The concept of kalapani – the ancient Subcontinental prohibition against crossing the seas, of which much has been made – does not mean that travel was unknown in earlier times in Southasia. Nor did it mean that those apart from the most highly self-absorbed Brahmins obeyed this stricture. Pilgrimage and trade routes cut across the landscape. Everyone moved, for a million reasons. Supposed religious diktats aside, the Aitareya brahmana of the Rigveda exhorts, 'There is no happiness for the person who does not travel; living amongst men, even the best man becomes a sinner; for Indra is the traveller's friend. Hence, travel!'
'To the stranger in India', wrote the colonial officer William Crooke in 1906, 'nothing is more impressive than the constant movement of vast crowds of pilgrims to visit the many sacred places scattered throughout the country.' Of course, many of the people are motivated by 'strong religious enthusiasm', wrote Crooke, but to most 'the pilgrimage is the one annual outing which breaks the dreary monotony of village life – a chance of amusement and shopping, as a race-meeting or a cattle show is to the English rustic.' The pilgrimage is perhaps the earliest form of tourism. Penitents went to Hindu temples, Sufi dargahs, Buddhist relics, to the river's edge for the Kumbh Mela, across the seas or overland on Haj.
Furthermore, the flows of people across the rivers of Central Asia, the mountains of the Himalaya and the waters of the Indian Ocean were constant, a feature of the movement of warriors, traders and intellectuals. Was this 'travel' or simply displacement from one place to the other? Did those who moved have to self-consciously know that they were 'travelling'? To travel implies not just movement from one place to another but to register the journey, to consider the differences in places. Of course, this consciousness is not easy to track, and it is often left to the intellectuals to record for us their ruminations.
We have the great Chinese travellers who marched across the high mountains into the Indus-Ganga plains, and returned home to record their impressions of the lands of the Buddha: Fa-hsien (399-414), Hsuan-tsang (629-645), and I-ching (671-695). We have the great Persian scholar, Abu Rayhan al-Biruni (973-1052), who meandered across Central Asia, finding employment with warriors and traders, seeking information and knowledge where he could find it. From him we get his book India, whose Arabic title gives us the full flavour of the writings, Ketab tahqiq maa le'l-hind men maqula maqbula fi'l-aql aw mardula (The book confirming what pertains to India, whether rational or despicable). If you read between the lines of Abu'l Fazl's 16th-century Ain-e-akbari, you would get a sense of the curiosity about other places, as you would in Nik Rai's 18th-century Tazkirat al-safar va tuhfat al-zafar (Account of travels and the gift of success). Whether they crossed the waters or the mountains or lingered on the landmass of the Subcontinent, these writers developed a self-conscious understanding of journeys, the safar, the yatra.