalitarian village community, the foundation of the Asiatic mode of production thesis, "was far from true": sixteenth and seventeenth-century rural society was sharply differentiated, from big zamindars with superior land rights down to landless labourers subjected to untouchability, with substantial peasants using hired labour for commodity production in between. On towns, the chapter cites a concrete figure against Bernier's "camp town" claim: roughly 15 per cent of the population lived in towns during the seventeenth century, a higher urban share than contemporary Western Europe, spread across manufacturing, trading, port and pilgrimage towns with their own merchant guilds (mahajans, headed by a sheth, or in Ahmedabad the nagarsheth), not merely towns dependent on the imperial camp. Even Bernier's own writing undermines his thesis: he separately conceded that enormous quantities of the world's precious metals flowed into India in exchange for its manufactured exports, and noted a prosperous merchant community engaged in long-distance trade, observations hard to square with a story of uniform decline. The chapter also notes that this pessimistic reading of Mughal India was not unique to Bernier, the Dutch traveller Pelsaert was similarly struck by rural poverty in the early seventeenth century, which is itself a useful reminder that a shared bias across several European travellers of the period is not the same as an independently verified fact about Mughal India.

European trading settlements and perceptions of society

The NCERT chapter's own treatment of European trading settlements is narrower than a political history of colonial expansion, and stays focused on the writers these settlements produced and the image of India they carried back to Europe. Once the Portuguese arrived in India around 1500, a number of them wrote detailed accounts of Indian social customs and religious practice; the Jesuit Roberto Nobili even translated Indian texts into European languages, and Duarte Barbosa left one of the best-known Portuguese accounts of trade and society in south India. After 1600, growing numbers of Dutch, English and French traders arrived, and their travellers followed the same pattern of close observation: the French jeweller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier travelled to India at least six times, particularly interested in comparing India's trading conditions with those of Iran and the Ottoman Empire, while the Italian doctor Niccolao Manucci, like Bernier a figure at the Mughal court, settled permanently in India and never returned to Europe.

What makes this angle distinct from a straightforward account of company settlements is what the chapter draws out about circulation: these travellers' writings, carried home and multiplied through European printing, built an image of Indian society for European readers who would never see India themselves. That image was not one-sided for long. After 1750, Indians who travelled to Europe, among them Shaikh Itisamuddin and Mirza Abu Talib, encountered the European image of their own society at first hand and wrote their own accounts in response, an early instance of the subjects of travel writing answering back. This site's Advent of the Europeans in India note covers the same Portuguese, Dutch, French and English arrivals from the angle of trade turning into territorial conquest; this chapter's own interest is in what these settlements reveal about how Europeans came to perceive, describe and eventually influence ideas about Indian society itself.

Quick revision points

• Al-Biruni (973 to about 1048, from Khwarizm): wrote the Kitab-ul-Hind in Arabic, 80 chapters, following a question-description-comparison structure. Relied almost entirely on Brahmanical Sanskrit texts despite naming language, religious difference, and local insularity as barriers to understanding.
• Ibn Battuta (from Tangier, Morocco, in India from 1333, appointed qazi of Delhi by Muhammad bin Tughlaq): his book is the Rihla. Described Delhi's fortifications and Daulatabad; described the horse-post (uluq) and foot-post (dawa) system, so efficient that the Sultan's spy reports covered the fifty-day Sind-to-Delhi route in just five days.
• Francois Bernier (French, at the Mughal court 1656 to 1668, physician to Dara Shukoh): wrote Travels in the Mughal Empire. Claimed the Mughal crown owned all land, leaving no private property and no middle state in India; called Mughal cities mere "camp towns"; is the only traveller in the chapter to describe the imperial karkhanas in detail.
• Bernier's ideas fed Montesquieu's "oriental despotism" and later Karl Marx's "Asiatic mode of production".
• The NCERT chapter itself disputes Bernier: Abu'l Fazl's land revenue was "remunerations of sovereignty", not rent on state-owned land; Irfan Habib's Agrarian System of Mughal India documents extensive zamindari land rights; roughly 15 per cent of the population was urban in the seventeenth century, higher than contemporary Western Europe; and Bernier's own account concedes a thriving merchant class and heavy precious-metal inflows.
• European trading settlements (Portuguese from 1500, Dutch, English and French after 1600) mattered here for the travellers they produced, Duarte Barbosa, Tavernier, Manucci, whose printed accounts shaped European perceptions of Indian society, later answered by Indian travellers to Europe such as Shaikh Itisamuddin and Mirza Abu Talib.

Keep the three travellers, their books, and which specific claim belongs to each straight, and this chapter's statement-based questions stop being a guessing game.