Watch all episodes here: 1. A Brief History of a Civilisation and Why We Need to Know it | 2. The Aryans and the Vedic Age | 3. The Mauryans and Megasthenes | 4. The Ikshvakus of Andhra Pradesh. | 5. Nalanda and the Decline of Buddhism | 6. Khajuraho and the World of Tantra | 7. Alberuni and Marco Polo in India | 8. The Vijayanagar Empire | 9. The Mughals and Bernier | 10. The Faiths of Varanasi.
In the early second millennium, two famous travellers visited India: Alberuni and Marco Polo, who’ve left behind vivid impressions of social life. Alberuni, a great scientist and scholar of the Persian ‘Golden Age’, was in north India between 1017–30, when Mahmud of Ghazni was raiding temples. Led by his own curiosity, Alberuni spent 13 years studying Indian thought and society. He learned Sanskrit, studied the works of Brahminism, and sought out learned men to clarify his doubts.
In 1030, he published his magnum opus, Alberuni’s India, containing sharp insights into Brahminical religion, scriptures, caste, marital norms, festivals, inheritance, taxes, crime and punishment, etc. He also assessed the quality of the ‘Hindu sciences’. Alberuni’s portrait of India is so perceptive that he deserves to be called the ‘first Indologist’.
Marco Polo was a Venetian merchant – adventurer. Returning home from China in 1292, he stopped in south India. He landed in the kingdom of the Pandyas, near modern Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu. He spent a few months going around the coast, finally sailing out of Gujarat. Marco Polo was less scholarly and more gullible than Alberuni, but he still astutely recorded many practices of religion and caste, customs and professions, norms of beauty and sexuality. These travellers add colour and depth to our understanding of medieval India, with rich insights into how much has – or hasn’t 2 – changed.
The full transcript of the video is below.
Hello and welcome to Indians. I’m Namit Arora.
In the previous episode, we looked at the Chandela kingdom at Khajuraho, and how its erotic temple art was shaped by tantric religiosity. We examined the hedonistic culture of its elites, and why it started declining, long before the Turko-Persian invasions of north India.
Let’s now look at two famous travellers who visited India, and their impressions of social life in the early 2nd millennium. The first is Alberuni, who frequented north India between 1017 and 1030, when Mahmud of Ghazni was raiding temples in India. The second is Marco Polo, who visited south India in 1292, just a few decades before the rise of the Vijayanagar Empire. Their accounts add colour and depth to our understanding of medieval India, with rich insights into how much has—or hasn’t—changed.
Alberuni’s Background
Alberuni was one of the greatest scholars and scientists of the medieval age. Not much is known about his early life, but he was a product of what’s often called the ‘Golden Age of Islam’—a period of scientific, economic, and cultural flourishing during the Abbasid Caliphate, centred in Baghdad. Its creative spirit was more Persian than Arabic. Its elites were studying ancient Greek classics, mathematics, astronomy, optics, medicine, shipbuilding, poetry, literature, and philosophy. The folk tales of the Arabian Nights were compiled at this time. This was the age of luminaries like Avicenna, Al-Farabi, Omar Khayyam, Alhazen, and Firdausi. Some of these men were contemporaries of Alberuni.
Alberuni was likely born in the city of Khiva in Uzbekistan. Fluent in five languages, he was a gifted polymath. He excelled in mathematics, physics, geography, pharmacology, mineralogy, philosophy, history, and other disciplines. When he was 60, he compiled a list of 146 books he had already written, only 22 of which have survived. In his writings, Alberuni rarely spoke about himself, but he comes across as a mildly devout Muslim, likely Shia, with some fondness for the Persian culture of Islam. He was tolerant, open-minded, and a big believer in science, reason, and evidence.
The Ghaznavids and Mahmud of Ghazni
At its peak, the Abassid Caliphate had highly disciplined armies whose eastern flanks were peopled by ethnic Turks, who had been converting to Islam from Buddhism and their native animistic faith called Tengrism. By the end of the millennium, some of the Caliphate’s Turkish generals had broken away and built independent kingdoms, retaining only a ceremonial attachment to the Caliph in Baghdad. One such kingdom in modern Afghanistan was led by the Ghaznavids (977-1186), whose second king was the infamous Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030). He is quite justifiably viewed by many Indians as a fanatic warrior, a destroyer of temples and plunderer of their wealth.
