Bernier and the “Degenerate” East

François Bernier belonged to a very different intellectual tradition from Ibn Battuta. Where Ibn Battuta described what impressed him for its novelty, Bernier was preoccupied with comparing and contrasting India with Europe — especially France — and focusing on what he considered depressing. His aim was to influence policy-makers and the intelligentsia to make what he saw as the “right” decisions.

Bernier’s Travels in the Mughal Empire is marked by detailed observations, critical insights, and reflection. He tried to place Mughal history within a universal framework, constantly comparing Mughal India with contemporary Europe and generally emphasising the superiority of the latter. His representation of India works on a model of binary opposition: India is presented as the inverse of Europe. He then ordered these perceived differences hierarchically, so that India appeared inferior to the Western world.

The question of landownership

According to Bernier, one fundamental difference between Mughal India and Europe was the lack of private property in land in India. He was a firm believer in the virtues of private property and saw crown ownership of land as harmful for both the state and its people. He thought that in the Mughal Empire the emperor owned all the land and distributed it among his nobles, and that this had disastrous consequences.

This perception was not unique to Bernier but is found in most travellers’ accounts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Because of crown ownership, argued Bernier, landholders could not pass on their land to their children. So they were averse to any long-term investment in sustaining or expanding production. The absence of private property in land had prevented the emergence of a class of “improving” landlords (as in Western Europe) who would maintain or improve the land. It had led to:

• The uniform ruination of agriculture
• Excessive oppression of the peasantry
• A continuous decline in the living standards of all sections of society except the ruling aristocracy

Bernier described the peasantry in the countryside as living in desperate conditions. He wrote that vast tracts of the empire were little more than sand or barren mountains, badly cultivated and thinly populated. Even good land remained untilled for want of labourers, many of whom perished because of the bad treatment they experienced from governors. Poor people, when they became incapable of discharging the demands of their rapacious lords, were not only deprived of the means of subsistence but also lost their children, who were carried away as slaves. Driven to despair by such excessive tyranny, the peasantry abandoned the country.

In this instance, Bernier was participating in contemporary European debates about the nature of state and society. He intended his description of Mughal India to serve as a warning to those who did not recognise the “merits” of private property.

As an extension of this, Bernier described Indian society as consisting of undifferentiated masses of impoverished people, subjugated by a small minority of a very rich and powerful ruling class. Between the poorest of the poor and the richest of the rich, there was no social group or class worth the name. He confidently asserted: “There is no middle state in India.”

This is how Bernier saw the Mughal Empire: its king was the king of “beggars and barbarians”; its cities and towns were ruined and contaminated with “ill air”; and its fields were “overspread with bushes” and full of “pestilential marishes”. And all this, he claimed, was because of one reason: crown ownership of land.

Influence on Western theorists

Bernier’s descriptions influenced Western theorists from the eighteenth century onwards.

• Montesquieu used this account to develop the idea of oriental despotism, according to which rulers in Asia (the Orient or the East) enjoyed absolute authority over their subjects, who were kept in conditions of subjugation and poverty. All land belonged to the king and private property was non-existent. Everybody except the emperor and his nobles barely managed to survive.
• Karl Marx further developed this as the concept of the Asiatic mode of production in the nineteenth century. He argued that in India (and other Asian countries), before colonialism, surplus was appropriated by the state. This led to a society composed of a large number of autonomous and internally egalitarian village communities. The imperial court presided over these communities, respecting their autonomy as long as the flow of surplus was unimpeded. This was regarded as a stagnant system.

However, this picture of rural society was far from true. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, rural society was characterised by considerable social and economic differentiation. At one end were the big zamindars, who enjoyed superior rights in land, and at the other were the “untouchable” landless labourers. In between were the big peasant, who used hired labour and engaged in commodity production, and the smaller peasant who could barely produce for his subsistence.

A more complex social reality

While Bernier’s preoccupation with projecting the Mughal state as tyrannical is obvious, his descriptions occasionally hint at a more complex social reality.

For instance, he felt that artisans had no incentive to improve the quality of their manufactures, since profits were appropriated by the state. Manufactures were, consequently, everywhere in decline. At the same time, he conceded that vast quantities of the world’s precious metals flowed into India, as manufactures were exported in exchange for gold and silver. He also noticed the existence of a prosperous merchant community engaged in long-distance exchange.

In one excerpt, Bernier described both agriculture and craft production in a different light. He observed that a large portion of the country was extremely fertile — the large kingdom of Bengal, for instance, surpassing Egypt itself not only in the production of rice, corn, and other necessaries of life, but of innumerable articles of commerce such as silks, cotton, and indigo. He noted that in many parts of the Indies, the population was sufficiently abundant and the land pretty well tilled. The artisan, although naturally indolent, was compelled by necessity to employ himself in manufacturing carpets, brocades, embroideries, gold and silver cloths, and the various sorts of silk and cotton goods used in the country or exported abroad. He also noted that gold and silver, after circulating in every other quarter of the globe, came at length to be swallowed up, lost in some measure, in Hindustan.

During the seventeenth century, about 15 per cent of the population lived in towns. This was, on average, higher than the proportion of urban population in Western Europe in the same period.

In spite of this, Bernier described Mughal cities as “camp towns” — towns that owed their existence and depended for their survival on the imperial camp. He believed they came into existence when the imperial court moved in and rapidly declined when it moved out. He suggested they did not have viable social and economic foundations but were dependent on imperial patronage.

As in the case of landownership, Bernier was drawing an oversimplified picture. There were all kinds of towns: manufacturing towns, trading towns, port-towns, sacred centres, pilgrimage towns, etc. Their existence is an index of the prosperity of merchant communities and professional classes.

Merchants often had strong community or kin ties and were organised into their own caste-cum-occupational bodies. In western India these groups were called mahajans, and their chief, the sheth. In urban centres such as Ahmedabad, the mahajans were collectively represented by the chief of the merchant community who was called the nagarsheth. …