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

There is a fair amount of exaggeration in this radiant medieval portrait of India, but in broad terms it is factual. India was indeed blessed with rich natural resources. And the basic survival requirements of the common people — food and shelter — were easily available there for all in normal times. But it is equally true that the common people of medieval India lived at a bare subsistence level. The land was rich, but the people were poor.

And the richness of the land continued to fascinate foreigners, and it attracted many adventurers, migrants and invaders into India all through history, well into modern times. And foreign visitors continued to write glowingly about the riches of India.

But there was a dark side to this luminous medieval image of India. India, like most other regions of the medieval world, was periodically ravaged by famine, for its agricultural production at this time was mostly dependent on the vagaries of weather. When weather failed, famine felled thousands and thousands of people in one sweep.

And those who survived did so by eating whatever they could find, however filthy or rotten, even putrefied carrion, and by taking to cannibalism. ‘One day I went out of the city, and I saw three women … cutting in pieces and eating the skin of a horse which had been dead for some months,’ writes Battuta about the horrors of famine he witnessed in India. ‘Skins were cooked and sold in the markets. When bullocks were slaughtered, crowds rushed forward to catch the blood, and consumed it for their sustenance.’ Adds Barani: ‘Distress and anarchy reigned in all the country and towns … [In Delhi] famine was very severe, and man was devouring man.’

On such occasions the sultans, despite their general indifference to the plight of the people, often did what they could to alleviate their sufferings. Even Muhammad Tughluq, a sultan not particularly known for his compassion, once, during a time acute scarcity, ‘ordered provisions for six months to be distributed to all the people of Delhi,’ reports Battuta. In normal times too Delhi sultans usually took care to open almshouses in towns to succour the poor, as a pious act. This was mainly for the benefit of poor Muslims, but low caste Hindus, who could eat the food cooked by Muslims, also benefited from it.

THE EFFULGENT VIEW of India propagated by ancient and early medieval foreign visitors to India began to change gradually in the late medieval period, as the contrast between regressive India and progressive Europe sharpened, and as more and more European travellers visited India, and India became a familiar land to them. The fabled luminous images of India were then gradually replaced in their accounts with the images of the stark reality of India. Many visitors were now appalled by what they saw as the abysmal conditions of the life of the common people in India. Typically, Pelsaert, a Dutch traveller in India during the Mughal period, writes: The common people of India live in a ‘poverty so great and miserable that the life of the people can be depicted or accurately described only as the home of stark want and the dwelling place of bitter woe. Their houses are built of mud, with thatch roofs. Furniture there is little or none, except some earthenware pots to hold water and for cooking.’

These and similar reports about the abject conditions of life of the common people in medieval India are in many cases rather exaggerated, just as the earlier glowing reports about India were exaggerated. There was still great wealth in medieval India, and though most of it was in the hands of the small ruling class, there was enough of it left over for the subsistence of the common people. Daily provisions were usually quite cheap and abundantly available everywhere. The disparity between the incredibly luxurious lifestyle of the ruling class and the dreary life of the common people was of course shocking, but this was a common feature of human societies nearly everywhere in the premodern world, though in European countries the conditions of life of the underclasses were not as dismal as it was in India.

Curiously, despite the growing awareness among Europeans of the abject poverty of the common people of India, many European powers were drawn to India in medieval times. This was because there were vast untapped natural resources in India to be exploited. And the very poverty and backwardness of Indians made the invasion of India seem easy. India thus remained, till modern times, a most enticing land in the eyes of foreigners, and migrants and invaders continued to stream into India.

THE ECONOMIC CONDITIONS in medieval India varied considerably from region to region, but most of the land was quite fertile and was extensively cultivated. ‘This is a vast country, abounding in rice, and nowhere in the world have I seen any land where prices are lower than there,’ notes Battuta about what he observed in fourteenth-century Bengal. And he goes on to report that an old inhabitant there once told him that he could maintain his family for a whole year with just eight dirhams, small silver coins. And Battuta found that in Kerala ‘there is not a foot of ground but is cultivated. Every man has his own orchard, with his house in the middle and wooden palisade all around it.’

Orissa too was luxuriantly verdant. Afif, who visited the region during the reign of Firuz Tughluq, found it ‘in a very flourishing state … [with] abundance of corn and fruit … The numbers of animals of every kind were so great that no one cared to take them. Sheep were found in countless numbers.’ The scene in Jammu too was similar. ‘The five or six kos which I traversed in this day’s march was entirely through a cultivated country; nowhere did I see any dry or waste land,’ writes Timur about Jammu in his autobiography. In addition to cultivating fields, most villagers in medieval India also maintained cattle-pens, for that involved virtually no expenditure, as there was plenty of open land in India for cattle-grazing.

Most farmlands in early medieval India were rain fed. Though Indian villages generally had water tanks in them, these were usually small and were used only to provide drinking water to villagers. ‘They have a custom in those villages of making tanks in which the rain-water collects, and this supplies them with drinking water all the year round,’ notes Battuta about what he observed in North India. As for irrigation facilities, pre-medieval India had a system known as araghatt —the precursor of the Persian wheel — for lifting water from wells and channelling it into fields, and these were modified and made more efficient in medieval times under Turkish influence. The spread of tank irrigation, and the cultivation of cash crops like cotton and indigo, notably boosted the income of farmers, and improved the living conditions in rural India at this time, even in dry regions.

The building of tanks to irrigate fields and to provide drinking water for people was a major community activity in ancient and medieval Indian villages. Kings also built them, huge reservoirs, to serve several villages. One of the oldest and largest of these reservoirs was the Sudarsana Lake in Gujarat built by Mauryan emperor Chandragupta in the fourth century BCE. Similar major irrigation works were constructed by kings in several other regions of India over the centuries. Paes saw a great reservoir being built in Vijayanagar by Krishnadeva, the embankment of which was a ‘falcon-shot wide.’ This reservoir, notes Paes, was built ‘at the mouth of two hills, so that the water which comes from either one side or the other collects there.’ In addition to rain water, the reservoir was also fed with water brought through pipes from a nearby lake. This was a gigantic enterprise, and it took several thousand men very many months to build it. ‘In the tank I saw so many people at work that there must have been fifteen or twenty thousand men there, looking like ants, so that you could not see the ground on which they walked, so many were there,’ states Paes. And while the dam was being constructed the raja had sixty men, presumably prisoners, and a number of horses and buffaloes sacrificed at the gate of the local temple, to appease gods and thus ensure the safety of the dam. Apart from this huge reservoir, the Vijayanagar rajas also built a number of other irrigation facilities, and this substantially increased the agricultural prosperity of the kingdom.