Alberuni

Watch | Indians, Episode 7: Alberuni and Marco Polo in India

Led by his own curiosity, Alberuni spent 13 years studying Indian thought and society. He learned Sanskrit, studied the works of Brahminism, and sought out learned men to clarify his doubts.

In the early second millennium, two famous travellers visited India: Alberuni and Marco Polo, who’ve left behind vivid impressions of social life. Alberuni, a great scientist and scholar of the Persian ‘Golden Age’, was in north India between 1017–30, when Mahmud of Ghazni was raiding temples. Led by his own curiosity, Alberuni spent 13 years studying Indian thought and society. He learned Sanskrit, studied the works of Brahminism, and sought out learned men to clarify his doubts.

In 1030, he published his magnum opus, Alberuni’s India, containing sharp insights into Brahminical religion, scriptures, caste, marital norms, festivals, inheritance, taxes, crime and punishment, etc. He also assessed the quality of the ‘Hindu sciences’. Alberuni’s portrait of India is so perceptive that he deserves to be called the ‘first Indologist’.

Marco Polo was a Venetian merchant – adventurer. Returning home from China in 1292, he stopped in south India. He landed in the kingdom of the Pandyas, near modern Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu. He spent a few months going around the coast, finally sailing out of Gujarat. Marco Polo was less scholarly and more gullible than Alberuni, but he still astutely recorded many practices of religion and caste, customs and professions, norms of beauty and sexuality. These travellers add colour and depth to our understanding of medieval India, with rich insights into how much has – or hasn’t 2 – changed.

The full transcript of the video is below.

Hello and welcome to Indians. I’m Namit Arora.

In the previous episode, we looked at the Chandela kingdom at Khajuraho, and how its erotic temple art was shaped by tantric religiosity. We examined the hedonistic culture of its elites, and why it started declining, long before the Turko-Persian invasions of north India.

Let’s now look at two famous travellers who visited India, and their impressions of social life in the early 2nd millennium. The first is Alberuni, who frequented north India between 1017 and 1030, when Mahmud of Ghazni was raiding temples in India. The second is Marco Polo, who visited south India in 1292, just a few decades before the rise of the Vijayanagar Empire. Their accounts add colour and depth to our understanding of medieval India, with rich insights into how much has—or hasn’t—changed.

Alberuni’s Background

Alberuni was one of the greatest scholars and scientists of the medieval age. Not much is known about his early life, but he was a product of what’s often called the ‘Golden Age of Islam’—a period of scientific, economic, and cultural flourishing during the Abbasid Caliphate, centred in Baghdad. Its creative spirit was more Persian than Arabic. Its elites were studying ancient Greek classics, mathematics, astronomy, optics, medicine, shipbuilding, poetry, literature, and philosophy. The folk tales of the Arabian Nights were compiled at this time. This was the age of luminaries like Avicenna, Al-Farabi, Omar Khayyam, Alhazen, and Firdausi. Some of these men were contemporaries of Alberuni.

Alberuni was likely born in the city of Khiva in Uzbekistan. Fluent in five languages, he was a gifted polymath. He excelled in mathematics, physics, geography, pharmacology, mineralogy, philosophy, history, and other disciplines. When he was 60, he compiled a list of 146 books he had already written, only 22 of which have survived. In his writings, Alberuni rarely spoke about himself, but he comes across as a mildly devout Muslim, likely Shia, with some fondness for the Persian culture of Islam. He was tolerant, open-minded, and a big believer in science, reason, and evidence.

The Ghaznavids and Mahmud of Ghazni

At its peak, the Abassid Caliphate had highly disciplined armies whose eastern flanks were peopled by ethnic Turks, who had been converting to Islam from Buddhism and their native animistic faith called Tengrism. By the end of the millennium, some of the Caliphate’s Turkish generals had broken away and built independent kingdoms, retaining only a ceremonial attachment to the Caliph in Baghdad. One such kingdom in modern Afghanistan was led by the Ghaznavids (977-1186), whose second king was the infamous Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030). He is quite justifiably viewed by many Indians as a fanatic warrior, a destroyer of temples and plunderer of their wealth.

From the year 1001, Mahmud had started raiding India’s richest temples in places like Mathura, Thanesar, Kannauj, and Somnath. He raided 17 times over the next 25 years. Whether his primary motivation was material gain or religious fanaticism is now a contentious topic. What we do know is that Mahmud was bad news not just for Hindus in Indian temple towns. In other regions, he also plundered those he considered the ‘wrong’ kinds of Muslims, such as Ismailis and Shias, and even desecrated their mosques. Mahmud also kept a division of loyal mercenary Hindus in his army who lived in a Hindu quarter in Ghazni, and one of whose commanders was named Tilak—a detail that ought to inform our assessments of Mahmud and his motivations.

Mahmud’s temple raids helped fund his Central Asian wars and turn Ghazni into a fine city with palaces, gardens, a huge library, a university, and a grand mosque. From his Central Asian raids, Mahmud brought to his court the greatest scholars and writers of the age. One of them was Alberuni, who Mahmud had brought as a prisoner of war from Khiva in Uzbekistan. Another captive was the great poet Firdausi, author of the Persian epic, Shahnameh (‘The Book of Kings’). Firdausi managed to escape after some time, but this was how Mahmud tried to be a patron of the arts and science. And that’s largely how he is still remembered in Afghanistan.

Curiously, our knowledge of Mahmud’s raids is based entirely on Turko-Persian court chronicles. Hindu sources are silent about even the most infamous of his raids—on Somnath Temple in 1025. Nor do the Hindu sources suggest a sense of social trauma. Twelve years later, the account of a Goan king’s pilgrimage to Somnath temple mentioned neither any damage, nor the raid. In time, the local Gujarati and Turko-Persian merchants even began a thriving trade.

