The Bloodless Revolution

by Tristram Stuart

  Marignolli – perhaps with the misleading assistance of Muslim interpreters – readily incorporated vegetarian Buddhism into the biblical tradition. He claimed that the ‘skins’ Adam and Eve were given to wear after the Fall were actually coconut-fibre clothes (as modelled by the inhabitants of Ceylon). The vegetarian Buddhists and Brahmins of India, according to this dazed Christian, were continuing the prelapsarian vegetable diet. Having abandoned his initial caution, Marignolli doffed his European clothes, donned a coconut-fibre sarong, and joined the Buddhist fraternity until it was time for him to return. The 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 the
ir vegetarian foibles. By this time, the other major European powers were eyeing with envy the Portuguese monopoly on Indian trade. At the end of the sixteenth century the Dutch finally muscled in on the game by sending armed galleons to back up their 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 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 Chr
istian 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.