Journey
François Bernier — physician at the Mughal court (1658–68)
A Montpellier physician who arrived by the Red Sea in 1658 into the middle of the Mughal succession war, served briefly in Dara Shukoh's camp and then twelve years in Aurangzeb's Delhi. His essays on land tenure and the army gave Europe the idea of oriental despotism, and Montesquieu and Marx both argued from them.
Stops (6)
- Paris · home · and the book
A Montpellier physician who went east by way of Egypt, Arabia and the Red Sea rather than round the Cape, spent twelve years in India and eight of them in Mughal service, and published the Histoire de la dernière révolution des États du Grand Mogol in Paris in 1670–71. It was read across Europe in four languages within a decade.
- Surat · Surat, into a civil war
Landed at Surat just as Shah Jahan's sons went to war over the succession, and was caught up in the campaign almost at once — which is the accident that made the book what it is. He was in Dara Shukoh's camp as his physician during the retreat, and then in the winner's capital as a guest.
- Agra Fort · Agra, in the aftermath
Agra, in the aftermath: Shah Jahan shut in the fort by his own son, and Dara Shukoh hunted down and killed. Being the losing claimant's physician and then the winner's guest is what gives his account of the succession war its peculiar authority — he had seen both sides of it from inside.
- Red Fort, Delhi · Delhi, eight years
Delhi under Aurangzeb, where he lived in the household of Danishmand Khan, a noble who employed him to read Gassendi and Descartes aloud in Persian translation. He wrote the essays on land tenure, the army and the court that Montesquieu and, two centuries later, Marx would argue from. A household in which a French physician read Descartes aloud in Persian is not the Mughal court of the textbooks.
- Lahore Fort & Shalimar · Lahore and the camp
Lahore, on the imperial road north as the court moved to escape the summer heat. He describes the camp on the march as a moving city of several hundred thousand people with its own bazaars, streets and postal service — the best description anyone left of a Mughal army in motion.
- Mughal Gardens of Kashmir · Kashmir, 1665
Kashmir, in the emperor's train, and the first European to describe the valley — its shawl weavers, saffron fields and Mughal gardens. He called it “the terrestrial paradise of the Indies” and complained bitterly about the journey up. His account of the shawl industry is the first anywhere, and the goats' wool he describes was later copied at Paisley.