Scholars have puzzled over why Hindu chroniclers failed to record Mahmud’s attack on Somnath temple, and why his raid was apparently forgotten. One theory is that the damage wasn’t great, and the locals simply rebuilt and moved on, much as their ancestors had done when rival Indian kings raided and pillaged their temples. Somnath itself was a relatively new Shiva temple at the time, likely built over a Buddhist chaitya—a fate that many Buddhist sites suffered in the late first millennium.

What’s really interesting is that it was only in the 19th century that British scholars discovered Mahmud’s raids in dusty Turko-Persian archives. The British cited these raids to present their own colonial project as more ‘enlightened’ and to divide and rule Indians. The Hindu revivalists of this period used this discovery for their own partisan ends, inventing the trope of the ‘thousand years of memory’ and its lingering ‘social trauma’. This would soon become a foundational mythos of modern Hindu nationalism.

Alberuni’s Approach to India

Alberuni was a decent man. He hated Mahmud, and, after Mahmud’s death in 1030 CE, denounced his raids on Hindu temples. In some of those raiding years, Alberuni had travelled in north India and noticed the damage caused by Mahmud. Led by his own curiosity, he spent 13 years studying Indian thought and society. He learned Sanskrit and studied the major works of Brahminism. He felt overwhelmed at first by the sheer volume of material, but he kept going. He sought out learned Brahmins to clarify his doubts. He even translated Sanskrit texts into Arabic, for instance, of Samkhya and Patanjali. In 1030, at age 57, he published his magnum opus titled, ’Verifying All That the Indians Recount, the Reasonable and the Unreasonable’. Its 19th century English translation is simply called Alberuni’s India.

Alberuni’s native informants were Brahmins, since they dominated scholastic learning in India. He never came across Buddhism, because, as we saw earlier in this series, Buddhism’s demise from much of India predated Mahmud of Ghazni. So Alberuni mainly documented the customs and practices of Brahminical society. The focus of his book, as he says himself, ‘is that which the Brahmins think and believe.’ He introduced their major religious texts, and highlighted parts of the Vedic corpus, the Bhagavad Gita, the Puranas, Patanjali, and stories from the two epics. He reviewed Indian scientific and astronomical texts. He compared Brahminical thought with the Greco-Roman thought of Socrates, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Galen, and also with Sufi thought.

Alberuni’s Social Observations

Alberuni admired many things in India, from its mathematics to the architecture of step wells. He describes how Indians made books from the bark of birch trees. Such a book was called puthi, from which we get pustaka. He saw a festival called Dibali, for which people dressed up, exchanged presents, visited temples and gave alms. At night, ‘they lit a great number of lamps in every place’. This celebration had nothing to do with Rama liberating Sita, but with a different story of Lakshmi liberating Bali, who was a prisoner in the seventh earth. The cult of Rama was apparently still small, and yet to be linked to the festival of lights in north India.

Alberuni’s social observations are perhaps the most interesting. Caste made a deep impression on him. It really bothered him that learned Hindus ‘did not mingle with foreigners [mleccha] like him, as in sitting, eating, and drinking with them, for fear of being polluted’. Nor did they mingle with members of other varnas. Many outcaste groups, who performed essential services, were forced to live outside the walls of towns and villages. Alberuni despised social institutions that, he wrote, cannot ‘be broken through by the special merits of any individual’, and yet such institutions abound among the Hindus, he wrote. He called this the main difference between Hindus and his own people. ‘We Muslims,’ he noted with some pride, ‘consider all men as equal, except in piety’. He seems to concede that Muslims can be more fanatical than Hindus about theological matters, but he thought that the Brahmins just expressed their fanaticism differently. It showed up in their obsessions with purity and their treatment of fellow humans as innately impure and inferior.

A thousand years ago, Alberuni wrote, most ‘Brahmins recite the Veda without understanding its meaning’. They teach it to the Kshatriyas, but the Vaishyas, Shudras and the outcastes ‘are not allowed to hear it, much less to pronounce and recite it. If such a thing can be proved against one of them, the Brahmins drag him before the magistrate, and he is punished by having his tongue cut off’. This punishment was apparently rare, but the threat is indicative of the era’s social realities.

According to Alberuni, child marriages were the norm. A Hindu man could marry up to four women, depending on his place in the varna hierarchy. Brahmins were allowed four wives, Kshatriyas three, vaishyas two, and the Shudras, one. Alberuni wrote that a ‘husband and wife can only be separated by death, as the Hindus have no divorce.’ If a wife died, the husband could marry another woman, but the reverse wasn’t allowed. A widow inherited nothing from her husband’s wealth, so her choices were to: (1) either remain a widow dependent on the kindness of her male relatives; or (2) burn herself on the husband’s funeral pyre, an event that was fortunately rare outside the Kshatriya class.

Alberuni described taxation, inheritance, cremation rites, crime and punishment. The common people, he wrote, lied about their property in order to lower their taxes—a custom we’ve tenaciously held on to! Female prostitution was legal, which included the temple devadasis. Alberuni’s morality and sexual conservatism did not approve of this practice. He faulted the kings for making prostitutes ‘an attraction for their cities, a bait of pleasure for their subjects, for only financial reasons’. It seems the taxes they paid offset the state’s military expenses.

The Brahmins, however, were exempt from all taxes. Even the law of the land treated them leniently. They literally got away with murder, asked only to atone for it by ‘fasting, prayers, and almsgiving’. Members of other castes faced harsher penalties for the same crime. Interestingly, the Brahmins were punished more for flouting the caste order. Alberuni wrote, ‘If a Brahman eats in the house of a Shudra for sundry days, he is expelled from his caste and can never regain it.’

