The landownership debate and the "degenerate East"

In this note

Detail

François Bernier was a French doctor. He trained in medicine at the University of Montpellier and was born at Joué in the Loire valley, France. [2]
He stayed in India about 12 years, 1658–1669. [2]
His jobs here:
first personal physician to Dara Shikoh, eldest son of Shah Jahan and the named heir. [2]
later worked for Danishmand Khan, a noble at Aurangzeb's court. [2]
He saw the war of succession of 1656–59 with his own eyes, in which Aurangzeb defeated his elder brother Dara Shikoh and took the throne. [2]
In 1664 he travelled with Aurangzeb to Kashmir — "commonly called the paradise of India" — and is likely the first European to visit that province. [2]
His book came out in French as Histoire de la dernière révolution des états du Grand Mogol, Paris, 1670–71; the English version is titled Travels in the Mogul Empire. [2]
Why this matters for the exam: he was an eyewitness insider at court. That is exactly why his wrong ideas about land travelled so far and lasted so long.

The one big difference he claimed between India and Europe: India had no private property in land.
His belief: the emperor owned all the land and handed it out to his nobles.
The chain of reasoning he built on that belief — break it into steps:
a landholder could not pass the land to his children;
so he had no reason to spend money on improving it (wells, better ploughing, trees);
so India produced no class of "improving landlords" of the kind Western Europe had;
result, in his words: uniform ruination of agriculture, excessive oppression of the peasantry, and falling living standards for everybody except the small ruling aristocracy.
Important NCERT caution: this picture was not Bernier's alone. The same view appears in most travel accounts of the 16th–17th centuries.

He described India as a huge mass of poor, undifferentiated people under a tiny rich class.
His line: "There is no middle state in India" — no middle group between the very rich and the very poor.
His book was written as a warning to Europe. If European kings copied the Mughal model, he said, they would end up "kings of deserts and solitudes, of beggars and barbarians".
So the account was not neutral reporting. He was taking a side in live European debates of his own time about the state, society and private property.

No Mughal official document ever claims the state was the sole owner of the land. This is the strongest single point against Bernier.
Abu'l Fazl, Akbar's official chronicler, describes the land revenue as "remunerations of sovereignty".
Meaning: it was a payment claimed for the protection the ruler gave, not rent taken by a landlord who owned the soil.
It was, in plain terms, a tax on the crop.
Why Europeans got it wrong: the revenue demand was very high. Travellers saw a big payment going to the state and mistook a tax for rent — and rent implies an owner.

Village society in the 16th–17th centuries showed considerable differentiation (clear layers of rich and poor). Bernier's "no middle state" is simply false. The layers, top to bottom:
big zamindars — held superior rights in land;
big peasants — hired labour and grew crops for the market (commodity production);
smaller peasants — grew mainly enough to eat (subsistence);
landless labourers, treated as "untouchable" — owned no land at all.
So the "middle" Bernier could not see was actually there: the big peasants and the zamindars.

18th century — Montesquieu's "oriental despotism", fed directly by Bernier.
The claim: Asian rulers had absolute authority over subjects kept in subjugation and poverty; all land belonged to the king; there was no private property.
Montesquieu set this out in The Spirit of Laws (1748), one of the great works of political theory. [3][4]
In that book he sorted governments into republics, monarchies and despotisms, each with a driving principle: virtue for republics, honour for monarchies, fear for despotism. [3][4]
He also argued that climate shaped politics — hot climates, he said, made Asians physically weak, so Asia was "condemned to eternal despotism". [3]
19th century — Karl Marx's "Asiatic mode of production", a further development of the same idea.
The claim: in pre-colonial India the surplus (what was produced above what people needed to live) was taken by the state.
Villages were pictured as self-sufficient, internally equal communities, cut off from each other.
The whole system was therefore called stagnant — never changing on its own.
NCERT's plain verdict: this picture of rural society was far from true.
Exam-useful takeaway: one traveller's mistaken guess about land became theory, and the theory later served as justification for colonial rule over a supposedly changeless East.

François Bernier was a French physician trained at the University of Montpellier. [2]
He was in India for about 12 years, 1658–1669. [2]
He served first Dara Shikoh, then the Mughal noble Danishmand Khan. [2]
His book was published in French at Paris in 1670–71 as Histoire de la dernière révolution des états du Grand Mogol; English title Travels in the Mogul Empire. [2]
He travelled to Kashmir in 1664 with Aurangzeb, probably the first European in that province. [2]
Famous Bernier line: "There is no middle state in India."
Abu'l Fazl (Akbar's chronicler) called land revenue "remunerations of sovereignty" — a tax on the crop, not rent.
Montesquieu's The Spirit of Laws was published in 1748; for him the principle of despotism was fear. [3][4]
Karl Marx developed the concept of the Asiatic mode of production in the 19th century.
Rural layers in 16th–17th century India: big zamindars → big peasants → small peasants → "untouchable" landless labourers.

Travellers' accounts are evidence and argument at the same time. Bernier wrote for a European audience debating private property, so his India was partly a mirror held up to Europe. Any answer using traveller sources must ask who the intended reader was.
The crucial counter-evidence is documentary silence plus a mistranslation of category. No Mughal document claims state ownership of land, and Abu'l Fazl's "remunerations of sovereignty" shows the state was claiming a tax for protection, not rent as an owner. Europeans saw a high demand and read it as rent.
Differentiation destroys the "flat poverty" model. Big zamindars with superior rights, big peasants hiring labour and selling to the market, and "untouchable" landless labourers cannot all be one undifferentiated mass.
Ideas outlive their evidence. Bernier → Montesquieu's oriental despotism (1748) → Marx's Asiatic mode of production shows how a flawed 17th-century observation hardened into a theory of a stagnant East — a picture NCERT calls far from true, and one that later suited colonial self-justification.