From the year 1001, Mahmud had started raiding India’s richest temples in places like Mathura, Thanesar, Kannauj, and Somnath. He raided 17 times over the next 25 years. Whether his primary motivation was material gain or religious fanaticism is now a contentious topic. What we do know is that Mahmud was bad news not just for Hindus in Indian temple towns. In other regions, he also plundered those he considered the ‘wrong’ kinds of Muslims, such as Ismailis and Shias, and even desecrated their mosques. Mahmud also kept a division of loyal mercenary Hindus in his army who lived in a Hindu quarter in Ghazni, and one of whose commanders was named Tilak—a detail that ought to inform our assessments of Mahmud and his motivations.
Mahmud’s temple raids helped fund his Central Asian wars and turn Ghazni into a fine city with palaces, gardens, a huge library, a university, and a grand mosque. From his Central Asian raids, Mahmud brought to his court the greatest scholars and writers of the age. One of them was Alberuni, who Mahmud had brought as a prisoner of war from Khiva in Uzbekistan. Another captive was the great poet Firdausi, author of the Persian epic, Shahnameh (‘The Book of Kings’). Firdausi managed to escape after some time, but this was how Mahmud tried to be a patron of the arts and science. And that’s largely how he is still remembered in Afghanistan.
Curiously, our knowledge of Mahmud’s raids is based entirely on Turko-Persian court chronicles. Hindu sources are silent about even the most infamous of his raids—on Somnath Temple in 1025. Nor do the Hindu sources suggest a sense of social trauma. Twelve years later, the account of a Goan king’s pilgrimage to Somnath temple mentioned neither any damage, nor the raid. In time, the local Gujarati and Turko-Persian merchants even began a thriving trade.
Scholars have puzzled over why Hindu chroniclers failed to record Mahmud’s attack on Somnath temple, and why his raid was apparently forgotten. One theory is that the damage wasn’t great, and the locals simply rebuilt and moved on, much as their ancestors had done when rival Indian kings raided and pillaged their temples. Somnath itself was a relatively new Shiva temple at the time, likely built over a Buddhist chaitya—a fate that many Buddhist sites suffered in the late first millennium.
What’s really interesting is that it was only in the 19th century that British scholars discovered Mahmud’s raids in dusty Turko-Persian archives. The British cited these raids to present their own colonial project as more ‘enlightened’ and to divide and rule Indians. The Hindu revivalists of this period used this discovery for their own partisan ends, inventing the trope of the ‘thousand years of memory’ and its lingering ‘social trauma’. This would soon become a foundational mythos of modern Hindu nationalism.
Alberuni’s Approach to India
Alberuni was a decent man. He hated Mahmud, and, after Mahmud’s death in 1030 CE, denounced his raids on Hindu temples. In some of those raiding years, Alberuni had travelled in north India and noticed the damage caused by Mahmud. Led by his own curiosity, he spent 13 years studying Indian thought and society. He learned Sanskrit and studied the major works of Brahminism. He felt overwhelmed at first by the sheer volume of material, but he kept going. He sought out learned Brahmins to clarify his doubts. He even translated Sanskrit texts into Arabic, for instance, of Samkhya and Patanjali. In 1030, at age 57, he published his magnum opus titled, ’Verifying All That the Indians Recount, the Reasonable and the Unreasonable’. Its 19th century English translation is simply called Alberuni’s India.
Alberuni’s native informants were Brahmins, since they dominated scholastic learning in India. He never came across Buddhism, because, as we saw earlier in this series, Buddhism’s demise from much of India predated Mahmud of Ghazni. So Alberuni mainly documented the customs and practices of Brahminical society. The focus of his book, as he says himself, ‘is that which the Brahmins think and believe.’ He introduced their major religious texts, and highlighted parts of the Vedic corpus, the Bhagavad Gita, the Puranas, Patanjali, and stories from the two epics. He reviewed Indian scientific and astronomical texts. He compared Brahminical thought with the Greco-Roman thought of Socrates, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Galen, and also with Sufi thought.