Alberuni On Indian Science

Alberuni was surprised by the mediocre state of Indian science. The ‘scientific theorems of the Hindus’, he wrote, ‘are in a state of utter confusion’ and ‘mixed up with … religious dogmas.’ The Hindus, he added, do not ‘raise themselves to the methods of a strictly scientific deduction.’ His views reflect the fact that a thousand years ago, science in the Persianate world was more advanced than in India and Europe. Indian astronomy had actually regressed in the 500 years since Aryabhata. Its leading astronomers now believed that the earth does not rotate on its axis but is at rest. So Alberuni showed them how to construct an astrolabe to understand the rotation of the earth. As we saw in a previous episode, Indian medicine too had long stagnated, partly because Brahminical healers, who monopolised formal education, avoided working with the ‘polluting fluids’ of the body. Such ‘is the state of things in India’, Alberuni lamented, that Brahmins attempt to combine ideas of purity with the pursuit of science. No resemblance at all to our own age!

But none of this, according to Alberuni, prevented the elites from having an inflated opinion of themselves. In a fit of annoyance, he wrote: The Hindus believe that no other people ‘besides them have any knowledge or science whatsoever. Their haughtiness is such that, if you tell them of any science or scholar in Khorasan and Persis, they will think you to be both an ignoramus and a liar. If they travelled and mixed with other nations, they would soon change their mind, for their ancestors were not as narrow-minded as the present generation is.’ According to a modern scholar of this period [Richard Eaton], ‘the smugly insular stance of Sanskrit scientific literature … remained for centuries willfully ignorant of its competitors’. This situation improved somewhat after Persianate and Sanskritic cultures began mingling in India.

Alberuni’s account shows that on the eve of the Turko-Persian invasions, Brahminical society was not exactly a picture of intellectual and moral health that many now fondly imagine it to have been. Barring exceptions like Abhinavagupta of Kashmir, India’s urban intellectual culture seems to have declined in preceding centuries; it had fallen behind in science. Its Brahminical elites had grown insular, insecure, superstitious, caste-bound, lacking in creativity. By the late first millennium, growing Brahminical orthodoxy and Bhakti devotionalism had been crowding out the rational and liberal strains of Indian spirituality. Alberuni’s portrait of north India is so perceptive that he deserves to be called the ‘first Indologist’.

Marco Polo’s Background

Marco Polo (1254–1324) was a very different kind of man than Alberuni. A Venetian merchant and adventurer, Marco Polo had travelled the Silk Road from Europe to China. There, he ended up serving as the foreign emissary of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan for 17 years, which took him all over Asia. He was 38 years old in 1292, when he stopped in south India on his way home from China. His ship landed near modern Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu, in the kingdom of the Pandyas. He spent a few months going around the Indian coast, finally sailing out of Gujarat.

Like Alberuni, Marco Polo was curious, open-minded and tolerant. He had a cosmopolitan spirit and a merchant’s pragmatic eye, but he had none of the scholarly temper of Alberuni. He was superstitious, gullible, and prone to exaggeration. He believed hearsay about giant birds that lifted elephants, men who looked like dogs, and other such fabulist tales. Fortunately, his account also contains fine social observations, and it’s usually not hard to separate the two. For instance, who would doubt his observation that Indians reserved their left hand for ‘unclean necessities like wiping the nostrils, anus and suchlike’. Or that Indians did not put their lips on flasks, preferring to ‘hold it above and pour the fluid into their mouths’. Or that Indians chewed a leaf called tambur, sometimes mixing it with camphor, spices and lime, and went about spitting it freely.

Marco Polo On South Indians

The hot climate of south India meant that all men and women wore nothing but a loincloth, including the kings and queens—except theirs were studded with rubies, sapphires, emeralds and other gems. Boys and girls went naked till seven years. Marco Polo called the Pandya kingdom ‘the richest and most splendid province in the world’, which, together with Ceylon, produced most of the pearls and gems of the world. The people consulted astrologers, he wrote, and had ‘enchanters called Brahmins’, who read mantras to protect the oyster divers against predatory fish. For this service, the brahmins received one in twenty pearls the divers extracted from the sea. Not a bad gig!

Marco Polo noticed the practice of sati among certain groups. People venerated the cow and daubed their houses with cow dung. They did not eat beef—except for a group with low social status, whose members were not admitted inside holy places, and who ate cattle that died a natural death. Marco Polo observed that people looked down on sailors and seafaring. This likely came from the Brahminical taboo of kala pani, in which seafaring caused ritual pollution and loss of caste. Many Hindus still sailed, but this might help explain why the shipping lanes at the time were dominated not by Hindus but by Indian Muslims, Arabs and the Chinese.

Marco Polo wrote about devadasis who sang and danced in temples, and traded sexual favours for money. It seemed to him that Indians did ‘not regard any form of sexual indulgence as a sin’, a remark best understood in light of his strong Christian morality. Marco Polo also wrote that dark skin was preferred by Indians. When a child is born, he wrote, they rub an oil on her skin to make her grow darker, because darker people were more highly esteemed than the lighter-skinned ones. That’s why their gods were all black ‘and their devils white as snow’. It’s possible that the higher value for lighter skin that had emerged with the spread of Indo-Aryan culture, hadn’t yet penetrated folk culture this far south. Cultural standards of beauty have of course changed dramatically since then.

Marco Polo’s Spicy Tales

Marco Polo’s account is also full of spicy, gossipy tales. Like the story of a king who kept 500 wives and concubines. ‘Whenever he set eyes on a beautiful woman or damsel, he took her for himself’. Yet he coveted the wife of his brother who was also a king of a nearby region. He even managed to ‘steal’ her away. A war between the brothers was prevented only by their mother’s emotional blackmail, when she threatened to cut off her breasts with a knife. This is the story he tells; we have no way of verifying if it’s true.

