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

As for the rule that Muslims could have only four legal wives at a time, it could be easily circumvented, for divorce and remarriage were easy in Islam. The process for divorce was for the husband to merely say talaq —I divorce you — three times before his wife, after which he could right away marry another woman. This meant that men could divorce and marry any number of wives in succession, without going through any elaborate legal process. Similarly, a woman too could divorce her husband and marry another man, though the process involved in this was more complicated than in the case of divorce by men. And she could have, at least in theory, any number of husbands in succession, though at any given time she could have only one husband.

The facility for easy divorce in Islam led to the practice of some people entering into temporary marriages, sometimes for just a few hours. This form of marriage, termed muta marriage among Shias, was common in Maldives, the island chain off the southern tip of India. ‘When ships arrive, the crew marry wives, and when they are about to sail they divorce them,’ reports Battuta from his personal experience. ‘The women never leave their country.’

Unlike in Islam, there was no restriction at all in Hindu society about the number of wives a man could have. ‘The inhabitants of this region marry as many wives as they please,’ comments Venetian traveller Nicolo Conti about what he observed in Vijayanagar in the early fifteenth century. Indeed, having a large number of wives was, for upper class Hindus, a means to flaunt their socio-economic status — as well as their sexual prowess! Some Hindu rajas are known to have had a prodigious number of wives. Achyutadeva, the mid-sixteenth century king of Vijayanagar, had as many as 500 wives, according to Fernao Nuniz, a contemporary Portuguese trader-traveller. This is most likely an exaggeration, but probably not a gross exaggeration. Even Krishnadeva, whose preoccupation with wars and administration would have left him with little time for dalliance, had twelve wives, according to Paes.

Unlike polygamy, polyandry was rare in India, and the only people who practiced it routinely were Nairs of Kerala. ‘Among them there is a tribe in which one woman has several husbands,’ notes Abdur Razzak, the mid-fifteenth century Persian royal envoy in India, about what he observed in Kerala. ‘They (the husbands) divide the hours of the night and day amongst themselves, and as long as any one of them remains in the house during his appointed time, no other can enter. The Samuri (Zamorin) is of that tribe.’

‘Each [Nair] woman has from two to ten known [lovers],’ states Tome Pires, an early sixteenth century Portuguese pharmacist-traveller in India. ‘The more lovers a Nair woman has, the more important she is.’ Adds Portuguese traveller Duarte Barbosa, who was also in India in the sixteenth century: ‘Nayre women of good birth are very independent, and dispose of themselves as they please with Bramenes and Nayres, but they do not sleep with men of castes lower than their own under pain of death … The more lovers she has the greater her honour. Each one of them (her lovers) passes a day with her from midday on one day till midday on the next day, and so they continue living quietly without any disturbance or quarrels among them. If any of them wishes to leave her, he leaves her, and takes another woman, and she also, if she is weary of a man, tells him to go, and he does so, or makes terms with her.’ No ceremony at all was involved in accepting or discarding a lover.

This freewheeling amatory practice continued among Nairs well into modern times, as Francis Buchanan-Hamilton, a Scottish physician who was in India in the first decade of the nineteenth century, noted. Nair women, he writes, ‘marry before they are ten years of age … but the husband never cohabits with his wife … She lives in her mother’s house, or, after her parent’s death, with her brother, and cohabits with any person she chooses of an equal or higher rank than her own … It is no kind of reflection on a woman’s character to say that she has formed the closest intimacy with many persons; on the contrary, the Nair women are proud of reckoning among their favoured lovers many Brahmins, Rajas, or other persons of high birth … In consequence of this strange manner of propagating the species, no Nair knows his father, and every man looks on his sisters’ children as his heirs.’

Marriage customs in medieval India, like everything else, varied greatly from region to region and community to community. But generally speaking, women were not allowed to marry below their caste, though men could do that. In most communities marriage between close relatives was also forbidden. For instance, among high caste Maharashtrians, they ‘do not marry their relatives, except those who are cousins six times removed,’ notes Battuta. But first cousin marriages and uncle-niece marriages were common in South India.

SEXUAL PROMISCUITY WAS pervasive in medieval Hindu society. ‘Great licentiousness prevails in this country among women as well as men,’ writes Abu Said, an early tenth century Arab historian. Ibn Khurdadba, another Arab writer of about the same period, confirms: ‘The king and people Hind regard fornication as lawful.’ In that social milieu, illegitimate children were common, and they usually had no stigma attached to them. Indeed, even a child born out of the extramarital liaison of a woman was considered legitimate. ‘If a stranger has a child by a married woman, the child belongs to her husband, since the wife, … the soil in which the child is born, is the property of the husband,’ observes al-Biruni, an eleventh century Ghaznavid chronicler.

Because of this general laxity in sexual matters in Hindu society, abnormal sexual practices like homosexuality and pederasty were rare in it. According to al-Biruni, Hindus considered sodomy as revolting, as revolting as eating beef, which was the ultimate revolting act a Hindu could commit. But these deviant sexual practices were common in Muslim society. Even some of the sultans were bisexual or homosexual. In medieval Muslim society, as in ancient Greece, none of that entailed any strong disapprobation. Thus sultan Mubarak, a successor of Ala-ud-din Khalji, spent his whole time ‘in extreme dissipation,’ reports Barani. ‘He cast aside all regard for decency, and presented himself decked out in the trinkets and apparel of a woman before his assembled company.’ Similar was the conduct of Kurbat Hasan Kangu, a fourteenth century sultan of Ma’bar (Tamil Nadu), who, when he held court, ‘appeared decked out hand and foot with female ornaments, and made himself notorious for his puerile actions,’ notes Afif.

Muslim women too sometimes strayed, though they were usually very carefully guarded. But when caught, they, even royal women, were savagely punished. Thus, according to Battuta, Sultan Muhammad Tughluq once had a princess stoned to death ‘on a charge of debauchery or adultery.’ Muhammad’s successor, Firuz, was also quite severe in dealing with such matters, and he, as he notes in his autobiography, even prohibited women from going to the tombs on holy days, for that offered an opportunity for ‘wild fellows of unbridled passion and loose habits … [to indulge in] improper, riotous actions. I commanded that no woman should go out to the [sacred] tombs under pain of exemplary punishment.’

Another matter in which Muslims and Hindus differed radically was in their attitude towards prostitution. Islam considered prostitution a major sin, but Hindus viewed it as a normal and legitimate aspect of social life. In ancient India, in Mauryan Empire for instance, there were even state run brothels. Similarly, in medieval times brothels were run as a government sanctioned service in Vijayanagar, and they were a source of revenue for the state. According to Razzak, the state derived 12,000 fanams (small silver coins) a day from ‘the proceeds of the brothels,’ and used that revenue to meet the salary of a large number of policemen.