Alberuni’s Social Observations
Alberuni admired many things in India, from its mathematics to the architecture of step wells. He describes how Indians made books from the bark of birch trees. Such a book was called puthi, from which we get pustaka. He saw a festival called Dibali, for which people dressed up, exchanged presents, visited temples and gave alms. At night, ‘they lit a great number of lamps in every place’. This celebration had nothing to do with Rama liberating Sita, but with a different story of Lakshmi liberating Bali, who was a prisoner in the seventh earth. The cult of Rama was apparently still small, and yet to be linked to the festival of lights in north India.
Alberuni’s social observations are perhaps the most interesting. Caste made a deep impression on him. It really bothered him that learned Hindus ‘did not mingle with foreigners [mleccha] like him, as in sitting, eating, and drinking with them, for fear of being polluted’. Nor did they mingle with members of other varnas. Many outcaste groups, who performed essential services, were forced to live outside the walls of towns and villages. Alberuni despised social institutions that, he wrote, cannot ‘be broken through by the special merits of any individual’, and yet such institutions abound among the Hindus, he wrote. He called this the main difference between Hindus and his own people. ‘We Muslims,’ he noted with some pride, ‘consider all men as equal, except in piety’. He seems to concede that Muslims can be more fanatical than Hindus about theological matters, but he thought that the Brahmins just expressed their fanaticism differently. It showed up in their obsessions with purity and their treatment of fellow humans as innately impure and inferior.
A thousand years ago, Alberuni wrote, most ‘Brahmins recite the Veda without understanding its meaning’. They teach it to the Kshatriyas, but the Vaishyas, Shudras and the outcastes ‘are not allowed to hear it, much less to pronounce and recite it. If such a thing can be proved against one of them, the Brahmins drag him before the magistrate, and he is punished by having his tongue cut off’. This punishment was apparently rare, but the threat is indicative of the era’s social realities.
According to Alberuni, child marriages were the norm. A Hindu man could marry up to four women, depending on his place in the varna hierarchy. Brahmins were allowed four wives, Kshatriyas three, vaishyas two, and the Shudras, one. Alberuni wrote that a ‘husband and wife can only be separated by death, as the Hindus have no divorce.’ If a wife died, the husband could marry another woman, but the reverse wasn’t allowed. A widow inherited nothing from her husband’s wealth, so her choices were to: (1) either remain a widow dependent on the kindness of her male relatives; or (2) burn herself on the husband’s funeral pyre, an event that was fortunately rare outside the Kshatriya class.
Alberuni described taxation, inheritance, cremation rites, crime and punishment. The common people, he wrote, lied about their property in order to lower their taxes—a custom we’ve tenaciously held on to! Female prostitution was legal, which included the temple devadasis. Alberuni’s morality and sexual conservatism did not approve of this practice. He faulted the kings for making prostitutes ‘an attraction for their cities, a bait of pleasure for their subjects, for only financial reasons’. It seems the taxes they paid offset the state’s military expenses.
The Brahmins, however, were exempt from all taxes. Even the law of the land treated them leniently. They literally got away with murder, asked only to atone for it by ‘fasting, prayers, and almsgiving’. Members of other castes faced harsher penalties for the same crime. Interestingly, the Brahmins were punished more for flouting the caste order. Alberuni wrote, ‘If a Brahman eats in the house of a Shudra for sundry days, he is expelled from his caste and can never regain it.’
