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

Siraj on the role of astrologers in India: In one instance, when a queen was about to deliver, astrologers cautioned that the child would be unlucky if born just then, ‘but if the birth occurred two hours later the child would reign for eighty years. When his mother heard this opinion of the astrologers, she ordered her legs to be tied together, and caused herself to be hung with her head downwards. She also directed the astrologers to watch for the auspicious time. When they all agreed that the time for delivery had come, she ordered herself to be taken down, and Lakhmaniya was born directly, but he had no sooner come into the world than his mother died from the anguish she had endured.’

Battuta on a reservoir outside Delhi: It is ‘a large reservoir … from which the inhabitants draw their drinking water. It is supplied by rain water, and is about two miles in length and half that in breadth. In the centre there is a great pavilion built of squared stones, two stories high. When the reservoir is filled with water it can be reached only in boats, but when the water is low the people go into it. Inside it is a mosque, and at most times it is occupied by mendicants … When the water dries up at the sides of the reservoir, they sow sugarcanes, cucumbers, green melons and pumpkins there. The melons and pumpkins are very sweet but of small size.’

Tome Piers on Kerala: ‘In Malabar it is the custom for woman to have her eyes on the bed during coitus, and for man to have his eyes on the ceiling. This is the general practice among the great and small, and they consider anything else to be strange and foreign to their condition … The Nair women of Malabar have no virtue, nor do they sew and work, but only eat and amuse themselves.’

Barbosa: Among Nairs in Kerala, when a girl comes of age, her ‘mother goes about searching and asking some young man to take her daughter’s virginity … They regard it among themselves as a disgrace and a foul thing to take a woman’s virginity … These Nayre women at their periods shut themselves up in a house apart for three days, touching no one, and prepare their food in separate pans and dishes … It is an article of faith with them (Nairs) that every woman who dies virgin is damned.’

Barbosa: ‘The distinctive kudumi knot of the Malayali … does not hang down behind as with Tamils, but lies on the top of the head or is drawn around to the left of the forehead.’

Sati is not mentioned in Manu-Smriti , but it says that a widow ‘may, if she so chooses, emasculate her body by subsisting on flowers, roots and fruits.’ Kautilya prohibited sati as a punishable crime. In medieval times Sankaracharya condemned sati.

Mahatma Gandhi in Young India , 21 May 1931: ‘If the wife has to prove her loyalty and undivided devotion to her husband, so had the husband to prove his allegiance and devotion to his wife. Yet, we have never heard of a husband mounting the funeral pyre of his deceased wife.’

Barbosa on coconut: Coconut is ‘very sweet … when green … and each one when green has within it a pint of fresh and pleasant water, better than that from a spring. When they are dry this same water thickens within them into a white fruit as large as an apple which also is very sweet and dainty. The coconut itself after being dried is eaten, and from it they get much oil by pressing it … And from its shell … is made charcoal for the goldsmiths who work with no other kind. And from the outer husk … they make all the cord which they use … And from the sap of the tree itself they extract a must , from which they make wine … From this same must they make very good vinegar, and also a sugar of extreme sweetness which is much sought after in India. From the leaf of the tree they make many things, in accordance with the size of the branch. They thatch the houses with them … No house is roofed with tiles save temples or palaces … From the same tree they get timber for their houses and firewood as well …’

In Islamic countries medical studies were part of the general curriculum in educational institutions, and some of the sultans — Muhammad and Firuz Tughluq, for instance — were hakims. The system of medicine they used was the Unani system, a Graeco-Arabic system formulated by Avicenna in the early eleventh century. Avicenna’s system became increasingly popular in Delhi from the time of Sikandar Lodi.

Medieval writers were not given to modesty. Nizami, for instance, claimed that his work was ‘superior to anything written by ancients or moderns.’

Poet Amir Khusrav was extolled as the Parrot of Hind. ‘Amir Khusrav … is the prince of poets and the first among philosophers, for he was one of those steeped in spiritual wisdom, and such skill as he possessed in every kind and manner of literary composition, both in the use of ordinary or unusual phraseology, and of plain or obscure terms, has seldom been allotted to anyone,’ comments medieval writer Abdu-l Hakk Dehlawi.

Khusrav on Indian literature: ‘The language of Hind is like Arabic … If there is grammar and syntax in Arabic, there is not one letter less of them in Hindi. If you ask whether there are the sciences of exposition and rhetoric, I answer that Hindi is in no way deficient in these respects.’

Khusrav on Sanskrit: ‘The common people know nothing of it. Brahmins know it, but Brahmin women do not understand a word of it. It bears a resemblance to Arabic in some respects, in its permutations of letters, its grammar, its conjugations, and polish.’

Khusrav: ‘Brahmins here are as learned as Aristotle and there are among them many scholars in various fields …’

Abdur Razzak on musicians in Vijayanagar: ‘The singers were for the most part young girls, with cheeks like the moon, and faces more blooming than the spring, adorned with beautiful garments, and displaying figures which ravished the heart like fresh roses. They were seated behind a beautiful curtain opposite the king. On a sudden the curtain was removed on both sides, and the girls began to move their feet with such grace that wisdom lost its senses, and the soul was intoxicated with delight.’

‘The contrast between the Hindu temples and the Muslim mosques could hardly have been more striking,’ writes John Marshall, an early twentieth century British archaeologist in India. ‘The shrine of the former was relatively small and constricted; the prayer chamber of the latter was broad and spacious. One was gloomy and mysterious, the other light and open to the winds of heaven. The Hindu system of construction was trabeate, based on column and architrave; the Muslim system was arcuate, based on arch and vault. The temple was crowned with slender spires or pyramidal towers; the mosque with expansive domes … [Hindu] monuments were enriched with countless idols of its deities; Islam rigidly forbade idolatry or the portrayal of any living thing. Decorative ornament in Hindu architecture delighted in plastic modelling; it was naturalistic … and … exuberant; Islamic ornament, on the other hand, inclined to colour and line or flat surface carving, and took the form of conventional arabesques or ingenious geometric patterning.’