India through the eyes of travellers

A Greek ambassador to the court of Chandragupta Maurya. His account survives only in fragments; it describes, for example, a committee with six subcommittees to coordinate the army.

📍 Pataliputra, the Mauryan capital

A Chinese Buddhist monk who travelled to India in search of Buddhist texts. He wrote that “untouchables” had to sound a clapper in the streets so that people could avoid seeing them.

A Chinese pilgrim who came in search of Buddhist texts while Harshavardhana ruled Kanauj. He found Pataliputra in ruins, and most of what we know about Nalanda comes from his records.

📍 Pataliputra — found in ruins · Nalanda

Born in Khwarizm in 973, he knew Syriac, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew and Sanskrit. When Sultan Mahmud invaded Khwarizm in 1017, he took Al-Biruni to Ghazni, where he developed an interest in India.

📜 Kitab-ul-Hind — in Arabic, 80 chapters on religion, festivals, astronomy, customs, weights and measures, laws and more.

📍 Ghazni — Sultan Mahmud’s capital

Visited China — and also India — from his home in Venice in the late thirteenth century. Ibn Battuta’s account is often compared with his.

Reached Sind in 1333 and travelled via Multan and Uch to Delhi, where Muhammad bin Tughlaq made him the qazi (judge). In 1342 he was sent as envoy to China, going via the Malabar coast, the Maldives and Sri Lanka; he got home in 1354. He was amazed by the efficient postal system.

📜 Rihla — his book of travels, in Arabic, rich in details of social and cultural life in the fourteenth century.

📍 Multan · Delhi — qazi under Muhammad bin Tughlaq

A diplomat from Herat whose account is one of the most important descriptions of the city of Vijayanagara in the fifteenth century.

📍 Vijayanagara (Hampi)

A fifteenth-century traveller from Russia who spent the years 1466–72 in India.

Among the best known Portuguese writers, he wrote a detailed account of trade and society in south India.

A sixteenth-century traveller from Turkey, listed by NCERT among the travellers who wrote about India.

A sixteenth-century traveller from Spain, listed by NCERT among the travellers who wrote about India.

A Jesuit who even translated Indian texts into European languages.

Travelled very widely in the 1620s and, fascinated by India, even became a sort of sanyasi for a time.

A seventeenth-century traveller from England, listed by NCERT among the travellers who wrote about India.

A French jeweller who travelled to India at least six times; fascinated by trading conditions, he compared India with Iran and the Ottoman empire.

A doctor, political philosopher and historian, in India for twelve years. He was physician to Prince Dara Shukoh, Shah Jahan’s eldest son, and later worked with the noble Danishmand Khan. He kept comparing India with Europe and dedicated his major writing to Louis XIV of France.

An Italian doctor who never returned to Europe and settled down in India.

Came to north India in the 1740s and, unlike Balkhi, was disappointed and even disgusted with India.