CDS (I) 2021 General Knowledge · Question 29 of 120

Correct — D, Prince Dara Shikoh. The school text is explicit: Bernier was in India for twelve years, from 1656 to 1668, and was closely associated with the Mughal court as a physician to Prince Dara Shukoh, the eldest son of Emperor Shah Jahan, and later as an intellectual and scientist with Danishmand Khan, an Armenian noble at the court. The dates explain why the association was short. Bernier reached India in 1656 and the war of succession broke out the next year; Dara Shukoh was defeated and executed in 1659, after which Bernier attached himself to Danishmand Khan and stayed until 1668. He was a Frenchman who was doctor, political philosopher and historian at once, and the book that came out of these years, dedicated to Louis XIV, is the source of the argument that there was no private property in land in the Mughal Empire and that this explained everything he thought was wrong with it. The claim is disputed by historians, but it shaped European writing on Asia for a century.

• (a)Prince Murad — Another of Shah Jahan's sons and a participant in the same war of succession, which is what makes him a plausible-looking option. Bernier's attachment was to Dara Shukoh, the eldest brother, and never to Murad.
• (b)Princess Jahanara — Shah Jahan's eldest daughter and a considerable figure at court, close to Dara Shukoh in the succession struggle. Being near the same prince is not the same as being the traveller's patron, and no such attachment is recorded.
• (c)Emperor Shah Jahan — The most tempting wrong answer, because Bernier is a Shah Jahan-era traveller and the emperor is the biggest name on the list. The connection ran through the emperor's son. By the time Bernier had settled into the court, Shah Jahan was in any case a prisoner of Aurangzeb at Agra.

Foreign travellers are a distinct category of source for medieval India because they notice what insiders take for granted, and because each brings the preoccupations of his own society. The seventeenth-century group is examined most often — Bernier the French physician and philosopher, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier the gem merchant who left the classic account of the diamond mines, Niccolao Manucci the Italian doctor who never went home, and Peter Mundy the English factor. Reading them requires care: Bernier was writing for a European audience and comparing everything he saw with Europe, and by his own account almost always to India's disadvantage.

The option list is built entirely from Shah Jahan's family, so the item is a test of one precise link rather than of general familiarity. The way to keep travellers straight is to attach each to a patron and a signature subject — Bernier to Dara Shukoh and the theory of crown ownership of land, Tavernier to the diamond trade, Manucci to a long life in India, Ibn Battuta much earlier to Muhammad bin Tughlaq and the postal system. Bernier's dates are worth carrying too, because they place him across the succession war of 1657 to 1659, which is the event his readers in Europe most wanted described.

• François Bernier, a Frenchman, was a doctor, political philosopher and historian.
• He was in India for twelve years, from 1656 to 1668.
• He served as physician to Prince Dara Shukoh, the eldest son of Shah Jahan, and was later associated with Danishmand Khan, an Armenian noble at the Mughal court.
• He dedicated his major work to Louis XIV of France, and many of his other writings took the form of letters to influential officials and ministers.
• His central argument was that crown ownership of land, and the absence of private property in land, was the root of the empire's condition — a claim historians dispute.
• Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, a contemporary French traveller, left the best-known European account of India's diamond mines.

• Attaching a traveller to the emperor of the period rather than to his actual patron.
• Confusing Bernier with Tavernier; the names are close and both are French and of the same decades.
• Treating Bernier's account of Mughal land ownership as established fact rather than as a contested argument.

As a traveller-to-patron item, or as a match-the-following pairing travellers with their nationality, their period or the subject they wrote about.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Mughal noble with whom François Bernier was associated after the death of his first patron was

  • (a)Mir Jumla
  • (b)Danishmand Khan
  • (c)Jai Singh
  • (d)Shaista Khan

  Answer(b) Danishmand Khan — an Armenian noble at the Mughal court, with whom Bernier stayed as an intellectual and scientist until he left India in 1668.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The traveller who argued that there was no private property in land in the Mughal Empire, and that this explained its condition, was

  • (a)Niccolao Manucci
  • (b)Jean-Baptiste Tavernier
  • (c)François Bernier
  • (d)Peter Mundy

  Answer(c) François Bernier — the argument runs through his account of the empire and shaped European writing on Asia long afterwards, though historians dispute it.