In an age when travel has become an obsession owing to the carefully curated Instagram feeds, packaged into lifestyle aspirations, and sold as a form of self-discovery, it is easy to forget that travel can also be a philosophical way of knowing, perhaps something new, or revisiting the familiar with a fresh perspective.

The making of a philosophical traveller

François Bernier, the French physician who spent over a decade at the Mughal court during the course of the seventeenth century, was one of the earliest examples of what Peter Burke calls the “Philosophical Traveller”: someone who used encounters with the unfamiliar—a foreign country or “the other” (in Bernier’s case “the orient”)—not simply to record exotic details, but more importantly, to use the insights gained to critique his own society (Burke 1999, 124).

Unlike today’s impulse-driven tourism, Bernier’s journey was hence rooted in the pursuit of knowledge and a serious engagement with questions of power, governance, and culture.

To grasp the weight of his observations on the Mughal state, however, we must first consider the influences that shaped him and the particular lens through which he wrote.

Delhi, Kashmir, and the Mughal Court

Bernier was born near Angers (France) in 1620. He studied philosophy and medicine but is best remembered as a traveller. Before his long stay in Asia, he visited Italy, Germany, and Poland, and he spent about fourteen years in Asia (mainly the Indian subcontinent) between 1655 and 1688. He arrived in Delhi during the famous coup d’état of 1658, when Aurangzeb, Shah Jahan’s third son, deposed his father and took the Peacock Throne. Bernier is also the first European known to have visited Kashmir. According to Burke, if we divide the travellers into “short stayers” and “long stayers”, Bernier clearly belongs to the latter category (Burke 1999, 124).

Bernier learned at least one major Asian language, that is, Persian, the Mughal court’s lingua franca, and seems to have been an attentive listener, keen observer, and absorber of a different culture.

As a French physician, he entered the service of the Mughal high-official Danishmand Khan, for whom he translated into Persian the works of French philosophers Pierre Gassendi and René Descartes. Bernier himself was deeply influenced by Gassendi, who rejected Aristotelian doctrine in favor of explanations grounded in scientific observation.

On Mughal governance and socio-economic critiques

Turning to Bernier’s observations on the Mughal state, one of the most striking examples comes from his letter to Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the finance minister of Louis XIV. The very subtitle of this letter is revealing: “Concerning the Extent of Hindoustan, the Currency towards, and final absorption of gold and silver in that country; its Resources, Armies, the administration of Justice and the principle Cause of the Decline of the States of Asia.”

Bernier describes the Mughal empire as vast and fertile, a place where no emperor, prince, or high minister was ever approached empty-handed. It was, above all, a land of immense riches, where “gold and silver, after circulating in every other quarter of the globe, come at length to be swallowed up, lost in some measure” (Bernier 1914, 202). Even as Bernier marvels at the wealth of the Mughal court, he is quick to add that “there are many circumstances to be considered, as forming a counterpoise to these riches” (Ibid, 205).

For Bernier, the foremost of these counterweights was the condition of the peasantry. He writes of their relentless exploitation at the hands of local governors and landlords. Vast tracts of land, he observed, were

little more than sand, or barren mountains, badly cultivated, and thinly populated; and even a considerable portion of the good land remained untilled for want of laborers; many of whom perish in the consequence of the bad treatment they experience from the Governors (Ibid).

He also notes that many peasants fled to the domains of local rulers (rajas), where they encountered comparatively less oppression.

Secondly, Bernier argues that the Mughal emperor was not, in practice, the absolute master of the diverse nations he ruled. Across the empire were many chiefs or sovereigns, some of whom paid tribute and others who did not. Those who withheld tribute were often powerful rulers in their own right, scattered both near and far from Delhi and Agra. Bernier notes that if some of such chiefs were ever to form an offensive alliance, they would pose a serious threat to the Mughal state.

Thirdly, Bernier describes “the Great Mughal” as essentially a “foreigner in Hindoustan, a descendant of Tamerlan [Amir Timur], chief of those Mongols from Tartary who about the year 1401, overran and conquered the Indies” (Ibid, 209). The emperor’s position was further complicated by the religious dynamics of the court: while the sovereign was a Sunni Muslim, many of his nobles were Shia. This, Bernier suggests, placed the emperor in a precarious situation, forcing him to maintain a large standing army—an undertaking that required immense expenditure.

He then turns to the financial mechanics that sustained this army, focusing on the mansab-jagir system. In this arrangement, the substantial revenues of the state were absorbed by bureaucrats or mansabdars, who when holding revenue assignments called jagirs became jagirdars. As governors and revenue contractors, since their tenure rarely exceeded three years, these officials were primarily concerned with amassing as much wealth as possible in the short term, with little incentive to improve the condition of the peasantry.