In another story, Marco Polo met holy men who went stark naked and led austere lives. They believed that all creatures had a soul and took pains to avoid hurting even the tiniest of them. When asked why they did not cover their private parts, they said, ‘We go naked because we want nothing of this world. For we came into this world naked and unclothed . . . It’s because you employ this member in sin and lechery that you cover it and are ashamed of it. But we are no more ashamed of it than of our fingers.’

Another vignette comes from the Thanjavur region of Tamil Nadu, where, according to custom, ‘the king and his barons and everyone else all sit on the earth’. He asked them why they ‘do not seat themselves more honourably’. The king replied, ‘To sit on the earth is honourable enough, because we were made from the earth and to the earth we must return.’ I think we could certainly use a few similarly grounded politicians today!

Marco Polo also visited the tomb of St Thomas the Apostle near Chennai, a place of pilgrimage for local Christians and Muslims. He wrote that Indians imported over 2000 horses from Aden every year. But most of them died because Indians didn’t know how to care for them. He mentioned a kingdom ‘ruled by a queen, a very wise woman.’ Historians think this was Rudrama Devi of the Kakatiya Dynasty of Warangal. He praised the fine cotton textiles of south India. He admired wine made out of dates in Kerala. He noticed leather workshops, pepper and indigo plantations, and was visibly thrilled by the beautiful birds and animals of south India.

Other Travellers’ Accounts

Other travellers after Marco Polo have given us additional insights into south India. These include Ibn Battuta, who visited in the 1340s. He described huge Chinese ships in the Calicut harbour, some with four decks, cabins with toilets, and a thousand people on board! Battuta called the Chinese the wealthiest people in the world, who dominated the shipping industry around the 13th to 15th centuries. Calicut had a large resident community of Malayali-speaking Muslims called Mappilas, dating from at least the ninth century. They and others in the region had matrilineal societies. Some groups even practised polyandry. Clearly, Indian social norms were a lot more diverse in Battuta’s time than our narrowly patriarchal norms today.

In the 13th century, parts of south India saw much political churn and military violence. Some of it was driven by the expansionary Delhi Sultanate—whose Turko-Afghan warriors possessed a culture of greater military discipline, battlefield innovations, and meritocracy. When the dust settled in the early 1300s, the Delhi Sultanate ruled in the north, and two new entities had appeared in south India: The Bahmani Sultanate and the Vijayanagar Empire.

In the next episode, I’ll look at the rise and fall of the Vijayanagar Empire, and the secrets of its wealth, military power, and cosmopolitan culture that many foreign travellers wrote about. See you next time!

Why Didn’t India’s Muslim Rulers and Thinkers Confront the Inequities of the Caste System?

Since caste was around before Islam arrived, how did Muslim clerics, scholars and rulers view it? After Islam came to India, the only writer who discussed the caste question was Alberuni in the 11th century

Last month, the South Asian Institute of Columbia University organised a seminar on ‘Afterlives of Babri Masjid: Thirty Years Later’. I made a presentation at that seminar on ‘Post-Babri Anti-Caste Movement: A New Awakening in India’.

In my abstract I said the following:

“The anti-caste movement of post-independent India has changed the track of Indian democratic discourse in the post-Babri context. I wrote Why I am Not a Hindu and Post-Hindu India in that context only. Though the anti-caste movement included the minorities in its agenda, the Muslims did not participate in that discourse. Muslim intellectuals remained caste blind, leaving the Dalit/OBC/Adivasis to defend themselves. Over a period of 30 years, the Dalit/OBC/Adivasis realised that caste and untouchability have destroyed their intellectual and organisational abilities to fight against Brahminism. Organised religions like Indian Islam and Christianity virtually left them to the mercy of highly English-educated and globalised Brahminic forces. This situation helped the post-Babri Hindutva forces attract them into their fold and gradually turn them into their vote bank. But at the same time a huge anti-caste ideology was developed by the post-Mandal Dalit/OBC/Adivasi intellectuals and political activists by foregrounding Ambedkar, Phule, Periyar and so on. This situation has created an anti-caste global ideological mobilisation. However, the future of Indian democracy and the question of a caste-free egalitarian India is still uncertain.”

After my presentation, some scholars questioned the relevance of discussing the role of Muslim intellectuals and Indian Islam’s history at a time when they are facing persecution in India. This concern was expressed even by American intellectuals working on India and other South Asian societies. While a Muslim scholar, Khalid Anis Ansari from Azim Premji University, made a presentation about the presence of caste among Indian Muslims and the ongoing oppression of Pasmanda Muslims by upper-caste Muslims, a few scholars expressed disappointment – arguing that this is not the time to raise caste discrimination within Indian Muslims as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party are trying to exploit that division.

However, I believe it is important – even amidst the current political atmosphere – to discuss the role of Muslim intellectuals in Indian caste civilisation. This discussion is important to understand the Shudra/Dalit/Adivasi problem as well as the Muslim minority problem, so that the Muslim intelligentsia realises what the Shudra/OBC and Dalits find problematic about their relationship and history.

After the BJP came to power in 2014, there has been an intense debate about the relationship between the OBCs and Muslims, as the OBCs are seen supporting the BJP electorally and communally.

There is also a view that the OBCs participated in the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992. It is true that without OBC support, the BJP could not and cannot win elections as they are winning now. Prime Minister Narendra Modi presented himself as an OBC from Gujarat; perhaps that has also added to the BJP’s OBC mobilisation. Does it mean that the OBCs – as the historical Shudra agrarian and artisanal communities – hate Muslims? There is no evidence to support the claim that the Shudras have some theoretical or cultural antipathy towards Muslims. Whatever anti-Muslim writing there is in India has come so far from Brahmin or other Dwija writers and ideologues. The writings of V.D. Savarkar and M.S. Golwalkar are evidence.

