Ch 5Through the Eyes of Travellers — Perceptions of Society — Class 12 History, concept-first.

Al-Biruni was not a casual traveller. He was a scholar who came to India as a hostage in 1017, but ended up spending the rest of his life studying its society, religion, and sciences.

Al-Biruni was born in 973 in Khwarizm, a region in present-day Uzbekistan. At that time, Khwarizm was a major centre of learning, and Al-Biruni received the finest education available.

The Kitab-ul-Hind (Book of India) was written in Arabic by Al-Biruni. Its style is simple and lucid, which is remarkable given the complexity of its subject matter.

Ibn Battuta’s Rihla is one of the richest sources we have for understanding life in the Indian subcontinent during the fourteenth century.

Ibn Battuta was not just a traveller — he was a scholar who believed that seeing the world taught you more than reading about it.

Ibn Battuta was not just a traveller — he was an inveterate one, meaning he travelled compulsively and over vast distances.

The arrival of the Portuguese in India around 1500 opened a new chapter in European travel writing. Many Portuguese travellers wrote detailed accounts of Indian social customs and religious practices.…

François Bernier, a French physician and traveller who spent about twelve years in the Mughal Empire (1656–1668), did not simply record what he saw.

Al-Biruni arrived in the subcontinent in the early eleventh century, a Persian scholar from Central Asia who had been brought to India by Mahmud of Ghazni.

Al-Biruni was acutely aware that understanding a foreign society is never straightforward. He did not simply record what he saw; he reflected on why it was so difficult to grasp the meaning of Indian…

Al-Biruni did not simply describe the caste system as a strange Indian custom. Instead, he tried to explain it by looking for parallels in other societies.

Ibn Battuta arrived in Delhi in the fourteenth century, at a time when the Indian subcontinent was part of a vast global network of communication stretching from China in the east to north-west Africa…

The coconut and the paan were two plants completely unknown to Ibn Battuta’s audience in North Africa and West Asia.

Ibn Battuta saw Indian cities as places of immense opportunity for anyone with drive, resources, and skill.

Ibn Battuta was deeply impressed by the Indian postal system, which he saw as a key reason for the state’s success in encouraging trade.

François Bernier belonged to a very different intellectual tradition from Ibn Battuta. Where Ibn Battuta described what impressed him for its novelty, Bernier was preoccupied with comparing and contra…

The central argument Bernier makes about Mughal India is that the emperor owned all the land. This was, in his view, the single most important difference between India and Europe.

Bernier’s description of Mughal India is not entirely one-sided. While he is clearly determined to paint the state as tyrannical, his own observations sometimes reveal a far more complex social and ec…

The travellers who left written accounts were almost always men. Their observations on women in the subcontinent were shaped by curiosity, and sometimes by the assumption that social inequities were s…

Questions from official CBSE sample papers.