In addition to these subtle (or not so subtle) critiques, Bernier also reflects on the very nature of the Mughal state:

… the King is sole proprietor of all the land in the empire; a capital city, such as Dehly [Delhi] or Agra, derives its chief support from the presence of the army, and…the population is reduced to the necessity of following the Mogol [Mughal] whenever he undertakes a journey of long continuance (Ibid, 220).

One of the most striking comparisons here is Bernier’s depiction of the Mughal capital as little more than “a camp”.

He also observes that every soldier in the Mughal army was married, with wives, children, servants, and slaves dependent on him for survival. The soldier himself, however, was entirely dependent on the pay he received from the state; or more precisely, from the emperor. For Bernier, this revealed the vast scale of revenue income in the empire: how else, he wondered, could the subsistence of so many dependents be explained?

Yet Bernier is quick to note that this immense income, which he terms rent rather than revenue (since the emperor was understood as the universal landlord), did not translate into the accumulation of wealth. Alongside the heavy costs of maintaining armies, governors, and officials, he points to the Mughal court’s love of luxury, pomp, and ceremonial display as another drain on resources. He adds:

I admit that his [the emperor’s] income exceeds probably the joint revenues of the Grand Seignior [of France] and of the King of Persia; but if I were to call him a wealthy monarch, it would be in the sense that a treasurer is to be considered wealthy who pays with one hand the large sums which he receives with the other (Ibid, 222).

Moreover, Bernier concluded from the absence of private property and the unchecked power of the bureaucracy that such conditions in India prevented the development of the arts (Ray 2004, 179-81). Artisans, he argued, were compelled to work for high officals, often for little or no pay. Bound within the rigidities of the caste system, artisans had no real mobility and could not aspire to move higher within the social hierarchy. As a result, artisanal skills were passed down unchanged from one generation to the next, leading to stagnation rather than innovation.

Some historians have suggested that Bernier’s observations on the “absence of the middle state” in India were essentially about the absence of a middle class. This absence troubled him, not least because Bernier himself came from such a class in France—one that had actively resisted the centralizing tendencies of the monarchy. To his mind, the existence of a middle class was not only a marker of social vitality but also the bearer of “civilized” norms, something he found lacking in Mughal India (Ibid, 180).

Among other aspects of the Mughal state, Bernier comments on the precarious position of merchants, the practice of buying and selling offices, and what he saw as the flaws of the judicial system. He justifies the existence of the judges (qazis) only by mocking their limited role and reducing their function to little more than affixing seals to documents rather than dispensing justice.

Bernier does concede that one supposed advantage of such despotism was the shorter process of delivering judgments, but he quickly adds a sharp qualification:

[If a state] does away with ‘meum and tuum’ (what is yours and what is mine), the necessity for an infinite number of legal proceedings will at once cease but it is equally certain that the remedy would be infinitely worse than the disease, and that there is no estimating the misery that would afflict the country (Bernier 1914, 237).

For Bernier, the central cause of the decay of Asian states lay in the absence of private property in land. He insists:

Yes, My Lord, to conclude briefly I must repeat it: take away the right of private property in land, and you introduce, as a sure and necessary consequence, tyranny, slavery, injustice, beggary and barbarism: the ground will cease to be cultivated and become a dreary wilderness; in a word, the road will be opened to the ruin of Kings and the destruction of Nations (Ibid, 238)

As Aniruddha Ray notes, it is hardly surprising then, that in the eighteenth century, when the Mughal empire had begun to fragment, Bernier’s writings were repeatedly cited to underline the supposed inevitability of Mughal decline. Bernier’s “prophecy,” articulated nearly a century earlier, was proving to be true (Ray 2004, 164).

Contradictions in and limitations of Bernier’s account

No doubt Bernier’s account of the Mughal state has drawn considerable criticism from historians. Ray notes that Bernier was unique among European travellers to India in being shaped by two key influences: the rapidly shifting political situation in France and the philosophy of Gassendi, whose scientific assertions challenged prevailing customs and superstitions (Ibid).

According to Ray, however,

the difference is not in the details of the narrative of the voyage, which Bernier usually failed to provide in the manner of some of his contemporaries, but in the systematic consolidation and organization of data that Bernier accomplished (Ibid).

Yet this very systematization rested on selective and often unverifiable sources, making his knowledge highly subjective. At times Bernier identifies his informants, but at others he leaves their origins obscure. This raises the question of why he relied on certain reports that can only be compared to “bazaar gossip”. Popular examples include the alleged escapades of Roshanara Begum, suggestions of an incestuous relationship between Shah Jahan and his daughter Jahanara Begum, and rumours surrounding the Mughal civil war—events Bernier himself did not witness and for which he provides no reliable authority (Ibid, 170-71).

