Francoise Bernier Brought Kashmir to France
Françoise Bernier (1620–1688) was instrumental in mediating Kashmir to a French intellectual audience in the late seventeenth century. As physician to the Mughal court and correspondent of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Bernier accompanied Aurangzeb’s entourage across the Pir Panjal in 1664–1665, and subsequently codified his observations in "Voyages dans les États du Grand Mogol (1670–1688)" . Crucially, Bernier’s epistemological framing indebted to Cartesian rationalism , rendered Kashmir legible within French categories of geography, political economy, and comparative climate. Consequently, his text became a canonical source read and cited by the leading intellectuals of the French Enlightenment.
Key French intellectuals who read Bernier include: Voltaire, who mobilised Bernier in "Essai sur les mœurs" to contest Eurocentric chronologies; 0Montesquieu, who appropriated his data in "De l’esprit des lois" to elaborate theories of orient
al despotism and environmental determinism; Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, who drew upon Bernier extensively for entries on India, the Mughals, and Kashmir in the "Encyclopédie"; Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the statesman to whom Bernier’s original letters were addressed and who used them for information on trade and administration; and later Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, an early orientalist who treated Bernier as foundational.
Françoise Bernier brought Kashmir to France not as myth, but as a place people could finally picture. A French physician and philosopher, Bernier travelled to Mughal India between 1658 and 1670 and, in 1664–1665, accompanied Aurangzeb’s court over the Pir Panjal pass into the valley. He wrote detailed letters home, later published as "Voyages dans les États du Grand Mogol", which became the most widely read French account of India in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Before Bernier, Kashmir was little more than a name meaning “earthly paradise”. He replaced that vagueness with precise observation. He described the long, cold crossing into the valley, the ring of mountains, the meadows, villages, saffron fields, and orchards, and he likened the landscape directly to Switzerland. He noted Dal Lake, houseboats, the shawl wool of pashmina goats, cherries, melons, and how the Mughals escaped Delhi’s heat by summering there. Because he wrote with a rational, philosophical tone shaped by Descartes, his work appealed beyond travellers. Voltaire and Montesquieu quoted him extensively, Through Bernier’s book, reprinted and translated many times, Kashmir entered French political thought, literature, and imagination, and remained the definitive French image of the valley for over a century.
Bernier Created Curiosity for the Kashmiri Shawl in France
Françoise Bernier did not physically import the shawl, but he was the first to create intellectual curiosity for it in France. By describing the Kashmiri shawl with precision in "Voyages dans les États du Grand Mogol", he transformed it from a vague Eastern luxury into a specific, desirable object linked to Kashmir and Mughal refinement. His letters, addressed to Colbert and later published for the French public, framed the shawl as both a marvel of craft and a potential model for French manufacture.Bernier wrote:
"The shawls of Cashmere are made of the wool of a certain goat, which is found in the country of Thibet, and which is exceedingly fine and soft. This wool is brought to Cashmere, where it is spun and woven into shawls of such delicacy that a single shawl can be passed through a ring.They are of several colours, but the most esteemed are white, or white with a border of flowers."
It laid the groundwork for the later 18th and 19th century fashion for shawls in France, culminating with Empress Josephine.
( Avtar Mota )
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