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

trading ventures. The British followed hot on their heels, promising the Great Mughal an alliance with Queen Elizabeth. They came in search of riches, but they knew there was also a market back home for tales of wonder and adventure, and each nation produced its own scribe of India.

      One of the things that fascinated Europeans most were the vegetarians. In fact, only certain groups of Hindus were actually vegetarian. Most Brahmins upheld their caste purity laws by abstaining from meat, and to some Europeans this gave them an aura of austere sanctity. But still more surprising to Western travellers were the masses of ordinary people who lived on what in Europe was considered an exceptionally abstemious diet. Many Banians, the trading caste, were strict vegetarians especially on the Western coast in Gujarat, and some of these joined the all-vegetarian Jains.⁴³ Several Jain monks held prominent positions at the Mughal courts and Europeans were well-placed to observe them there and even interrogate them on their beliefs.⁴⁴ It should be noted that many of the ancient Sanskrit texts that applaud vegetarianism and ahimsa also list numerous exceptions under which meat-eating was allowed and even praised. These included cases of medical necessity; ritual sacrifice of animals; and hunting by the princely-warrior caste, the Ksatriyas.⁴⁵ Sanskrit texts such as the Laws of Manu (200 BC–AD 200) actually state (just like Aristotle) that it was natural for humans to be predators: ‘animals without fangs are the food of those with fangs, those without hands of those who possess hands, and the timid of the bold.’⁴⁶ It was partly because eating animals was natural that abstaining was seen as a virtue. Thus the same text promises that ‘He who does not seek to cause the sufferings of bonds and death to living creatures, but desires the good of all beings, obtains endless bliss.’⁴⁷ Europeans became fixated with the belief system underlying the Indians’ vegetarianism and nearly every traveller marvelled at it, revealing in their responses their own prejudices and preoccupations: what was the proper relation between man and beast? What diet was suitable for the human body? What happened to people’s temperament when they no longer committed daily violence to animals? Whatever the answers to these questions, one thing was certain: encountering Indian vegetarianism triggered a review of European morality. Hinduism became the arena in which these issues were fought out, and the travellers’ varying responses produced a vocabulary for discussing the vegetarian question in the wider context.

      The Indians’ apparent animal worship was a massive hurdle for Christians to overcome.⁴⁸ Zoolatry was the ultimate degradation of God and humanity, and many took temple images of animals as proof that Hindus worshipped the devil.⁴⁹ The most prominent instance of ‘animal worship’ in India, which everyone commented on, was the reverence for the cow.⁵⁰ European Christians found the habit abominable – reminiscent as it was of the Israelites’ golden calf and the Egyptian god Apis – and this made a great excuse for pillaging golden cows from temples.⁵¹ The Franciscan missionary to India and China, Odoric of Pordenone (1286–1331), whose account was plagiarised in the widely successful Mandeville’s Travels, wrote disparagingly of pagans who washed in cow dung and urine as if it were holy water.⁵² Scatological details about Indians using cattle faeces as a cleansing agent for houses, bodies and souls became a staple of European writing about Hinduism.⁵³

      Indian cow-worship from the frontispiece of Thomas Herbert’s A Relation of Some Yeares Travaile … (1634)

      But alongside such stereotyping, Europeans as early as Marco Polo were prepared to see a utilitarian rationale behind cow worship. Cattle, they noticed, were the primary beasts of burden in India, responsible for cultivating the fields as well as providing milk, so any religious law that sought to protect the cow contributed to the agronomy and well-being of the country.⁵⁴ ‘[T]his superior regard for the cow,’ wrote François Bernier in 1667, ‘may more probably be owing to her extraordinary usefulness.’⁵⁵ In fact, there was already a long tradition of reading self-interested motives into cow-protection laws. St Thomas Aquinas, even while arguing against vegetarianism, allowed that some food taboos were rational, instancing Egypt where ‘the eating of the flesh of the ox was prohibited in olden times so that agriculture would not be hindered’.⁵⁶ St Jerome, likewise, commented that in Egypt and Palestine the killing of calves was prohibited in ‘the interests of agriculture’. Even in sixteenth-century England, Queen Elizabeth had outlawed meat-eating during Lent to allow cattle stocks and grazing lands to be replenished.⁵⁷

      Brahmin with cow, from Henry Lord’s A Display of two forraigne sects in the East Indies (1630)

      However, the protection of animals that were not useful flabbergasted even the most hardened travellers. The sixteenth-century Portuguese writer Duarte Barbosa was astounded by the ‘marvellous’ extreme to which the Indians took ‘this law of not killing anything’. ‘For it often happens,’ he reported, ‘that the Moors bring them some worms or little birds alive, saying they intend to kill them in their presence; and they ransom them, and buy them to set them flying, and save their lives for more money than they are worth.’⁵⁸ He was still more astonished – as future European travellers would be – to find that noxious insects like lice were looked after by special people allotted to the task of feeding them with their own blood.⁵⁹

      Christians thought that animals were made for humans, so an animal’s value was dependent on its usefulness. The Hindus and Jains, they perceived, had a fundamentally different system which attributed value to animal life independent from, and even at the expense of, man. In the 1590s the Dutch traveller to India John Huygen van Linschoten articulated this in his internationally best-selling travelogue Itinerario (The Journey), by explaining that the Banians ‘kill nothing in the world that has life, however small and useless it may be’. Despite his culture-shock, Linschoten rendered such morals comprehensible by giving them a Christian gloss: the Hindus, he explained, consider it ‘a work of great charity, saying, it is don to their even neighbours’.⁶⁰ It became common for Europeans to regard the Hindu value of animal life not so much as something completely alien, but as an extension of laws compatible with Christianity such as ‘loving thy neighbour’.⁶¹ In that framework, Hindus were seen by some as more virtuous than Christians. As one English gentleman put in the 1680s, it was ‘a sad thing’ that in respect of their treatment of animals ‘Christians, very many of them, may go to School, and learn of Infidels and Heathens to reform their Lives and Manners’.⁶²

      The ultimate surprise for the Europeans were the Indian ‘animal hospitals’.⁶³ Again, Europeans were most challenged by the fact that such hospitals expended effort and money on animals that were past their usefulness. ‘They have hospitals for sheepe, goates, dogs, cats, birds, and for all other living creatures,’ wrote Ralph Fitch, the first Englishman to write a travelogue on India in 1594. ‘When they be old and lame, they keepe them