François Bernier

François Bernier (1625 – 1688) was a French physician and traveler, born at Joué-Etiau /Anjou. For 12 years he was the personal physician of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb.

His 1684 publication Nouvelle division de la terre par les différentes espèces ou races qui l'habitent is considered the first published post-Classical classification of humans into distinct races. He wrote Travels in the Mughal Empire, which is mainly about the reigns of Dara Shikoh and Aurangzeb.

Life
A son of farmers, François Bernier, was orphaned very young and was cared for by his uncle, the curé de Chanzeaux. At age 15, he moved to Paris to study at the Collège de Clermont (the future Lycée Louis-le-Grand) where he was invited to stay at the home of his younger friend Chapelle, the natural son of Luillier who was a counselor at the parliament in Metz. There Bernier most probably met Cyrano de Bergerac and Molière, and certainly the philosopher Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), whose aide and secretary he became. He developed a taste for travel (1647) in the company of monsieur d'Arpajon, the French ambassador to Poland and Germany.

In 1652 during a prolonged stay with Gassendi in the south of France, he managed to become a medical doctor on the strength of a speed-course at the famous Faculté de Montpellier: an intensive three-month course gave the medical degree providing one did not practice on French national territory.

Liberated from his ties to France by the death of Gassendi (1655) he set out on his twelve-year journey to the East, at 36 years of age: Palestine, Egypt, one year in Cairo, Arabia, Ethiopia. In 1658 he debarked at Surat in India, in Gujarat state. Attached at first and for a short while to the retinue of Dara Shikoh -- the history of whose downfall he was to record -- he was installed as a medical doctor at the court of Aurangzeb, the last of the great Mughal emperors.

A tour of inspection by Aurangzeb (1664-1665) gave Bernier the opportunity to describe Kashmir, the first and for a long time the only European to do so. In: "Voyages de F. Bernier (angevin) contenant la description des Etats du Grand Mogol, de l'Indoustan, du royaume de Kachemire" (David-Paul Maret ed., Amsterdam, 1699).

After his return from Kashmir, he traveled around on his own, meeting with Jean-Baptiste Tavernier in Bengal and -- while preparing for a journey to Persia at Surat -- with Jean Chardin, that other great traveler in the Orient (1666).

He returned once more to Surat (1668) to write a memoir on Indian commerce for the use of Jean-Baptiste Colbert (who recently had founded La Compagnie des Indes Orientales). In 1669 Bernier left India for Paris, to stay.

In 1671 he almost was jailed for writing in defense of the ideas of René Descartes, against whom a judicial arrest had been issued -- an exploit he followed with an "Abrégé de la Philosophie de Gassendi", also not a subject to arouse official approval (1674).

Meanwhile he was a favored guest at some of the great literary salons, for example that of Marguerite de la Sablière, who introduced him to Jean de La Fontaine; or at that of Ninon de Lenclos. (His much-debated text on "races" -- "A New Division of the Earth", of which the second half is dedicated to feminine beauty -- may be read against this background.)

In 1685 Bernier visited London where he met with some famous exiles from France: Hortense Mancini, Duchesse de Mazarin, niece of the redoubtable Cardinal; Saint-Evremond; others. He returned to Paris via the Netherlands, where he probably visited his philosophical correspondent Pierre Bayle.

Bernier died in 1688, the year that saw the publication of his "Lettre sur le quiétisme des Indes". (see note: )

Foremost among his correspondents while he was in India had been Jean Chapelain, who shipped him crates of books, Melchisédech Thévenot, and François de La Mothe-Le-Vayer. From Chapelain's correspondence we know of a link with the elder Pétis de la Croix, whose son François Pétis de la Croix was sent on a language course to Persia two years after Bernier's return from India.

Note: this description of the life of François Bernier is abstracted from a French introduction by France Bhattacharya to an edition of "Voyage dans les Etats du Grand Mogol" (Paris: Fayard, 1981).

