Chinese and Arab Travellers: Filling the Gaps in Indian History

How do you piece together the story of a civilisation that stretches back thousands of years but never kept a neat, dated record of its own past? This is the central challenge historians face when trying to reconstruct the history of ancient and medieval India. Indian sources, both archaeological and literary, are rich but often incomplete, and their interpretation involves a fair degree of scholarly debate. Into this gap step a group of outsiders: Chinese and Arab travellers who visited the subcontinent at different points in time and wrote down what they saw. Their firsthand observations offer something that no amount of reinterpretation of existing sources can provide: an eyewitness perspective.

The Problem: A History Without a Timeline

Rebuilding India’s ancient and medieval past is not straightforward. Two major difficulties stand in the way.

• No systematic chronological records — Unlike some other ancient civilisations that maintained year-by-year annals or king lists, India did not develop a widespread tradition of dated historical writing. Events can often be placed in a rough sequence, but pinning them to exact years is frequently difficult.
• Subjectivity in interpretation — The sources that do survive, whether inscriptions, coins, sculptures, or literary texts, are open to multiple readings. Different historians looking at the same piece of evidence can reach different conclusions depending on their analytical framework.

Given these hurdles, the accounts of foreign travellers who were physically present in India become a powerful tool. They help historians cross-check and confirm details drawn from other sources, filling in missing links that would otherwise remain blank.

Chinese Travellers: A Window into Gupta and Post-Gupta India

Three Chinese visitors stand out for the depth and value of their observations: Fa-hien, Hsuan Tsang, and I-tsing. All three were Buddhist scholars whose journeys brought them to India during or shortly after the Gupta period, and their writings cover several dimensions of Indian life.

What Life Looked Like on the Ground: Socio-Economic Conditions

These travellers did not just visit temples and monasteries. They noticed how ordinary people lived and how society was organised.

Fa-hien, who visited India in the early 5th century AD, recorded a striking social observation: the Chandalas (untouchables) were made to live outside the boundaries of the village. This single detail is historically significant because it provides eyewitness confirmation that the practice of untouchability (the social exclusion of certain groups deemed ritually impure) was already well established in Indian society as early as the 5th century AD.

Shifting Centres of Power: Political Conditions

Hsuan Tsang, who travelled through India during the reign of Harsha in the 7th century AD, painted a picture of a changing political landscape. He noted that Pataliputra (modern-day Patna), once one of the greatest cities in the ancient world, had fallen into decline. At the same time, Prayag and Kannauj, both located in the Doab (the fertile region between the Ganga and Yamuna rivers), had risen to become the important centres of political and administrative activity.

This kind of observation is invaluable because it captures a shift in progress, a transformation in India’s political geography that Indian sources alone do not describe so clearly.

Buddhist Institutions Under the Spotlight: Doctrines, Rituals, and Monasteries

As Buddhist scholars, all three travellers paid close attention to the state of Buddhism in India. Hsuan Tsang and I-tsing left especially vivid accounts of Nalanda, one of the world’s great centres of learning at the time. Their descriptions cover the monastic routines, the scholarly community, the teaching methods, and the doctrines that guided religious life there.

These accounts are among the most detailed surviving records of how a major Indian vihara (monastic university) actually functioned on a day-to-day basis.

Arab Travellers: Merchants, Scholars, and the View from the West

While Chinese travellers approached India primarily through the lens of Buddhism, the Arab visitors came with different interests and backgrounds. Some were merchants drawn by trade, others were scholars driven by curiosity about Indian civilisation.

The Merchant Observers: Sulayman and Abu Zaid

Arab merchants such as Sulayman and Abu Zaid visited India and wrote vivid descriptions of Indian culture and science. Because they were traders by profession, their accounts carry a natural focus on commercial activity, providing historians with valuable information about the trade contacts between India and the Arab world, and the considerable wealth that the Indian subcontinent derived from this commerce.

Abu Zaid made one particularly striking social observation. He noted that most Indian princes, while holding court, allowed their women to be seen unveiled. This is a historically important detail because it shows that the purdah system (the practice of secluding women behind veils or screens) was not prevalent among upper-class women in early medieval India, a fact that challenges certain assumptions about the period.

The Scholar Travellers: Al-Beruni and Ibn Battuta

Al-Beruni and Ibn Battuta occupy a special place among foreign observers of India. What set them apart was their direct personal contact with the people of the Indian subcontinent. They did not simply pass through. They engaged with Indians from different walks of life, learned about local customs, and immersed themselves in the social and economic realities of the regions they visited.

This close, sustained interaction allowed them to provide detailed firsthand information about the economic activities, social structures, and daily practices of the people. Their accounts go beyond surface-level descriptions and capture nuances that a brief or distant visitor would miss entirely.

Valuable But Not Perfect: The Limitations

No historical source is without its problems, and the accounts of foreign travellers are no exception. Historians approach these writings with a degree of caution for one key reason: personal bias.

Every traveller carried the cultural assumptions, religious beliefs, and individual perspectives shaped by their own background. A Chinese Buddhist monk viewing Hindu society, or an Arab merchant evaluating Indian customs through an Islamic cultural lens, would inevitably filter their observations through their own worldview. This means certain details may be exaggerated, misunderstood, or coloured by the observer’s own expectations.

Despite these limitations, the accounts remain indispensable. They are key sources for discovering missing links in the reconstruction of Indian history, offering perspectives that no purely Indian source can provide. The challenge for historians is to read them critically, accounting for bias while extracting the genuine observations that lie within.