Migrants: The Story of Us All by Sam Miller

Author:Sam Miller [Miller, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408713525
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2023-02-01T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

Linnaeus, Chinatown and Fu Manchu

In the early 1660s, two Frenchmen stood side by side in an Asian city, gazing at a large new white building. One of the men, a well-travelled doctor called François Bernier, who had left France more than five years earlier, admired this building greatly. Indeed, he considered it one of the finest pieces of architecture – modern or ancient – that he had ever seen. And he was about to say so, to tell his countryman that he thought this building quite astonishing, but instead he fell silent. He felt bashful. He was worried that his compatriot, a merchant just arrived from France, would judge him, would think less of him, would consider that his ‘taste might have become corrupted by long residence’ away from home.

It’s a revealing moment, which many migrants will recognise. Bernier felt caught between two cultures. He didn’t wish to be laughed at by a fellow Frenchman or to be seen as having ‘gone native’. And so he said nothing. Bernier wrote of his relief when the French merchant then turned to him and declared that he had seen nothing in Europe ‘so bold and majestic’ as the building they were gazing at, which was, as you may have guessed, a dazzlingly white new-build known as the Taj Mahal.

There are several other accounts of India written by white male migrants during the rule of the Great Mughals. But Bernier’s is unusual. He was by this time the personal physician to a senior minister at the court of the Mughal emperor that moved in a semi-nomadic fashion around northern India. He prided himself on being a philosopher and a doctor, not a merchant or missionary or mercenary or diplomat like the many other foreigners who turned up at court. Bernier was there to observe and take part, not make money or convert souls. He was interested in trying to make sense of a world that seemed to be in permanent flux, changing more rapidly than ever before. And he didn’t set out to exoticise India, or to find marvels and monstrosities to titillate European audiences. He repeatedly compared places in India to those in Europe – and so the dome of the Taj Mahal is, he insisted, like the dome of the Val de Grace church in Paris, the River Yamuna is like the Loire Valley, while Benares is the ‘Athens of India’. It was a genuine attempt to help Europeans imagine the Mughal Empire, even if its effect is to simplify and to categorise India on European terms.

There’s another more important reason why Bernier matters to this story; why he has, under the unforgiving floodlights of posterity, an alternative claim to fame, or infamy. For he was, in a particular sense of this word, the first ‘racist’. Bernier eventually left India and returned to France, for reasons that he never explained. There he published his account of the Mughal Empire, but he also wrote a short article for the Journal de Savants.

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