The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India. Tristram Stuart

Franciscan who set out to check up on the progress of the Eastern Catholic mission ended up using vegetarianism as a bridge between his religion and Buddhism.³⁰

      The Renaissance travellers who followed the missionaries to India reinforced expectations of finding remnants of Paradise. When the Venetian merchant Nicolò Conti returned from his Indian travels in 1448, the Pope sent his secretary, Poggio Bracciolini, to record what he had seen. The ancient Greek accounts of India – principally Strabo’s Geography (AD 23) – had just been rediscovered, and Conti’s new stories caused huge excitement. He spoke of ‘Bachali’ – presumably the descendants of the converts Bacchus had made on his mythical trip to India – who ‘abstain from all animal food, in particular the ox’.³¹ The Brahmins (whom Poggio differentiated from the Bachali) were great astrologers and prophets, living free from diseases to the age of 300, and their asceticism competed with anything practised in Europe.³²

      In 1520 the German cleric Joannes Boemus published his Omnium gentium mores, leges & ritus, a massive comparative ethnology which went through innumerable editions in French, Italian, Spanish and in English as The Fardle of Facions (1555). Boemus filled out what the classical sources did not provide with utopian fantasy: the ‘unchristened Brahmanes’, he said, put Europeans to shame by living a ‘pure and simple life … content with suche foode as commeth to hande’.³³ This was hardly less fantastic than the part-fictional, part-plagiarised Travels of Sir John Mandeville written in the mid-1300s, which had imagined the ‘Isle of Bragman’ inhabited by pagans ‘full of all virtue’ living chaste and sober lives in ‘perpetual peace’.³⁴ Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) was inspired by similar idealistic reports; More’s Utopians, like the Indians, exercise temperance, are kind to animals and live in political harmony; there is even a cryptic suggestion that they are gymnosophists.³⁵

This type of exotic idealism was elaborated by scores of other writers, such as Tommaso Campanella who wrote The City of the Sun in 1602, soon after being committed to twenty-five years’ imprisonment for attempting to establish a Hermetic solar utopia in Calabria. The narrator of Campanella’s story – a world-travelled sea captain – reports that the inhabitants of the City of the Sun rarely drink wine, never get the diseases of gluttonous Europe, live for up to 200 years, and derive their deistic^* religion from the Brahmins.³⁶ Campanella was so aware that vegetarianism would be expected of his ideal community that he wittily took the issue face on: ‘They were unwilling at first to slay animals, because it seemed cruel; but thinking afterward that it was also cruel to destroy herbs which have a share of sensitive feeling, they saw that they would perish from hunger … Nevertheless, they do not willingly kill useful animals, such as oxen and horses.’³⁷ More than a century later the theme was still very much alive, reappearing satirically in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) in which the barbarous flesh-eating Yahoos contrast with the idealised Houyhnhnms who only eat herbivorous food (as does Gulliver during most of his residence with them).³⁸ Like the travel literature they were based on, these utopian works critiqued European manners by setting them against other cultures. It is little wonder that puritanical enthusiasts in Europe sought to recreate the ideal communities at home which they read about in both travel and utopian literature.

      As the voyages of discovery fuelled a new wave of interest in India, travel literature became a subject of serious intellectual study. Renaissance scholars started interpreting Indian religions along similar lines as classical Greek and Roman paganism, forging the path for the late eighteenth-century Orientalism of Sir William Jones.³⁹ Some travellers were even bold enough to legitimise Indian customs by pointing out similarities with their own culture. In 1515, a Florentine envoy wrote from Cochin to tell Giuliano de Medici that he had encountered vegetarians who ‘do not feed upon anything that contains blood, nor do they permit among them that any injury be done to any living thing, like our Leonardo da Vinci’.⁴⁰ Da Vinci – who was himself rumoured to have travelled in the Orient – had spent decades ranting against cruelty to animals and deploring how man had made himself their ‘sepulchre’, despite the plentiful vegetable food provided by nature. Like the Hindus, he even lamented that eating eggs deprived future beings of life. Contemporaries related how da Vinci used to buy caged birds to set them free – an act of charity long associated with Pythagoras, and a habit now being remarked upon by European travellers in India.⁴¹

      Renaissance Neoplatonists had developed a method of syncretising the various pagan philosophies from Greece, Rome and Egypt and decoding them to find the hidden truths that lay behind their fantastic exterior. Some teachings of paganism were thus made compatible with Christianity. When new information became available on Indian ‘gentiles’ (or ‘Gentoos’ as they were often called), it was partially incorporated into this ready-made framework. But the Indians stood out, for unlike other bygone pagan peoples, they still existed. To some, this made them more threatening, but to anyone predisposed to learn from ancient Eastern sages, it made the Indians particularly sensational. Europeans were familiar with the vegetarian teachings of Pythagoras, and they had the biblical story of Eden engraved upon their hearts. But the Indian vegetarians stimulated an unparalleled renewal of interest, and the constant flow of varied reports about them encouraged a constant reappraisal of their significance. Europeans did project their own preconceptions onto Indian vegetarianism, but some tenets from Indian philosophy still managed to enter Europeans’ consciousness. Indian culture exerted a powerful influence which altered Western understanding of the religious and ethical issues raised by the practice of abstaining from meat.

      At the tail end of the fifteenth century, after years of trying to open the sea route to India, the Portuguese sea-captain Vasco da Gama and his crew limped round the Cape of Good Hope, and flopped – bedraggled and empty-handed – onto the Western coast of India. Da Gama’s mission had a commercial goal: to find a means of importing Indian spices without using the expensive Muslim-dominated land route. But King Manuel of Portugal had also allegedly threatened da Gama that on pain of death he was not to return until he found the legendary Christian King of India, the perennial ‘Prester John’. Almost the first people da Gama’s men met on their arrival were dreadlocked Indians who seemed willing to worship the Portuguese images of the Virgin Mary, possibly seeing in the baby Christ a counterpart of their own baby Krishna. The Portuguese rejoiced at having linked up with their long-lost Christian brothers, and after an initial hesitation about the odd Indian ‘churches’, in a gush of enthusiasm, they knelt down and prayed in the Hindu temples.

      The Portuguese soon realised that these ‘Christians’ were not entirely ordinary. They not only ‘ate no beef’, but when da Gama and his men arrived at the Calicut court for dinner they found that – in startling contrast to the lavish banquets of European royalty – the King ‘eats neither meat nor fish nor anything that has been killed, nor do his barons, courtiers, or other persons of quality, for they say that Jesus Christ said in his law that he who kills shall die’. While the Portuguese remained under the delusion that the Indians were Christian, they were more than willing to integrate local vegetarianism into the biblical commandment against killing, and noted with amazement that it was actually perfectly possible for humans to live without eating meat.⁴²

      But da Gama and his men gradually realised that they had been mistaken about the Indians’ Christianity and they became less tolerant about their vegetarian foibles. By this time, the other major European powers were eyeing with envy the Portuguese monopoly on Indian trade. At the end of