Ibn Battuta and Indian cities

Source 8 — Dehli. Ibn Battuta's account of Delhi (often spelt Dehli):

The city of Dehli covers a wide area and has a large population … The rampart round the city is without parallel. The breadth of its wall is eleven cubits; and inside it are houses for the night sentry and gate-keepers. Inside the ramparts, there are store-houses for storing edibles, magazines, ammunition, ballistas and siege machines … There are twenty-eight gates of this city which are called darwaza, and of these the Budaun darwaza is the greatest; inside the Mandwi darwaza there is a grain market … It has a fine cemetery in which graves have domes over them … and flowers blossom there in all seasons. …

Source 9 — Music in the market. Ibn Battuta on the Tarababad bazaar at Daulatabad:

In Daulatabad there is a market place for male and female singers, which is known as Tarababad. It is one of the greatest and most beautiful bazaars … In the middle of the market place there stands a large cupola, which is carpeted and decorated, and in which the chief of the musicians takes his place every Thursday after the dawn prayers … The female singers come in successive crowds, sing before him and dance until dusk … In this bazaar there are mosques for offering prayers … One of the Hindu rulers … alighted at the cupola every time he passed by this market place … Even some Muslim rulers did the same. …

Figure 5.8 shows a single, surviving stone arch at Tughlakabad, Delhi. The arch is tall and pointed, built of large, roughly dressed stone blocks. It stands alone — the rest of the structure it once belonged to has collapsed or been removed. The archway is deep, suggesting a thick wall, and the opening is wide enough for a person or a small cart to pass through. There is no gate, no ornamentation, no inscription visible — just the bare, sturdy masonry of the arch itself.

This is exactly the kind of monumental architecture that Ibn Battuta noticed and recorded. In his description of Delhi (Source 8 in the textbook), he mentions that in the city’s cemetery, graves either have domes over them or, failing that, “have an arch, for sure.” The arch at Tughlakabad is a physical example of that very feature — an arch that once formed part of a larger structure, likely a gate, a tomb, or a section of the fortification wall. The Tughlakabad fort was built in the early 14th century, during the reign of Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq, just a few decades before Ibn Battuta arrived in India. So the arch he saw would have been of similar construction.

The photograph helps students connect the traveller’s written words to a real, surviving object. When Ibn Battuta writes that Delhi’s rampart is “without parallel” and describes its thickness (eleven cubits), its stone-and-brick construction, its towers and gates, the arch in Figure 5.8 gives a tangible sense of the scale and solidity of that architecture. It is not a decorative arch — it is a functional, load-bearing one, built to last. That durability is why it still stands today, and why it impressed a 14th-century traveller accustomed to the cities of North Africa, West Asia, and the Indian Ocean world. …

Figure 5.9 shows a close-up view of a section of the massive fortification wall that once surrounded the city of Delhi. The wall is built in two distinct layers: the lower portion is made of large, roughly dressed stone blocks, while the upper part is constructed of brick. This matches exactly what Ibn Battuta recorded — he noted that the lower part of the rampart was stone and the upper part brick. The wall is thick and solid, with several small arched windows (the "windows which open on the side of the city" that Ibn Battuta mentions) piercing through it at regular intervals. These windows would have let light and air into the interior chambers and passageways inside the wall's thickness.

The photograph captures the wall's imposing scale and its defensive character. You can see that the wall is not a single flat surface but has a substantial width — Ibn Battuta said it was eleven cubits broad, which is roughly 5–5.5 metres. Inside that width, as he describes, there were rooms for sentries and gatekeepers, and storage spaces for grain, ammunition, and siege weapons. The image also shows one of the many closely spaced towers (or bastions) that project outward from the wall, allowing defenders to fire along the wall's face. The overall impression is of a formidable, carefully engineered fortification, not just a simple boundary wall. …

Figure 5.10 shows a textile pattern created using the ikat technique — a method of dyeing threads before weaving so that the design emerges as the cloth is woven, rather than being printed or embroidered afterwards. The pattern is geometric and repeating, typical of the kind of ikat that was produced and traded along coastal centres of the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia.

The caption tells us that this particular style of ikat was not originally local to every place where it was made. It was adopted and then modified at several coastal production centres — meaning that as the design travelled along trade routes, artisans in different regions adapted it to their own traditions and materials. This is direct material evidence of the kind of textile trade that Ibn Battuta praised so highly in his accounts: Indian cloth, including fine cottons, muslins, silks, brocades, and satins, was in great demand across West Asia and Southeast Asia, and fetched huge profits.

What the figure shows, therefore, is not just a pretty design. It is a visual record of a craft tradition that linked the subcontinent to a wider inter-Asian network of commerce. The fact that the pattern was modified at different coastal centres tells us that this was not a one-way export of finished goods, but a dynamic exchange of techniques and aesthetics. Artisans in Gujarat, the Coromandel coast, Bengal, and parts of Southeast Asia all produced ikat textiles, each with distinctive local variations — but all sharing the same basic resist-dyeing principle. …