Abraham Eraly - The Age of Wrath - A History of the Delhi Sultanate

In North India there were, in medieval times, several deep and elaborately constructed step-wells along the main roads, which had pavilions attached to them, providing resting places for travellers. ‘Kings and nobles of the country vie with one another in constructing them along the highroads where there is no water,’ notes Battuta.

THESE FACILITIES WERE however available only on just a few major roads. Travel in medieval India was usually quite hazardous, especially in the sparsely populated regions, because of the menace of highwaymen and the lack of proper roads there. Even the environs of major cities, including Delhi, were not always secure, as brigands openly rampaged through the land at the slightest sign of weakness in government. And trans-regional travellers often had to pass through dense forests, which were particularly dangerous places, as they were infested with bandits and wild tribes, apart from wild animals.

Travel security varied greatly from region to region in India. Mukhtasiru-t Tawarikh is clearly utopianising medieval India when it states that ‘merchants and tradesmen and all travellers, without any fear of thieves and robbers, take their goods and loads safe to distant destinations.’ Battuta also at times indulged in similar fantasies. ‘I have never seen a safer road than this,’ he writes about his experience in Kerala, ‘for they put to death anyone who steals a single nut, and if any fruit falls no one picks it up but the owner.’

Several regions of India in medieval times were entirely trackless, and sometimes even sultans lost their way there, as it once happened to Firuz Tughluq while returning to Delhi from Orissa. And nearly everywhere in India monkeys were a major nuisance to travellers, even to armies. ‘Several times when I encamped in these mountains great numbers of monkeys came into the camp from the jungles and woods, both night and day, and laid their claws upon whatever they could find to eat, and carried it off … At night they stole little articles and curiosities,’ writes Timur about his experience in India. Because of all these diverse perils people usually travelled in large groups, and whenever possible they accompanied trade caravans, which had armed guards.

Indian summer was yet another hazard that travellers had to cope with. ‘The heat was so intense that my companions used to sit naked except for a cloth around the waist and another cloth soaked with water on their shoulders; this dried up in a very short time, so they had to keep wetting it constantly,’ writes Battuta about his experience in Sind. Summer was particularly brutal in 1505, the year in which a devastating earthquake struck Agra. That year, recounts Ni’matullah, ‘the heat of the air became so intense that almost all people fell grievously sick of fevers.’

As in everything else in medieval India, the mode of travel also varied from region to region. In peninsular India, according to Nikitin, people did not travel on horses, but used ‘oxen and buffaloes … for riding, conveying goods, and every other purpose.’ And in Kerala ‘no one travels on an animal … and only the sultan possesses horses,’ states Battuta. ‘The principal vehicle of the inhabitants is a palanquin carried on the shoulders of slaves or hired porters; those who do not travel on palanquins go on foot, be they who they may. Baggage and merchandise is transported by hired carriers, and a single merchant may have a hundred such or thereabouts carrying his goods.’

Because of these diverse modes of travel and transport, and the general difficulties of the roads, the pace of travel was very slow in medieval India. Thus, according to Battuta, it took forty days to cover the 1000 kilometres between Delhi and Daulatabad, even though the highway between these two cities was one of the best in India. Travel was considerably slower in the peninsula, because there were hardly any roads there. ‘The country of Ma’bar (the Tamil country), which is so distant from the city of Delhi that a man travelling with all expedition could reach it only after a journey of twelve months,’ states Amir Khusrav, medieval Indian poet-chronicler.

Over the millennia, from the Old Stone Age, or perhaps from an even earlier period, to well into late medieval times, many diverse races had debouched into India, as migrants or invaders, through the defiles in the Hindu Kush mountains on the north-west border of the subcontinent. These mountain passes were among the most active trans-continental migration routes of races in the premodern world. And nearly all the diverse people who entered India through these passes made India their homeland. The many different races in the subcontinent today are all migrants. None are natives.

The invasions of Turko-Afghans and Mughals into India in medieval times were the last of the major people movements into India, and they radically altered the socio-cultural profile of the country. Though India would later, in early modern times, come under the dominance of yet another foreign power, the British, that involved no notable alteration in the population profile of India, as there was hardly any migration of Englishmen into India. In contrast to this, both the Turko-Afghan and the Mughal invasions of India resulted in radical changes in the racial makeup of India, as those invasions led to large-scale migrations into India by Central Asian and the Middle Eastern Muslims, who saw India as a land of opportunity, and were drawn to it by the prospect of gaining wealth and power. Further, India was for many of them a safe haven into which to escape from the racial and political turmoil in their homeland.

The consequences of the invasion of India by Turko-Afghans were fundamentally different from those of all previous invaders — while all the people who previously entered India had eventually blended smoothly and indistinguishably into Indian society by adopting Indian religion, social customs, cultural values, and even local languages, this did not happen in the case of Turko-Afghans, because in all these matters the culture of Indians was totally antithetical to that of Turks.

Unlike polytheistic Hinduism, which could absorb into it any number of new deities, beliefs and practices, and had a society divided into numerous hereditary, hierarchal and exclusive castes, each of which had its specific profession, Islam was a monotheistic religion which, though it had some sectarian divisions in it, was essentially a cohesive religion with only one god and one basic set of beliefs and practices. And its society was egalitarian, without any birth determined, caste-like social divisions in it, so anyone from any racial, social or family background could take up any vocation in it, aspire to occupy any office, and gain any social status.

These socio-religious differences led to a sharp divergence in the attitudes of Muslims and Hindus towards each other. The Hindu attitude towards Muslims was similar to the tolerant-intolerant attitude of Hindu castes towards each other. Hindus had no objection to Muslims keeping to their beliefs and practices, just as they had no objection to the different castes and sects of Hindus keeping to their particular beliefs and practices. But they would not tolerate the intermixing of the two communities, just as they would not tolerate the intermixing of different castes. Similarly, though Hindus normally had no objection to serve under a Muslim employer, they would avoid all social interaction with him. Typical of this was the experience of Battuta in Kerala, about which he writes: ‘It is the custom of the infidels in the Mulaybar lands that no Muslim may enter their houses or eat from their vessels.’ For Hindus, particularly for high caste Hindus, Muslims were untouchables. Muslims had no such apartheidal prejudices. They did treat Hindus as second class citizens, but this was not an irreversible birth-determined status division, as in Hindu society, for even Hindus of the lowest of the low outcastes were, on being converted into Islam, treated as equals to everyone else in that society, and the personal status of an individual depended solely on his abilities and achievements, not on his birth. So a person who was on the bottom rung of Hindu society could rise to the highest rung of Muslim society.