Chapter 1 :- TRACING CHANGES THROUGH
A THOUSAND YEARS
Facts
1154 CE by the Arab geographer Al-Idrisi made a map showing the Indian subcontinent from land
to sea.
Cartographer is a person who makes Map.
How has the Meaning of the term “Hindustan” Changed :-
“Hindustan”, for example. Today we understand it as “India”, the modern nation-state. When the term was used in the thirteenth century by Minhaj-i-Siraj, a chronicler who wrote in Persian, he meant the areas of Punjab, Haryana and the lands between the Ganga and Yamuna. He used the term in a political sense for lands that were a part of the dominions of the Delhi Sultan. The areas included in this term shifted with the extent of the Sultanate but the term never included south India.
By contrast, in the early sixteenth century Babur used Hindustan to describe the geography, the fauna and the culture of the inhabitants of the subcontinent. As we will see later in the chapter, this was somewhat similar to the way the fourteenth-century poet Amir Khusrau used the word “Hind”.
While the idea of a geographical and cultural entity like “India” did exist, the term “Hindustan” did not carry the political and national meanings which we associate with it today.
Nastaliq :- Nastaʼlīq is one of the main calligraphic hands used to write the Perso-Arabic script in the Persian and Urdu languages, and traditionally the predominant style in Persian calligraphy. It was developed in the land of Persia in the 14th and 15th centuries. There was another Shikaste.
The nastaliq style (on the left) is cursive and easy to read, the shikaste (on the right) is denser and more difficult.
Ziauddin Barani (1285–1358 CE) was a Muslim political thinker of the Delhi Sultanate located in present-day Northern India during Muhammad bin Tughlaq and Firuz Shah’s reign.
He was best known for composing the Tarikh-i-Firoz Shahi (also called Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi), a work on medieval India, which covers the period from the reign of Ghiyas ud din Balban to the first six years of reign of Firoz Shah Tughluq and the Fatwa-i-Jahandari which promoted a hierarchy among Muslim communities in the Indian subcontinent.
Rajputs, a name derived from “Rajaputra”, the son of a ruler. Between the eighth and fourteenth centuries the term was applied more generally to a group of warriors who claimed Kshatriya caste status.
Prashasti :- Written in the Praise of Kings/Sultans
A Sanskrit praising the Delhi Sultan Ghiyasuddin Balban (1266-1287) explained that he was the ruler of a vast empire that stretched from Bengal (Gauda) in the east to Ghazni (Gajjana) in Afghanistan in the west and included all of south India (Dravida).
People of different regions – Gauda, Andhra, Kerala, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Gujarat – apparently fled before his armies.
Amir Khusrau on Language :- In 1318 the poet Amir Khusrau noted that there was a different language in every region of this land: Sindhi, Lahori, Kashmiri, Dvarsamudri (in southern Karnataka), Telangani (in Andhra Pradesh), Gujari (in Gujarat), Ma‘bari (in Tamil Nadu), Gauri, (in Bengal) … Awadhi (in eastern Uttar Pradesh) and Hindawi (in the area around Delhi).
Amir Khusrau went on to explain that in contrast to these languages there was Sanskrit which did not belong to any region. It was an old language and “common people do not know it, only the Brahmanas do”.
Jatis and their Regulation :- As society became more differentiated, people were grouped into jatis or sub-castes and ranked on the basis of their backgrounds and their occupations.
Ranks were not fixed permanently, and varied according to the power, influence and resources controlled by members of the jati. The status of the same jati could vary from area to area.
Jatis framed their own rules and regulations to manage the conduct of their members. These regulations were enforced by an assembly of elders, described in some areas as the jati panchayat. But jatis were also required to follow the rules of their villages. Several villages were governed by a chieftain. Together they were only one small unit of a state.