His writings also contain several inherent contradictions. He laments the deplorable conditions of artisans and the stagnation of the arts in Mughal India, yet simultaneously suggests that the newly established French East India Company could make unlimited purchases of high-quality goods produced by independent artisans (Ibid, 180). Similarly, he criticizes the lack of European-style urban glamour in India while acknowledging the wealth of merchant houses, even though he elsewhere depicts merchants as unprotected and reduced to poverty. A further inconsistency appears in his claims that agricultural cultivation had declined, despite his own descriptions of flourishing urban centres such as Agra, which he considered larger than Paris. Such cities could hardly have been sustained without significant agrarian surplus.

According to Stanley J. Tambiah, one of the most effective challenges to Bernier’s thesis of absolute Mughal sovereignty has been Irfan Habib’s authoritative work The Agrarian System of Mughal India (1556–1707), based on a meticulous study of imperial revenue records. Habib’s analysis of the status and powers of the landholders (zamindars) directly falsifies Bernier’s claim that Mughal India lacked private property in land, intermediate powers, and political fragmentation. On the question of the supposed absence of a judicial system, Bernier has been critiqued by R. P. Tripathi, who devotes an entire chapter to the Mughal judiciary in his The Rise and Fall of the Mughal Empire. Likewise, while Bernier emphasized the oppressive and extractive nature of Mughal governance, P. Saran in The Provincial Government of the Mughals (1526–1658) presents a more nuanced picture of a benevolent and self-restrained sovereignty.

Bernier’s characterization of the emperor and Mughal bureaucracy as “foreigners”, moreover, has remained one of the most contentious and debated aspects of his work (Tambiah 1998).

The philosophical value of Bernier’s letters

Despite the above-detailed limitations, the significance of Bernier’s writings, however, as Burke writes, lies less in the factual reliability of his observations and more in what might be termed the “uses” of India for Bernier himself. Burke bases his analysis on the subtext underlying Bernier’s letters: they reflect his unease with the political changes in France during his absence—specifically, the early years of Louis XIV’s rule—and can be read as a veiled recommendation to return to more traditional forms of governance.

Bernier’s critique of Mughal despotism may in fact have been an indirect commentary on the absolutist system under construction in France by the king and his finance minister Colbert. Whether or not Colbert was aware of such a subtext is impossible to determine, but it is clear that Bernier participates in a long intellectual tradition of using “the orient” as a mirror to critique Europe; a writing tradition started by Edward Said whose works too suffer from multiple limitations, majorly the well known biased “oriental gaze” (Burke 1999, 130).

Placed within this genealogy, Bernier occupies a dual position: on the one hand, he provides a lens to view how European anxieties were projected onto Asian polities; on the other, his writings fed into later European constructions of “the orient”. Most notably, Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes drew upon the Persian “other” as a device to disillusion French readers with their own institutions, a technique that owes much to Bernier’s example. Such was the legacy of Bernier, the early “philosophical traveller”, whose letters were as much about Mughal India as they were about the political dilemmas of France.

Travel as intellectual wandering

As a critical thinker, one must always locate a historical source within its context. Bernier’s letters, despite their distortions and omissions, were shaped by his basic aim of making Mughal India intelligible to European readers who had never left their own continent. His literary strategy was therefore complex but also justified: he framed the unfamiliar in ways that resonated with familiar European debates. In doing so, he reminds us that travel is not only about physical displacement but also about the production of knowledge—sometimes new, sometimes refracted through old anxieties, and often offering fresh perspectives on both the “other” and the self.

What I wish to therefore convey is that, for me, Bernier’s account exemplifies how travel can serve as a way of knowing, a form of intellectual wandering; perhaps the very dimension that is missing from our own travels and travel accounts today, too often reduced to movement without reflection.

References

Bernier, F. 1914. “Letter to Monseigneur Colbert.” In Travels in the Mogul Empire, A.D. 1656-1668, translated by Archibald Constable. Oxford University Press.

Burke, P. 1999. “The Philosopher as Traveller: Bernier’s Orient.” In Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel, edited by Jaś Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubies. Reaktion Books.

Ray, A. 2004. “Francois Bernier’s Idea of India.” In India-Studies in the History of an Idea, edited by Irfan Habib. Munshiram Manoharlal.

Tambiah. S. J. (1998). “What did Bernier actually say? Profiling the Mughal empire.” Contributions to Indian Sociology 32 (2): 361-86. https://doi.org/10.1177/006996679803200210