The Cambridge History of India, Vol. III: Turks and Afghans v3.c20.428

v3.c20.428

His way to Delhi lay through the usually fertile province of Mālwa, and here he had an opportunity of observing the havoc which famine had wrought upon his people. Towns and whole districts were depopulated and even the postal runners were constrained to abandon their posts, so that the royal mails no longer ran between Delhi and Daulatābād. A pound of grain cost twenty-two or twenty-three grains of silver, and the people were reduced to eating unnatural and loathsome food. Ibn Batūtah saw some women cutting strips from the skin of a horse which had been dead for some months, and eating them, cooked hides were exposed for sale in the bazars, and people thronged round the butchers to catch and drink the blood of slaughtered cattle. Some travellers resting in the deserted city of Agroha, now Hissar, found a man cooking a human foot, and as the famine grew ever more severe human flesh became a common article of food.