The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery 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 until they die.’64 In Europe, sick animals or cattle past their productive age were automatically killed. The ‘ingratitude’ that this implied became a source of anxiety for Europeans.65 Hindus appeared to be extraordinary exemplars of charity, which put some European noses out of joint. Many travellers responded to this with ridicule, but others were impressed by the workings of a moral system that was entirely neglected in the West.

In dealing with this challenge, Europeans projected onto the Indians the simplified Pythagorean idea that they abstained from killing animals for fear of hurting a reincarnated human soul. This implied that the Hindus were not valuing the life of the animal itself, but the soul of the human trapped within it. Since most Christians dismissed reincarnation as a preposterous theological error, interpreting Hindu vegetarianism in this way deflected the ethical challenge and amputated their principle of non-violence (ahimsa). It meant that writers could fall back on the long-standing Christian tradition of ridiculing the Pythagorean objection to eating flesh, as the Christian theologian Tertullian put it in the second century AD, ‘lest by chance in his beef he eats of some ancestor of his’.66 One author who assessed the scientific case for vegetarianism at the end of the seventeenth century, simply declared that the Pythagoreans didn’t count as vegetarians because their diet was based on ‘a Mistake in their Philosophy, and not a Law of Nature’.67 Christians defused the moral strength of vegetarianism by reducing it to a comical superstition.

Having projected Pythagoreanism onto the Hindus, some Europeans explained the similarity by claiming that Pythagoras had taught the Indians their vegetarian doctrines, rather than the other way round.68 This gave Pythagoras the European a superior status, and it also meant that Brahmins could be more readily assimilated into biblical history by claiming that they and their philosophy were descended from the Egyptians. By the time the clergyman Samuel Purchas published his enormous anthology of travel literature in 1625, the idea that the Indians were identical to Pythagoreans was already widespread. Purchas himself thought Pythagoras must have been to India and he printed several authors who had noticed, as King James I’s ambassador to Jahangir, Sir Thomas Roe, put it in 1616, that the Indian ‘Pythagorians’ believe in ‘the soules transmigration, and will not kyll any living creature, no, not the virmine that bites them, for feare of disseising the speiritt of some frend departed’.69 Purchas made Indian vegetarianism part of common parlance and, inevitably, these ideas wove themselves into Europe’s cultural fabric.

In the 1620s the humanist nobleman, Pietro della Valle (1586–1652), was astonished when a Brahmin called ‘Beca Azarg’ told him that Pythagoras was the same person as the Hindu god Brahma; that it was ‘Pythagoras’ who had taught metempsychosis and vegetarianism to the Brahmins and that they still revered his books.70 It was, laughed della Valle, ‘a curious notion indeed, and which perhaps would be news to hear in Europe, that Pythagoras is foolishly ador’d in India for a God’. ‘But this,’ concluded della Valle, ‘with Beca Azarg’s good leave, I do not believe.’71 Henry Lord, chaplain to the English trading post at Surat in Gujarat, did believe it. In the hope that Hinduism could be reconciled to Christianity by purging it of Pythagorean doctrines, in 1630 he set himself up as a latter-day heretic-hunting St Augustine, calling upon the Archbishop of Canterbury to reprimand the Hindus for disobeying God’s instruction to eat flesh.72 By contrast, the French editor of The Open Door to Hidden Paganism (1651), the most advanced account of the Hindus, by the Dutch missionary Abraham Rogerius, took the view that ‘Plato and Pythagoras were not ashamed to learn the basic tenets of their philosophy from the Brahmans.’73 In a conservative backlash against such liberal views in the China illustrata of 1667, the Jesuit scientist-missionary Athanasius Kircher retorted that metempsychosis had been carried to India by an execrable band of Egyptian priests and had subsequently been spread across the Eastern world (along with its corollary vegetarianism) by a ‘deadly monster’ called Buddha, ‘a very sinful brahmin imbued with Pythagoreanism’. ‘These are not tenets, but crimes,’ concluded Kircher venomously. ‘They are not doctrines, but abominations.’74

In 1665 Edward Bysshe dragged the debate into the forefront of modern politics by publishing an anthology of the ancient writings on India, including Palladius’ dialogue, in which he presented the Brahmins as pure idealists who stood up to Alexander just as modern Puritans stood up to the tyranny of Charles II.75 In the context of mid-century Puritanism, Sir Thomas Roe’s chaplain, Edward Terry (1589/90–1660), gave a strikingly accurate account of the ancient doctrine of ahimsa – that an animal values its life just as humans value theirs, so destroying it manifestly against its will constitutes an act of violent injury (himsa). This was a remarkable moment of cross-cultural understanding which Terry appears to have accomplished by interviewing Jain monks, probably in Gujarat or while travelling with Jahangir’s court. However, he did not want to give too much ground to the Indians; he drew attention away from the morally powerful doctrine of ahimsa by claiming that their main reasons for being vegetarian were the ‘mad and groundlesse phansie’ of Pythagorean metempsychosis and the false commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill any living Creature’. He castigated them for ‘forbearing the lives of the Creatures made for mens use’, but nevertheless acknowledged that they provided a better moral example than Christians who fought unrighteous wars and made riotous ‘havock and spoil’ with the animals. Going some way to meet them, Terry lauded their temperance and felt that their other ‘excellent moralities’ showed that the divine law of nature was ‘ingraved upon [their] hearts’.76

As the seventeenth century matured, liberal philosophies started to compete more strongly with the Christian orthodoxies about man and nature. Over the heads of the Indian vegetarians, the great minds of the day fought out their disputes. Were Brahmins ignorant idolaters or ancient philosophers who could teach a thing or two to the Europeans?