Also read: Why Is the BJP Attempting to Woo Pasmanda Muslims?

This debate raises another question which is equally important – about the relationship between the Shudra/Dalit/Adivasi and Muslim? What was the historical role of Muslim rulers, writers and civil-spiritual intellectuals on the abolition or annihilation of caste after Islam as a religion took root in India? Did Muslims scholars and writers treat caste and human untouchability – which existed much before that religion arrived in India – as a system that could not be accepted in the world Allah created? Because Islam believes that everything – good and bad – is the creation of Allah. According to their understanding, nothing comes into existence or goes out of existence without Allah’s sanction. In that case, what about the caste system and untouchability that constructed an un-universal inequality, oppression and human degradation?

Since this system was around before Islam arrived, how did Muslim clerics and scholars view it? We would have been able to understand their view if only they had written something about it during the last 1,400-odd years of Islam’s existence in India. Unless scholars express themselves, either by writing or by preaching, even rulers will not know what to do with the system. However, it is clear from known history that India’s Muslim rulers – including the greatest of all, Akbar – did not open schools for educating the Shudras/Dalits and Adivasis. Even in kingdoms like Hyderabad, where Muslim rulers held state power till 1948, there is no evidence that mass education was provided to the Shudras/Dalits/Adivasis until some social reformers demanded such education in the Urdu language for those communities. Even then, only a handful of Shudra/Dalit/Adivasis were taught basic reading and writing skills in Urdu and Persian in Hyderabad state.

Persian and Urdu education was spread more among the Dwija castes like Brahmin, Kayastha, Khatri, Bania and Ksatriya in the whole of India, who had a Sanskrit education background. Muslim rulers and scholars also maintained caste barriers. Why? Is it because the rulers and scholars came from upper caste conversion, or is it because Islam as a religion failed to understand the evolution of the caste system and refused to study its relationship with divine creation and work out a scientific ideology to abolish that system?

In Brahminic history, caste and untouchability were practiced and written about as divinely ordained. The divine objects of the Shudra/Dalit/Adiavsis and the Dwijas differed in many aspects. But Muslims believed in one Allah. The question therefore is: what is the understanding of Muslim scholars about the relationship between Allah and caste system? Was it created by Allah as a positive and humanly necessary institution or was it created by humans?

There is a definite understanding of the relationship between men and women in relation to Allah’s creations. There is also an understanding about slaves and masters and relations between races and Allah. At the time of Prophet Mohammad’s life, all those categories of human society were present in all countries. But caste and untouchability were not there in any other nation except in South Asia, more so in the Indian subcontinent.

After Islam came to India, the only writer who discussed the caste question was Alberuni in the 11th century. Namit Arora writes,

“The four-fold varna system made a deep impression on Alberuni. He notes that members of each varna are forbidden to dine with members of other varnas. Below them are ‘people called Antyaja, who render various kinds of services’ and live outside the towns and villages of the four varnas. Then there are people called Hadi, Doma, Chandala and Badhatau, who ‘are not reckoned amongst any caste [and] are occupied with dirty work, like the cleansing of the villages and other services… In fact, they are considered illegitimate children; for according to general opinion they descend from a Shudra father and a Brahmin mother as the children of fornication; therefore, they are degraded outcasts’.”

Alberuni also disagreed with the Brahmanical view of human purity and pollution, which is the key notion for sustenance of human untouchability in India. Purity and pollution had huge implications to production. Way back in the 11th century, he said that Islam does not accept such ideas of human purity and pollution. What happened to this understanding? Why did Muslim scholars fail to educate Muslim rulers on abolishing caste and untouchability through legal firmans? The abolition of caste would have been possible even without resorting to conversion.

Many Muslim scholars are now saying that conversion did not kill caste practices within Indian Islamic society. What would have been a better way of abolishing caste practices? If such ideas were put on the record by Muslim scholars, Muslim kings may have agreed to make changes.

Watch: What is the Difference between Pasmanda and Dalit Muslims?

The fact is that Muslim scholars did not do any intellectual work to create anti-caste awareness among themselves and also among the Other – the Shudra/Dalit/Adivasis. Instead, till the post-Mandal realisation that without reservation the Pasmandas too would not progress came about, they did not talk about the caste system at all.

Unlike among the Shudra/OBC/Dalits, there was no focused spiritual denial of education for Muslim lower castes. Yet there is a caste distinction between the upper caste converts and the Shudra/Dalit converts. Where does the problem lie? In Hindu Brahminsm, there is a stated scriptural and practical forced denial of the right to education to the productive castes. The Shudra/Dalits did not fight because of divine fear, which was injected through the karma and punarjanma (rebirth cycles) theories. But what sustained caste in Indian Islam?

Among Indian Muslims, there were scores of English-educated intellectuals from the early days of the freedom struggle. Such modern English educated Shudra/Dalits were few and far between. Until Ambedkar emerged, nobody diagnosed the roots of caste from among them in a scientific manner. Muslim scholars claimed the presence of scientific enquiry in their intellectual history. The Brahminic intellectuals, whether modern English educated or classical Sanskrit or Persian educated, refused to study the roots of caste and work out abolitionist solutions because that would go against the ethics of Brahmanism.

Among Muslims, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (1817–1898) promoted English education around the same time when Brahmins, Banias, Kayastas and Khatris started learning English and studying in England in the 19th century. Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Allama Iqbal (both of whom were upper-caste converts) and many other Muslims were educated in English in England. Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia Millia taught the Muslim youth in English medium from their early days. The Indian Muslim community had the intellectual resources to undertake studies on the caste system. Even after Ambedkar put the question of caste on the national map, not a single Muslim intellectual studied caste from the point of view their own religion and proposed a serious solution to the question. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad was totally silent about it in his writings.

