India’s Epidemics in the Riḥla of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa: Plague, Cholera or Lexical Muddle

The famous Moroccan traveller Muḥammad Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, who left Tangier in 1325, claims to have made a journey that took him to most of the then Islamicate world. The country in which he recounts having stayed the longest was India, where he says he has remained from 1333 to 1341–1342 mostly in the Islamic Sultanate of Delhi. A long section of his Riḥla is dedicated to the sub-continent and modern historians of this area ascribe to it an important documentary value although, as for many other parts of the work, it has been argued that Ibn Baṭṭūṭa may have borrowed – not to say copied – information from other sources. In India, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa also speaks of two epidemics and one deadly disease that occurred in 1334–1335 and 1344, and some scholars have referred to them as cholera, while some others have suggested it was plague – thus supporting the hypothesis that the medieval plague pandemic had struck India before reaching the Middle East. How did this confusion arise? What exactly does Ibn Baṭṭūṭa’s Riḥla relate? Do Indo-Persian sources confirm these epidemics? Do they and/or IB’s Riḥla allow excluding the presence of the Medieval Plague in India, or rather do they assert it? In order to answer these questions, this paper analyses the information on the Indian epidemics in Ibn Baṭṭūṭa’s Riḥla and compares the text with its translations in the principal European languages and with Indo-Persian chronicles. These analyses reveal something of a lexical muddle in the texts and their translations which, in my opinion, has contributed to some errors and misunderstandings regarding the diseases in question. But another question arises: is it possible to read the information provided by IB and by the Indian chronicles in a consilient way, that is, taking into account not only the analysis of written documents, but also the recent and current findings in genetics of plague, and in particular on the Black Death? Finally, an attempt is made to answer a question that, given the criticism often levelled at Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, has to be asked. Considering that in one of these events he claims to have witnessed the epidemic, is there any reason to suppose that he did not? Regarding the other two events to which he did not claim to be a witness, is there any reason to doubt his claim, namely that he learned the news from an authoritative and trustworthy informant he met in India?