Bernier’s Account of India
François Bernier was a French physician, traveller, political philosopher, and historian who spent twelve years in India, from 1656 to 1668. He was closely associated with the Mughal court, initially serving as physician to Prince Dara Shikoh, the eldest son of Emperor Shah Jahan, and later, following Dara’s death, attaching himself to the court of Emperor Aurangzeb.
Bernier’s principal work, Travels in the Mughal Empire, deals mainly with the reigns of Dara Shikoh and Aurangzeb, and draws on his own extensive travels and observations as well as information gathered from prominent Mughal courtiers. He journeyed to several parts of the country, recording detailed accounts of what he witnessed, and frequently compared conditions in India directly with the situation in contemporary Europe. He dedicated his major work to Louis XIV, King of France, and many of his other writings took the form of letters addressed to influential officials and ministers. As one of the most widely cited European accounts of Mughal India, Bernier’s account occupies a central place in the historiography of the period — valuable both for its genuine empirical detail and, as later scholarship has shown, for the ways in which it distorted Indian realities to fit contemporary European frameworks, making it an important case study for UPSC History Optional aspirants in evaluating foreign traveller accounts critically.
Science and Technology in India
Bernier, who arrived in India during the second half of the 17th century, claims to have spent five or six years in the company of the Mughal noble Agha Danishmand Khan, to whom he regularly explained the recent scientific discoveries of Harvey and Pecquet concerning the circulation of the blood. He maintained a genuine personal interest in scientific matters, including astronomy, geography, and anatomy.
- Bernier held a notably poor opinion of Indian knowledge of anatomy, observing that Indian hakims and vaids showed little interest in Harvey’s discovery.
- As Bernier lamented, India possessed no dedicated academies — aside from madrasas devoted to religious study — where such subjects could be systematically pursued. As a result, interest in Western science and philosophy remained an essentially individual pursuit, one that tended to die out along with the individual scholar rather than being institutionally sustained.
Jagirdar–Peasant Relations
The strained relationship between jagirdars and the peasantry under their control is perhaps best reflected in Bernier’s account, drawn from his mid-17th-century travels in India.
- He observed that, owing to the frequent transfer of jagirs, jagirdars, governors, and revenue contractors alike had little genuine stake in the long-term welfare of the peasantry under their charge. They were consequently inclined to extract the maximum possible revenue from the peasantry, even at the cost of triggering desertion and leaving fields entirely unattended.
Bernier’s Major Observations
Crown Ownership of Land
Bernier identified one of the fundamental differences between Mughal India and Europe as the absence of private property in land, and the corresponding institution of crown ownership — a system he considered genuinely harmful to both the state and its people.
- He believed that, within the Mughal Empire, the Emperor owned all land outright, distributing it among his nobles, who in turn distributed it further down to the peasantry. In his assessment, this arrangement produced genuinely disastrous consequences for both the economy and society at large.
- Because of this crown ownership, Bernier argued, landholders were unable to pass their land on to their children, and were consequently averse to making any long-term investment in sustaining or expanding agricultural production.
- Bernier characterised Indian society as consisting of an undifferentiated mass of impoverished people, subjugated entirely by a small minority of an extremely rich and powerful ruling class. Between the poorest of the poor and the wealthiest of the rich, he claimed, no meaningful social group or class existed at all — famously asserting: “There is no middle state in India.”
- In Bernier’s rendering, the Mughal Empire was ruled by a king of “beggars and barbarians”; its cities and towns lay ruined and contaminated by “ill air”; and its fields were “overspread with bushes” and riddled with “pestilential marshes” — all of this, in his analysis, traceable to a single root cause: the crown’s exclusive ownership of land.
Evaluating This Observation
Curiously, none of the surviving Mughal official documents actually support the claim that the state was the sole owner of all land.
- Mughal land revenue was, in fact, formally described as the “remuneration of sovereignty” — a claim made by the ruler upon his subjects in exchange for the protection he provided, rather than as rent charged on land he personally owned.
- It is plausible that European travellers like Bernier came to regard such claims as functionally equivalent to rent, given how consistently high actual revenue demands often were. In reality, however, this was not rent, nor even a straightforward land tax — it functioned instead as a tax on the crop itself.
The Influence on Western Political Theory
Bernier’s descriptions went on to exert considerable influence over Western political theorists from the 18th century onward.
- The French philosopher Montesquieu, for instance, drew directly on Bernier’s account to develop his influential concept of “oriental despotism” — the theory that rulers across Asia (the “Orient,” or East) enjoyed absolute, unchecked authority over subjects kept in conditions of enforced subjugation and poverty, resting on the claim that all land belonged exclusively to the king, with private property effectively non-existent. According to this view, virtually everyone except the emperor and his immediate nobility barely managed to survive at all.
- This idea was subsequently developed further into the concept of the “Asiatic mode of production,” formulated by Karl Marx in the 19th century.
- Marx argued that in India, and comparably in other Asian societies, all economic surplus was appropriated directly by the state prior to colonial rule.
- This, in his analysis, gave rise to a society composed of a large number of essentially autonomous, internally egalitarian village communities, over which the imperial court presided from a distance — respecting local village autonomy so long as the flow of surplus revenue to the centre remained unimpeded.
- This model was, on the whole, regarded by Marx as a fundamentally stagnant economic system, incapable of genuine internal development.
