Source: 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).

At the age of 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 councillor at the parlement in Metz.

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 1685 Bernier visited London where he met with some famous exiles from France: Hortense Mancini, Duchesse de Mazarin, niece of the redoubtable Cardinal; Saint-Évremond; others.

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.

In 1684 Bernier published a brief essay dividing humanity into what he called "races", distinguishing individuals, and particularly women, by skin color and a few other physical traits.

[2] His biological classification of racial types never sought to go beyond physical traits, and he also accepted the role of climate and diet in explaining degrees of human diversity.

Bernier had been the first to extend the concept of "species of man" to classify racially the entirety of humanity, but he did not establish a cultural hierarchy between the so-called 'races' that he had conceived.

Bernier’s conception of biological or racial difference and variation due to climatic features is blurry, but contributed to the eventual development of theories of scientific racism.

Thus, the context of scientific discourse at the time meant Bernier did not receive huge attention for his classification in the second half of the 17th century, and "he remained a man of the salons".

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).

The importance of the detail could only fully be appreciated in the last decades of the 20th century, following the contributions by Henry Corbin and Seyyed Hossein Nasr to the history of Islamic philosophy.

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.

[8]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.

[10] His intellectual partner could be someone like Zu'lfaqar Ardistani (died 1670), author of the Dabistan-i Mazahib, an overview of religious diversity (Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim ...).

He was educated perhaps by Mir Abul-Qasim Astrabadi Findiriski[11] 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 knowledge of Greek peripatetic philosophers (mashsha'un, falasifa—in the Arabic translations), as well as respect for Ibn Sina and Shihabuddin Yahya Suhrawardi Maqtul (Hikmat al Ishraq).