This historical background brings us to the question: who is at fault? How can the Shudra-OBCs/Dalits who had no educational resources like Muslim intellectuals find a solution to Muslim backwardness, poverty, unemployment and casteism among them? Even now, Muslim intellectuals do not engage themselves with the much bigger problem of caste and untouchability. Shudra/Dalit/Adivasi intellectuals need to raise these questions.

Kanca Ilaiah Shepherd is political theorist, social activist and writer. His books include God As Political Philosopher: Buddha’s Challenge Brahminism, Why I am Not a Hindu and Buffalo Nationalism.

Alberuni’s Impressions of Brahminical Society in India

Alberuni’s readings of a large number of Hindu religious, philosophical and astronomical texts led him to make observations on society that hold even today.

An excerpt from Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization by Namit Arora.

Central to ‘the Hindu world of thought’, writes Alberuni, ‘is that which the Brahmins think and believe, for they are specially trained for preserving and maintaining their religion. And this it is which we shall explain, viz. the belief of the Brahmins’. This declaration makes it clear which section of Indian society – and its ideas, beliefs and values – is the one Alberuni mostly describes in India (i.e., Alberuni’s India, 1030 CE, translated by Edward C. Sachau).

‘The Hindus have numerous books about all the branches of science,’ he writes. They ‘have books about the jurisprudence of their religion, on theosophy, on ascetics, on the process of becoming god and seeking liberation from the world’, on various schools of thought like Samkhya, Mimamsa, Nyaya, Yoga, Lokayata and many more. He feels overwhelmed at first, ‘How could anybody know the titles of all of them, more especially if he is not a Hindu, but a foreigner?’

But Alberuni rolls up his sleeves and dives right in. ‘I do not spare either trouble or money in collecting Sanskrit books… and in procuring for myself, even from very remote places, Hindu scholars who understand them and are able to teach me.’ He learns Sanskrit, finding it a difficult language due to its range and complexity, much like Arabic. He observes that the Hindus of north India speak Sanskrit in two registers, a ‘vernacular one… and a classical one’. He feels lucky to be able to undertake all this learning so freely, and thanks God for the opportunity.

Namit Arora’s ‘Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization’

Over thirteen years, Alberuni reads a large number of Hindu religious, philosophical and astronomical texts. Much of India consists of his expositions of Brahminical texts and practices. He highlights choice parts from the Gita, the Upanishads, Patanjali, Puranas, the four Vedas and scientific texts by Aryabhata, Brahmagupta, Varahamihira and others. He relates stories from the two epics and other mythologies. He presents the Hindu science of grammar and metrical composition. He describes their social customs and hierarchies. He also compares Hindu thought to the Greek thought of Socrates, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Galen and others, and at times with Sufi teaching.

‘The Hindus use the numeral signs in arithmetic in the same way as we do,’ he writes (a couple hundred years earlier, zero and the decimal system had been adopted by the Muslim world, and were then transmitted to Europe as Arabic numerals). ‘I have composed a treatise showing how far, possibly, the Hindus are ahead of us in this subject.’ He also translated two books into Arabic ‘one about the origines and a description of all created beings, called Samkhya, and another about the emancipation of the soul from the fetters of the body, called Patanjali’.

After this deep immersion in Brahminical texts and society, Alberuni begins India with several general remarks about the Hindus and their society. He explains that just as the ‘confession, “There is no god but God, Muḥammad is his prophet”, is the shibboleth of Islam, the Trinity that of Christianity, and the institute of the Sabbath that of Judaism, so metempsychosis [reincarnation] is the shibboleth of the Hindu religion. Therefore, he who does not believe in it does not belong to them, and is not reckoned as one of them’.

Muslim and Hindu religions are poles apart, he writes. But while Hindus argue internally, they never physically fight over theological disputes. Instead, ‘their fanaticism is directed against . . . all foreigners. They call them mleccha, i.e., impure, and forbid having any connection with them [via a] relationship, or by sitting, eating, and drinking with them, because thereby, they think, they would be polluted’. This, he thinks, ‘constitutes the widest gulf between us and them’.

Alberuni gives the Hindus a wide berth as he considers that ‘the repugnance of the Hindus against foreigners increased’ after ‘the Muslims began to make inroads into their country’. But this isn’t the only reason for the barriers he senses between the Muslims and the Hindus. The barriers are also caused by other ‘peculiarities of their national character, deeply rooted in them, but manifest to everybody’. Mentioning them, he feels, ‘sounds like a satire’. For instance:

“The Hindus believe that there is no country but theirs, no nation like theirs, no kings like theirs, no religion like theirs, no science like theirs. They are haughty, foolishly vain, self-conceited, and stolid. They are by nature niggardly in communicating that which they know, and they take the greatest possible care to withhold it from men of another caste among their own people, still much more, of course, from any foreigner.”

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Alberuni had, however, begun humbly. ‘At first I stood to their astronomers in the relation of a pupil to his master,’ he writes. But soon, ‘I began to show them the elements on which this science rests, to point out to them some rules of logical deduction and the scientific methods of all mathematics, and then they flocked together round me from all parts, wondering, and most eager to learn from me, asking me at the same time from what Hindu master I had learnt those things.’ This really got his goat, and seemed to him illustrative of a broader attitude among the Hindus:

“According to their belief … no created beings besides them have any knowledge or science whatsoever. Their haughtiness is such that, if you tell them of any science or scholar in Khorasan and Persis, they will think you to be both an ignoramus and a liar. If they traveled and mixed with other nations, they would soon change their mind, for their ancestors were not as narrow-minded as the present generation is.”