The Historical Reality: A More Differentiated Society
In reality, during the 16th and 17th centuries, rural Indian society was characterised by considerable social and economic differentiation — a picture quite at odds with the simplified, undifferentiated mass that Bernier’s account, and the theories it inspired, would suggest.
- At one end of the social spectrum stood the great zamindars, who enjoyed genuinely superior rights over land; at the other end stood the “untouchable” landless labourers.
- In between these two extremes existed a considerable range of intermediate positions: the substantial peasant, who employed hired labour and engaged actively in commodity production for the market, and the smaller peasant, who could barely produce enough even for his own family’s subsistence.
No Care for Artisans
Bernier further believed that Indian artisans had little genuine incentive to improve the quality of their manufactures, since he considered that any resulting profits were ultimately appropriated by the state rather than retained by the artisans themselves. As a direct consequence, in his account, Indian manufactures were everywhere in a state of steady decline.
- Bernier nonetheless conceded that vast quantities of the world’s precious metals continued to flow into India during this period, as Indian manufactured goods were exported abroad in exchange for gold and silver — an observation that sits somewhat uneasily alongside his broader narrative of manufacturing decline.
- He also took note of the existence of a genuinely prosperous merchant community in India, actively engaged in long-distance commercial exchange.
Mughal Cities: “Camp Towns”
Bernier famously described Mughal cities as little more than “camp towns” — believing that they came into existence and flourished only when the imperial court happened to reside within them, and declined rapidly the moment the court moved elsewhere. He estimated the total strength of Shah Jahan’s great travelling camp at somewhere between 3 and 4 lakh persons.
Evaluating This Claim
In fact, during the 17th century, roughly 15 per cent of India’s total population lived in towns — a genuinely higher proportion of urban population than existed in Western Europe during the same period, directly contradicting the picture of purely court-dependent, transient urbanism that Bernier’s account suggests.
- Mughal India, in reality, contained a wide variety of distinct urban settlements: manufacturing towns, trading towns, port-towns, and sacred pilgrimage centres, among others. The sustained existence of this diverse array of towns serves as a meaningful index of the genuine prosperity enjoyed by India’s merchant communities and professional classes.
- Merchants themselves frequently maintained strong community and kinship ties, and were commonly organised into distinct caste-cum-occupational bodies — in Western India, these groups were known as mahajans, headed by a chief known as the sheth or nagarsheth.
- Urban populations also encompassed a range of established professional classes, including physicians (hakim or vaid), teachers (pundit or mulla), lawyers (wakil), as well as painters, architects, musicians, and calligraphers.
Sati and Women’s Labour
European travellers and writers of this period frequently highlighted the treatment of women within Indian society as a crucial marker of the perceived difference between “Western” and “Eastern” civilisations. Bernier, for his part, singled out the practice of sati for particularly detailed description, noting that while some women appeared to embrace such a death willingly, others were plainly forced into it against their will.
Evaluating This Focus
In historical reality, women’s lives in Mughal India revolved around a great deal more than the isolated practice of sati, which Bernier’s account tends to foreground almost to the exclusion of everything else.
- Women’s labour was, in fact, genuinely crucial to both agricultural and non-agricultural production across the empire.
- Women from established merchant families actively participated in commercial life, on occasion even bringing mercantile disputes before formal courts of law in their own right.
- Taken together, this evidence makes it seem genuinely unlikely that women in Mughal India were confined, as a general rule, purely to the private domestic space of the home — a far more active and economically integrated picture than Bernier’s narrow focus on sati alone would suggest.
Other Notable Observations
- Bernier’s Travels in the Mughal Empire offers vivid, detailed descriptions of Agra and Delhi, as well as of the broader revenue resources of the Mughal Empire.
- According to Bernier, the greater part of Aurangzeb’s nobility consisted of Persians.
- He observed that the notably luxurious lifestyle maintained by Mughal nobles ultimately contributed to their own financial impoverishment over time.
- Bernier left behind a valuable, genuinely first-hand eyewitness account of the imperial karkhanas at Delhi.
- On merchants’ clothing, Bernier notably remarked that wealthy merchants tended to deliberately affect an appearance of poverty and indignation, “lest that they should be used as filled sponges” — squeezed dry, that is, by predatory officials, were their true wealth to become widely known.
Conclusion: Assessing Bernier as a Source
Bernier’s Travels in the Mughal Empire is genuinely marked throughout by detailed observation, critical insight, and sustained reflection, making it a valuable — if imperfect — historical source. He consistently compared Mughal India with contemporary Europe, almost invariably emphasising the presumed superiority of the latter over the former.
- His broader representation of India operates fundamentally on a model of binary opposition, in which India is repeatedly presented as the structural inverse of Europe — poor where Europe was prosperous, despotic where Europe was ordered, stagnant where Europe was dynamic.
- He further consistently ordered these perceived differences in a strict hierarchy, positioning India as inherently inferior to the Western world across virtually every dimension of comparison.
As the evaluations above make clear, this overarching assessment was, in crucial respects, not always accurate — and Bernier’s account, however valuable for its wealth of empirical detail, must therefore be read critically, with careful attention to the European theoretical frameworks and assumptions that shaped both what he chose to observe and how he ultimately chose to interpret it.