Alberuni On Indian Science
Alberuni was surprised by the mediocre state of Indian science. The ‘scientific theorems of the Hindus’, he wrote, ‘are in a state of utter confusion’ and ‘mixed up with … religious dogmas.’ The Hindus, he added, do not ‘raise themselves to the methods of a strictly scientific deduction.’ His views reflect the fact that a thousand years ago, science in the Persianate world was more advanced than in India and Europe. Indian astronomy had actually regressed in the 500 years since Aryabhata. Its leading astronomers now believed that the earth does not rotate on its axis but is at rest. So Alberuni showed them how to construct an astrolabe to understand the rotation of the earth. As we saw in a previous episode, Indian medicine too had long stagnated, partly because Brahminical healers, who monopolised formal education, avoided working with the ‘polluting fluids’ of the body. Such ‘is the state of things in India’, Alberuni lamented, that Brahmins attempt to combine ideas of purity with the pursuit of science. No resemblance at all to our own age!
But none of this, according to Alberuni, prevented the elites from having an inflated opinion of themselves. In a fit of annoyance, he wrote: The Hindus believe that no other people ‘besides them have any knowledge or science whatsoever. Their haughtiness is such that, if you tell them of any science or scholar in Khorasan and Persis, they will think you to be both an ignoramus and a liar. If they travelled and mixed with other nations, they would soon change their mind, for their ancestors were not as narrow-minded as the present generation is.’ According to a modern scholar of this period [Richard Eaton], ‘the smugly insular stance of Sanskrit scientific literature … remained for centuries willfully ignorant of its competitors’. This situation improved somewhat after Persianate and Sanskritic cultures began mingling in India.
Alberuni’s account shows that on the eve of the Turko-Persian invasions, Brahminical society was not exactly a picture of intellectual and moral health that many now fondly imagine it to have been. Barring exceptions like Abhinavagupta of Kashmir, India’s urban intellectual culture seems to have declined in preceding centuries; it had fallen behind in science. Its Brahminical elites had grown insular, insecure, superstitious, caste-bound, lacking in creativity. By the late first millennium, growing Brahminical orthodoxy and Bhakti devotionalism had been crowding out the rational and liberal strains of Indian spirituality. Alberuni’s portrait of north India is so perceptive that he deserves to be called the ‘first Indologist’.
Marco Polo’s Background
Marco Polo (1254–1324) was a very different kind of man than Alberuni. A Venetian merchant and adventurer, Marco Polo had travelled the Silk Road from Europe to China. There, he ended up serving as the foreign emissary of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan for 17 years, which took him all over Asia. He was 38 years old in 1292, when he stopped in south India on his way home from China. His ship landed near modern Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu, in the kingdom of the Pandyas. He spent a few months going around the Indian coast, finally sailing out of Gujarat.
Like Alberuni, Marco Polo was curious, open-minded and tolerant. He had a cosmopolitan spirit and a merchant’s pragmatic eye, but he had none of the scholarly temper of Alberuni. He was superstitious, gullible, and prone to exaggeration. He believed hearsay about giant birds that lifted elephants, men who looked like dogs, and other such fabulist tales. Fortunately, his account also contains fine social observations, and it’s usually not hard to separate the two. For instance, who would doubt his observation that Indians reserved their left hand for ‘unclean necessities like wiping the nostrils, anus and suchlike’. Or that Indians did not put their lips on flasks, preferring to ‘hold it above and pour the fluid into their mouths’. Or that Indians chewed a leaf called tambur, sometimes mixing it with camphor, spices and lime, and went about spitting it freely.
Marco Polo On South Indians
The hot climate of south India meant that all men and women wore nothing but a loincloth, including the kings and queens—except theirs were studded with rubies, sapphires, emeralds and other gems. Boys and girls went naked till seven years. Marco Polo called the Pandya kingdom ‘the richest and most splendid province in the world’, which, together with Ceylon, produced most of the pearls and gems of the world. The people consulted astrologers, he wrote, and had ‘enchanters called Brahmins’, who read mantras to protect the oyster divers against predatory fish. For this service, the brahmins received one in twenty pearls the divers extracted from the sea. Not a bad gig!