Representative image of Brahmins in Benaras. Credit: Juan Antonio Segal/Flickr CC 2.0

Such ‘is the state of things in India’, he laments, that Brahmins attempt to combine ideas of purity with the pursuit of science. ‘I showed them what they were worth,’ he huffs, ‘and thought myself a great deal superior to them.’ They’re ‘devoid of training in astronomy, and have no correct astronomical notions. In consequence, they believe that the earth is at rest’ (Aryabhata, 500 years earlier, had argued that the earth rotates on its axis daily, a view that had travelled west and had been embraced by Muslim astronomers; smart global opinion posited a spherical earth rotating on its axis in a geocentric universe; however, most Indian astronomers after Aryabhata, including Varahamihira and Brahmagupta, had rejected this theory, and so Indian astronomy had regressed on this major issue). Alberuni translated for them the books of Euclid and Ptolemy’s Almagest into Sanskrit, and explained how to construct an astrolabe to understand the rotation of the earth. In doing this, he says disarmingly, he was guided only ‘by the desire of spreading science’. (Modern scholars too have noted ‘the smugly insular stance of Sanskrit scientific literature which, refusing to recognise the authority of non-Indian science, remained for centuries willfully ignorant of its competitors’. This changed after Persian culture and language began spreading in India.)

‘The Brahmins recite the Veda without understanding its meaning,’ writes Alberuni. ‘Only few of them learn its explanation, and still less is the number of those who master [it well enough] to hold a theological disputation.’ They don’t ‘allow the Veda to be committed to writing’ because it must be ‘recited according to certain modulations’. They teach it to the Kshatriyas, but the Vaishyas, Shudras and the outcastes ‘are not allowed to hear it, much less to pronounce and recite it. If such a thing can be proved against one of them, the Brahmins drag him before the magistrate, and he is punished by having his tongue cut off’. The Brahmins maintain that ‘certain passages in the Veda… must not be recited within dwellings, since they fear that they would cause an abortion both to women and the cattle. Therefore, they step out into the open field to recite them. There is hardly a single verse free from such and similar minatory injunctions’, writes Alberuni, before providing an overview of each of the four Vedas and how they are recited. The Samaveda, for instance, ‘treats of the sacrifices, commandments, and prohibitions. It is recited in a tone like a chant, and hence its name is derived, because sâman means the sweetness of recitation’. He goes on to explain the ‘cause of this kind of recital’ by relating a mythological story behind it.

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The four-fold varna system made a deep impression on Alberuni. He notes that members of each varna are forbidden to dine with members of other varnas. Below them are ‘people called Antyaja, who render various kinds of services’ and live outside the towns and villages of the four varnas. Then there are people called Hadi, Doma, Chandala and Badhatau, who ‘are not reckoned amongst any caste [and] are occupied with dirty work, like the cleansing of the villages and other services… In fact, they are considered like illegitimate children; for according to general opinion they descend from a Shudra father and a Brahmin mother as the children of fornication; therefore, they are degraded outcasts’.

Alberuni quotes Krishna from the Bhagavad Gita as affirming this varna order: ‘If anybody wants to quit the works and duties of his caste and adopt those of another caste, even if it would bring a certain honour to the latter, it is a sin, because it is a transgression of the rule.’ Alberuni despises social institutions that cannot ‘be broken through by the special merits of any individual’, and yet such institutions, he says, abound among the Hindus. ‘We Muslims,’ he writes, ‘of course, stand entirely on the other side of the question, considering all men as equal, except in piety; and this is the greatest obstacle which prevents any approach or understanding between Hindus and Muslims.’

Namit Arora is the author of Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization, The Lottery of Birth: On Inherited Social Inequalities, and the novel Love and Loathing in Silicon Valley. For more, visit shunya.net.

If Science Must Be a Self-Correcting Search for Truth, So Should Its Communication

There is an onus on all of us to have a stake in the scientific enterprise, understand its philosophy and practice and see how well it may be put to use, to make us more prosperous and knowledgeable.

A winter storm over the northeastern portion of the US in February 2015. Credit: gsfc/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

“Only a revival of interest in these riddles (of man’s knowledge of the world) can save the sciences and philosophy from narrow specialisation and from an obscurantist faith in the expert’s special skill”
– Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1959

“(To honour science and its representatives is) the duty of those who rule over them, of kings and princes. For they alone could free the minds of scholars from the daily anxieties for the necessities of life, and stimulate their energies to earn more fame and favour, the yearning for which is the pith and marrow of human nature”
– Alberuni (c. 1030 CE), translated by Edward Sachau, 1888

Science is an indelible part of our lives. It is a cliche that a lot of things we use in our everyday lives are products of modern science and its development into technology. Many believe that science and scientific reasoning is the only way to make our lives better. That may be an extreme view but there is no denying the fact that science has potentiated the development that we have come to take for granted, and in moderation has encouraged sustainable development. That puts the onus on all of us to have a stake in the scientific enterprise, understand its philosophy and practice and see how well it may be put to use, either in tangible economic terms or in terms of satiating curiosity. This is of greater importance in a democracy where every individual has the right to influence policy, even if in an infinitesimally small way.

What is science? Let us define science as one way of acquiring knowledge. What is knowledge? Many philosophers over several centuries and even millennia have debated this question, which assumes particular importance today, when many of us have access to a surfeit of reading, listening and viewing material on the internet, all purporting to teach us something or the other. We may condense our understanding of what constitutes knowledge into the following: we learn something about the world around us by a combination of sensory experience and theorising based on sound foundations.