The seminal analysis of Indian vegetarianism came from a most unlikely quarter, and showed how the association with Pythagoras could be a path towards assimilating Hinduism. François Bernier, who served as physician at the court of the Great Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb for eight years in the 1660s, had been trained in sceptical and Epicurean philosophy under Pierre Gassendi. With this enlightened background, Bernier attacked Indian culture not simply because Hindus were deluded idolaters who failed to see the obvious truth of Christianity; rather, his ridicules were aimed at the practice of superstitious rituals (many of which, he noted, were equivalent to the irrational beliefs of European Christians).77 Bernier smiled wryly as he watched Hindus gathering en masse to bathe in sacred rivers, banging on cymbals and using incantations to ward off the evil influence of an eclipse. He recited all the ‘monstrosities’ of Hindu culture from widow-burning to sun worship. But there was one doctrine for which Bernier pulled his punches: their Pythagorean vegetarianism.

Perhaps the first legislators in the Indies hoped that the interdiction of animal food would produce a beneficial effect upon the character of the people, and that they might be brought to exercise less cruelty toward one another when required by a positive precept to treat the brute creation with humanity. The doctrine of the transmigration of souls secured the kind treatment of animals … It may also be that the Brahmens were influenced by the consideration that in their climate the flesh of cows or oxen is neither savoury nor wholesome.78

Bernier’s willingness to recognise the health benefits of abstaining from meat may have been inspired by his master, Gassendi, who had himself been a staunch advocate of the vegetable diet (see chapter 11). But Bernier even rendered the doctrine of reincarnation comprehensible to Europeans by arguing that it was not designed to protect animals for their own sake, but ultimately for the benefit of humans. He was following a common tradition that had long been used to clear Pythagoras from imputations of superstition, exemplified by the third-century Epicurean biographer-philosopher Diogenes Laertius, who claimed that Pythagoras never believed in metempsychosis, but that ‘his real reason for forbidding animal diet’ was to give people ‘a healthy body and keen mind’.79 Indeed, this interpretative technique had been used by Christians on the Bible, for example when St Thomas Aquinas insisted that if Moses appeared to care for animals, he was really just trying ‘to turn the mind of man away from cruelty which might be used on other men’.80 Erasing from Hinduism the ethic of respect for animal life, and replacing it with European ideas of diet, agronomy and temperament, may seem like aggressive manipulation, but in doing so Bernier was treating Hinduism in much the same way as Christians treated the Bible. By transposing exegetical traditions onto Indian practice and regarding the Hindus as pseudo-Pythagoreans, Bernier developed a humanist interpretation of Indian culture that detected a reservoir of ancient sagacity behind their ‘fables’.

Having identified its potential, Bernier was astonished by the advantages of vegetarianism, noticing in particular that it was India’s greatest military asset. Whereas European armies were weighed down with barrels of salted beef and tankards of wine – without which the European soldier would absolutely refuse to fight – Indian armies were perfectly content with readily transportable dried food such as lentils and rice. He looked on with disbelief as Aurangzeb’s immense army transported enough provisions for ‘prodigious and almost incredible’ numbers of people.81

Such concrete evidence of the benefits of vegetarianism made a sizeable dent in the typical European argument that meat-eating was essential for sustaining human life, or at least for strength and virility. It was commonly supposed that anyone who abstained from flesh must be effeminate, weak and lazy. This, Europeans said to themselves, was what made it so easy for meat-eating Muslims and Europeans to conquer Indian vegetarians.82 This idea of Asian effeminacy, which dates back at least 2,500 years to Hippocratic medical ethnology, became one of the most pervasive means of denigrating Hindus, especially towards the end of the eighteenth century.83 But it was counterbalanced by the recognition that the Hindus’ frugality made them at least as long-lived as Europeans, and fuelled their admired industriousness and resilience to disease.84

The Europeans’ idea that meat-eating was normal, or essential, was swiftly being demolished by the discovery of vegetarian peoples all over the world. Europeans gradually realised that instead of representing the norm, they were an exceptionally carnivorous society. In Africa and America travellers found people living in primitive simplicity ‘before’ the luxury of civilisation had corrupted them – a state with both Edenic and barbaric connotations.85 In the East vegetarianism had been preserved beyond the state of nature by virtuous temperance and the institution of sacred laws against killing animals.86 Such discoveries were to provide grist to the mill of any European who wished to argue that eating meat was by no means a nutritional necessity.