Danishmand Khan
In India Bernier came under the protection of Daneshmand Khan -- Mullah Shafi'a'i, a native of Yazd -- an important official at the court of Aurangzeb. Mullah Shafi'a'i was secretary of state for foreign affairs, grand master of the horse, later treasurer (Mir Bakshi) and governor of Delhi (died 1670).

Two excerpts from "Travels in the Mughal Empire" may serve to illustrate the interchange that followed. The importance of the detail could only fully be appreciated in the last decades of the 20th century, following the monumental contributions by Henry Corbin and Seyyed Hossein Nasr to the history of Islamic philosophy. (ref. Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi 1986)

1° -commenting on the yogi manner of meditation: "''However I know that this ravishment and the way to enter it are the great mystery of the cabal of the Yogis, as it is of the Sufis. I say mystery because they keep it hidden amongst them and if it were not for my Pandit; and that Danishmand Khan knew the mysteries of the cabal of the Sufis, I would not know as much as I did." ''

2° "(...)do not be surprised if without knowledge of Sanskrit I am going to tell you many things taken from books in that language; you will know that my Agha Danismand Khan paid for the presence of one of the most famous pandits in India, who before had been pensioned by Dara Shikoh, the oldest son of Shah Jahan, and that this pandit, apart from attracting the most learned scientists to our circle, was at my side for over three years. When I became weary of explaining to my Agha the latest discoveries of William Harvey and Pequet in anatomy, and to reason with him on the philosophy of Gassendi and Descartes, which I translated into Persian (because that is what I did during five or six years) it was up to our pandit to argue."(excerpts taken from the chapter "Lettre à Monsieur Chapelain, de Shiraz en Perse, le 4 October 1667" ed. Fayard 1981).

A candidate for becoming Bernier's "pandit" probably would have come from the circle around Hindu scholars such as Jagannatha Panditaraja, who still was at work under Shah Jahan, or Kavindracharya, who taught Dara Sikhoh Sanskrit. (ref. Tara Chand 1961)

His intellectual partner could be someone like Zu'lfaqar Ardistani (died 1670), author of the "Dabistan-i Mazahib" -- "The Dabistan or the School of Manners", translated by David Shea and Anthony Troyer (Paris, 1843) -- an overview of religious diversity (Jewish, Christian Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim ...). He was educated perhaps by Mir Abul-Qasim Astrabadi Findiriski -- (Mir Fendereski, as noted by Henry Corbin in his "History of Islamic Philosophy"): a link between the religious tolerance aspect of the great project of Persian translations, initiated by Akbar and continued by his great-grandson Dara Shikoh, and the School of Isfahan near the end of the Safavid reign -- or perhaps he was educated by Hakim Kamran Shirazi, to whom Mir Findiriski referred as "elder brother", who studied Christian theology and the Gospel under Portuguese priests, traveled to India to study Sanskrit Shastra, lived with the yogi Chatrupa at Benares, and died -- chanting the liberation of the philosophers -- at the age of 100. Those were scholars who had a profound knowledge of Greek peripatetic philosophers (mashsha'un, falasifa -- in the Arabic translations), as well as a profound respect for Ibn Sina and Shihabuddin Yahya Suhrawardi Maqtul (Hikmat al Ishraq).

An interesting philosophical aside: France Battacharya tells us she has removed, in her critical edition based on the 1724 edition, the chapter "Lettre à Chapelle sur les atomes" -- as being not so relevant to the context. One wonders...

Note: the background to Bernier's philosophical interchange was composed from data collected in "Shi'a Contributions to Philosophy, Science and Literature in India" by Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi in "A Socio-Intellectual History of the Isna 'Ashari Shi'is in India" (1989).

Racial Classification System
François Bernier developed a racial classification system in his New division of Earth by the different species or races which inhabit it. He declared in this paper that Native Americans, North Africans and South Asians have little physical disimilarities from Europeans other than their dark skin. He is counted as one of the first anthropologists to specify race using physical characteristics. See also:)