Quality and richness

In the sciences, we would define sensory experience as experimentation and would require that the foundations on which a theory is based itself be knowledge acquired either by experimentation or via previously established theories. Experiments and theories often include assumptions and it is good scientific practice to declare these and justify them where possible. One could argue that all knowledge is context-dependent and probabilistic. Context-dependent in the sense that some scientific statements hold true only when certain other conditions are met. Probabilistic in the sense that accumulation of more evidence in favour of a certain thesis only brings us closer and closer to the truth if truth itself may never be attained. In other words, a single piece of strong counter evidence that falsifies the thesis can never be discounted. In Karl Popper’s view, being amenable to falsification is what defines science and distinguishes it from ‘non-science’.

Thus, science, across disciplines, searches for truth. Scientists explore a plethora of techniques and – as famously argued by the rebellious philosopher Paul Feyerabend – are often anarchic in their choices of methods and interpretations (Against Method, 4th ed., 2010). Anarchy is not bad and, when defined as “anything goes” or as the anti-thesis of a dogmatic scientific method, permits creative yet rigorous explorations occasionally resulting in transformative science. Scientists are humans and their susceptibility to the pitfalls of the nature of their species, including the search for “fame and favour”, may at times be the driver behind the anarchy that underlies Feyerabend’s view of science.

The search for truth involves the accumulation of scientific evidence for or against a statement. Science benchmarks itself by the quality and rigour of the experimental and theoretical techniques that it uses in its thirst for evidence. It is forever open to correction and it is believed that it is self-correcting. Different fields of science have their own benchmarks for quality and it might be that the positions of these benchmarks are defined by how rich a field is.

Quality and richness are described by the relevance of the techniques used by the scientist to address a particular question, as well as the ‘resolution’ offered by the techniques that she adopts. The history of genetics (Raphael Falk, Genetic Analysis, 2009) offers us an illustrative glimpse into the evolution (no pun intended) of the field towards better resolution, if not greater relevance to the broad question of inheritance (of genetically encoded traits from one generation to the next) that the field addresses.

Low resolution research

The issue of genetic inheritance was famously addressed by the European monk Gregor Mendel in the mid-nineteenth century. In fact, his work was published in 1866, 150 years ago. He performed breeding experiments with pea plants. In these experiments, he crossed plants carrying certain observable properties such as yellow coloured peas with those displaying different properties, such as green coloured peas. Then he observed the properties of their progeny over a few generations.

Based on these coarse-grained external manifestations of the complex genetic and biochemical machinery that plants possess, Mendel developed an influential theory of inheritance. Prior ideas of inheritance had posited that progeny would “blend” the traits of their parents: this would have predicted that if yellow pea-bearing and green pea-bearing plants were crossed, the progeny would have a colour somewhere between yellow and green. Mendel’s systematic experimentation showed that inheritance is ‘particulate’, i.e. the progeny were yellow or green and always in a certain ratio. Charles Darwin’s work from the same period developed the profound theory of evolution based on observations of external characteristics of birds and animals.

These early research works, the original text of some of which including Darwin’s Origin of Species have even reached the popular press today, would be eminently comprehensible to the lay, literate reader. These were landmark pieces of research that transformed our understanding of genetic inheritance. But they were also of a low ‘resolution’, in having little to say about what the nature of the genetic material might be and how the information that is encoded there is reflected in observable characteristics.

Fast forward to the present day, quickly glimpsing the immense strides we have taken in genetics and biochemistry including the identification of DNA as the genetic material, the elucidation of its molecular structure, the sequencing of genomes of every conceivable organism under the sun and shadows, our ability to biochemically tease apart the most subtle function of all manner of proteins and other cellular molecules. We find that genetics now operates at a rather ‘high resolution’, filling in large and small gaps in our understanding of genetic inheritance and evolution at a deeply mechanistic level, but is rapidly becoming incomprehensible even to a scientifically literate audience.

A visible face of science

Scientific publishing in the biological sciences is in the middle of a revolution. Open access is the deal today, making scientific papers freely accessible to everyone who can get onto the internet. This is a small subset of the verbiage that the internet is today, but one that is believed to disseminate evidence-based and not ideology-driven information. However, access to this information, unfortunately does not necessarily imply its assimilation. Increasing specialisation, a natural corollary of increasing resolution of scientific experiments, and the non-negotiable pressure on a scientist to communicate this with jargon-filled precision to a rapidly narrowing cone of fellow scientists, means that a large section of the promise of Open access to reach out to everyone remains unfulfilled.

To the lay literate audience, the most visible face of science is that reflected by the annual Nobel Prizes. To the scientist in me, this is another reflection of increasing specialisation. While one would rarely argue against the importance of work that received the Nobel in medicine fifty years ago, even many professional biologists today may only be vaguely familiar – if at all – with the work that wins the prize today. Not because the work was not seminal but because biology is so specialised, and each specialisation lives within its own well with only a limited view of its neighbouring wells. Hence the proliferation of large, collaborative pieces of work that bring together experts in diverse approaches into a single well – a practice which may not win too many Nobel Prizes in medicine today but may be the norm in the years ahead.

Yet another source of information on science for the general public are the newspapers and popular magazines. Unfortunately, in most such venues in India, the coverage is abysmally sensationalist and does not give due importance to the process that went into finding that X causes cancer or that Y is a cure to Parkinson’s. Then again, recent developments have been encouraging. The magazine Down to Earth has for many years covered science to a standard well above the average for our press. The Wire has admirably committed to communicating science in a balanced way to the public. Fountain Ink, the Chennai-based magazine for long-form writing, regularly carries detailed and beautifully presented content on science and medicine.

Even as we clamour for a greater say in things that matter, and realise that an informed say is better than an emotional one, we need to take the initiative to understand the process and outcomes of science and scientific thought. And in light of the increasing specialisation of the professional scientific literature, scientific communication of a high standard in the popular press requires urgent and pressing attention.

Aswin Sai Narain Seshasayee runs a laboratory researching bacterial biology at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru. Beyond science, his interests are in classical art music and history.