Today the Historians have to be careful about the terms they use because they meant different things in the past. For example, a simple term like “foreigner”. It is used today to mean someone who is not an Indian. In the medieval period a “foreigner” was any stranger who appeared say in a given village, someone who was not a part of that society or culture. (In Hindi the term pardesi might be used to describe such a person and in Persian, ajnabi.) A city-dweller, therefore, might have regarded a forest-dweller as a “foreigner”, but two peasants living in the same village were not foreigners to each other, even though they may have had different religious or caste backgrounds.

Some of the learners also asked:
What does the word foreigner mean?