Bernier’s attempt to understand and even learn from this Hindu doctrine has to be considered as liberal, especially compared to the invectives of his European contemporaries at the Mughal court, such as the Venetian Niccolao Manucci who described the Indian vegetarians as ‘a people who do not deserve the name of man’.87

Bernier’s acquaintance Jean-Baptiste Tavernier was less vituperative than Manucci, but furnished plenty of sensationalist examples of Indian vegetarianism in his Travels in India (1676), warning prospective visitors with the story of a Persian merchant who was whipped to death for shooting a peacock, and noting the extreme lengths taken to ensure that relatives were not killed – in the form of ants in firewood. Tavernier praised the high morality of the Hindus, but he – like many others before and since – could not but see an absurd contradiction in preserving the life of vermin, and yet happily burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands.88

Surprisingly, the most enthusiastic seventeenth-century travel writer was an English clergyman, the Reverend John Ovington, who travelled to India in 1689. Ovington accepted Bernier’s utilitarian rationale: vegetarianism clearly made the Indians less cruel, just as healthy, and spiritually and mentally ‘more quick and nimble’. But Ovington even endorsed the Indians’ animal protection practices on their own terms: ‘India of all the Regions of the Earth, is the only publick Theatre of Justice and Tenderness to Brutes, and all living Creatures,’ he said, ‘a Civil Regard … is enjoyn’d as a common Duty of Humanity’. Their innocence, said Ovington, made the Hindus comparable to ‘the original Inhabitants of the World, whom Antiquity supposes not to have been Carnivorous, nor to have tasted Flesh in those first Ages, but only to have fed upon Fruits and Herbs’. Ovington concluded by giving Hinduism a carte blanche of philosophical integrity: ‘there is not one of these Customs which are fasten’d upon them by the Rules of their Religion, but what comport very well, and highly contribute to the Health and Pleasure of their Lives.’89

The way was paved for Europeans to take Indian vegetarianism, if not as a lesson in philosophy and justice, then at least in medical health. The voyages of discovery and the new wave of early anthropology that followed in their wake impelled Europe towards a combination of cultural syncretism and relativism. Attempts to sustain the idea that European Christians had the best society often crumbled in the face of evident virtue and integrity in other peoples. International vegetarianism, which plugged directly into European discourses on diet and the relationship between man and nature, proved a serious challenge to Western norms. As readers back home assimilated the information in the travelogues, Indian vegetarianism started to exert influence on the course of European culture.

*For an account of deism, see chapter 9.

FIVE ‘This proud and troublesome Thing, called Man’: Thomas Tryon, the Brahmin of Britain

Thomas Tryon gazed out over the sugar plantations of Barbados. What he saw chilled his heart. With horror he watched lines of slaves labouring under the inhuman whip of their European masters. The cruelty of men claiming to be Christians surpassed all belief: the expatriated Africans were starved until they would eat putrefying horse meat; their limbs were crushed in the sugar mills; they died by thousands in the open fields. While Restoration England grew fat on their sweat and blood, Tryon complained, Barbados was perishing. The forests of the Americas were being depleted at a shocking rate; even the soil was suffering under the insatiable greed of the white man. After years of forcing the ground to produce the same cash crop, Barbados had gone from being ‘the most Fertil’st Spot of all America’, to ‘become a kind of Rock’ which grew nothing without dung fertiliser.1 All this destruction was committed only to supply luxury goods back in London – that stinking heap of human corruption Tryon had left behind. Everything had gone horribly awry: America was supposed to be a New World in which laws of justice between man and beast would bring about a Golden Age of peace and harmony, not the ransacked sewerage of the Old World.2 This was the opposite of what Tryon, in his youthful dreams, had imagined.

Born on 6 September 1634 in the Gloucestershire village of Bibury, Tryon had been sent out to spin wool at the age of six without an education. Working as a shepherd in his spare time he had accumulated enough capital by the age of thirteen to buy himself two sheep, and he swapped one of them for English lessons. Tryon loved his innocent flock and the contemplative life sleeping under the stars, but by the age of eighteen he ‘began to grow weary of Shepherdizing, and had an earnest desire to travel’. Without telling his parents, he packed up his belongings, his life savings and his ideals, waved goodbye to his sheep, said good riddance to his father’s plastering trade and set out for London.3

It was 1653 and the religious radicalism of Cromwell’s interregnum was at fever pitch. Having paid all of his £3 apprenticing himself to a hat-maker near Fleet Street, Tryon soon joined his master’s congregation of Anabaptists, attracted by their austerity, silence and periodic fasting from flesh.4 Up in his apprentice’s lodgings, he spent all his spare time and money delving into books on alchemy, herbal medicine and natural magic. In 1657, at the age of twenty-three, he had what he was waiting for – a divine visitation of his own: ‘the Voice of Wisdom continually and most powerfully called upon me,’ he wrote years later in his Memoirs; it told him to relinquish all luxuries and turn to vegetarianism: ‘for then I took my self to Water only for Drink, and forbore eating any kind of Flesh or Fish, and confining my self to an abstemious self-denying Life.’5