Marco Polo noticed the practice of sati among certain groups. People venerated the cow and daubed their houses with cow dung. They did not eat beef—except for a group with low social status, whose members were not admitted inside holy places, and who ate cattle that died a natural death. Marco Polo observed that people looked down on sailors and seafaring. This likely came from the Brahminical taboo of kala pani, in which seafaring caused ritual pollution and loss of caste. Many Hindus still sailed, but this might help explain why the shipping lanes at the time were dominated not by Hindus but by Indian Muslims, Arabs and the Chinese.
Marco Polo wrote about devadasis who sang and danced in temples, and traded sexual favours for money. It seemed to him that Indians did ‘not regard any form of sexual indulgence as a sin’, a remark best understood in light of his strong Christian morality. Marco Polo also wrote that dark skin was preferred by Indians. When a child is born, he wrote, they rub an oil on her skin to make her grow darker, because darker people were more highly esteemed than the lighter-skinned ones. That’s why their gods were all black ‘and their devils white as snow’. It’s possible that the higher value for lighter skin that had emerged with the spread of Indo-Aryan culture, hadn’t yet penetrated folk culture this far south. Cultural standards of beauty have of course changed dramatically since then.
Marco Polo’s Spicy Tales
Marco Polo’s account is also full of spicy, gossipy tales. Like the story of a king who kept 500 wives and concubines. ‘Whenever he set eyes on a beautiful woman or damsel, he took her for himself’. Yet he coveted the wife of his brother who was also a king of a nearby region. He even managed to ‘steal’ her away. A war between the brothers was prevented only by their mother’s emotional blackmail, when she threatened to cut off her breasts with a knife. This is the story he tells; we have no way of verifying if it’s true.
In another story, Marco Polo met holy men who went stark naked and led austere lives. They believed that all creatures had a soul and took pains to avoid hurting even the tiniest of them. When asked why they did not cover their private parts, they said, ‘We go naked because we want nothing of this world. For we came into this world naked and unclothed . . . It’s because you employ this member in sin and lechery that you cover it and are ashamed of it. But we are no more ashamed of it than of our fingers.’
Another vignette comes from the Thanjavur region of Tamil Nadu, where, according to custom, ‘the king and his barons and everyone else all sit on the earth’. He asked them why they ‘do not seat themselves more honourably’. The king replied, ‘To sit on the earth is honourable enough, because we were made from the earth and to the earth we must return.’ I think we could certainly use a few similarly grounded politicians today!
Marco Polo also visited the tomb of St Thomas the Apostle near Chennai, a place of pilgrimage for local Christians and Muslims. He wrote that Indians imported over 2000 horses from Aden every year. But most of them died because Indians didn’t know how to care for them. He mentioned a kingdom ‘ruled by a queen, a very wise woman.’ Historians think this was Rudrama Devi of the Kakatiya Dynasty of Warangal. He praised the fine cotton textiles of south India. He admired wine made out of dates in Kerala. He noticed leather workshops, pepper and indigo plantations, and was visibly thrilled by the beautiful birds and animals of south India.
Other Travellers’ Accounts
Other travellers after Marco Polo have given us additional insights into south India. These include Ibn Battuta, who visited in the 1340s. He described huge Chinese ships in the Calicut harbour, some with four decks, cabins with toilets, and a thousand people on board! Battuta called the Chinese the wealthiest people in the world, who dominated the shipping industry around the 13th to 15th centuries. Calicut had a large resident community of Malayali-speaking Muslims called Mappilas, dating from at least the ninth century. They and others in the region had matrilineal societies. Some groups even practised polyandry. Clearly, Indian social norms were a lot more diverse in Battuta’s time than our narrowly patriarchal norms today.
In the 13th century, parts of south India saw much political churn and military violence. Some of it was driven by the expansionary Delhi Sultanate—whose Turko-Afghan warriors possessed a culture of greater military discipline, battlefield innovations, and meritocracy. When the dust settled in the early 1300s, the Delhi Sultanate ruled in the north, and two new entities had appeared in south India: The Bahmani Sultanate and the Vijayanagar Empire.
In the next episode, I’ll look at the rise and fall of the Vijayanagar Empire, and the secrets of its wealth, military power, and cosmopolitan culture that many foreign travellers wrote about. See you next time!
