Life and Conditions of the People of Hindustan (1200–1550 A.D.) c4.s1.t1.1

c4.s1.t1.1

In spite of their fairly good knowledge of the Indian and the Chinese sea coast, the Arab geographers of the eighth century were very vague in dealing with the lands of India and China (Hind and Chin). The land beyond the Indus (or the Sind of the Arabs) was little explored and China was believed to be situated in an undefined region to the north and the north-east of Sind, without, however, calculating the impenetrable walls of the Himalayas. In fact, many centuries afterwards, the attack of Sultan Muhammad Tughluq on the hills of Kamaon (called Qarajal) was supposed to encroach upon some region of the Chinese Peninsula. Similarly, when Muhammad Bakhtyar Khalji invaded northern Bengal or Assam, he actually imagined he was leading an invasion into Turkistan. The western world roughly divided India into three regions : one up to the Indus, second between the Indus and the Ganges, and the third beyond these two regions. Even so late as the reign of Queen Elizabeth, John Frampton had no better idea of the country beyond the west coast of India and to the north of Deccan than that this ‘third India’ which is the hygh India is surnamed Malabar and dothe extend unto Cauch, which is the river Gange’,¹ that there grew plenty of ‘sinamon and pearle’, and that the king and the people of this country worshipped the ‘oxe’. ² The one clear fact, however, which one gathers even from these observations is that the Indo-Gangetic plains were believed to form a separate geographical unit, distinguishable from the rest of the peninsula by a distinct type of culture.