Monboddo thought that meat was hard to digest and caused diseases, whereas the vegetable diet had the power to save people from fatal sickness. ‘Now,’ he concluded, ‘any diet that is good for restoring health when lost, must be at least as good for preserving it.’ It was best to return the body to its herbivorous origin. At the very least Monboddo recommended mixing vegetables with meat and avoiding alcohol as far as possible – and this was the course he followed himself.
The orang-utans’ herbivorous diet was no less informative than their natural dress sense. The artificial invention of clothes, Monboddo explained, prevented the pores of the skin from being exposed to the fresh air, and thus he recommended ‘being naked as much as conveniently may be’. It was particularly important to work off meals by exercising in the nude: this was the custom of the ancient Greeks, and his illustrious acquaintance and founder of the state of Georgia, General James Oglethorpe, kept himself alive to the age of one hundred with the help of a daily dose of naked star-jumps.79
Monboddo had been Boswell’s guide and mentor – no doubt building on Boswell’s early exposure to both Williamson’s and Rousseau’s creed.80 Johnson, however, regarded Monboddo as an eccentric primitivist and he did not relish Boswell’s tales of Monboddo prancing around naked in front of his open window every morning.81 As they drove in the rain over the bleak moors to visit the loony laird, Boswell got cold feet; Johnson, wry as ever, merely recited Macbeth’s speech on meeting the witches. ‘Monboddo is a wretched place, wild and naked, with a poor old house,’ reflected Boswell with foreboding.
The moment ‘Farmer Burnett’ appeared on his doorstep to greet his guests dressed in rustic clothing holding a prize stalk of corn, the altercation began, Monboddo championing the strength of our primitive ancestors, Johnson insisting that modern humans were as strong as them and wiser: ‘This was an assault upon one of Lord Monboddo’s capital dogmas,’ commented Boswell morosely. When they sat down to dinner, Johnson was dismayed by the ‘farmer’s dinner’, grumbling that ‘I have done greater feats with my knife than this’; Monboddo, for his part ‘affects or believes he follows an abstemious system, [and] seemed struck with Dr Johnson’s manner of living’. But after clashing over ‘whether the Savage or the London Shopkeeper had the best existence’, Johnson and Monboddo warmed to each other. The idea of tracing man back to monkeys amused Johnson and he started reading Monboddo’s six-volume work, frequently quipping on the topic of men having tails and discussing the subject in his letters to Mrs Thrale.82 Back in Edinburgh, Boswell hosted a dinner for Johnson with the medical vegetarians William Cullen and Adam Ferguson, where they jocularly discussed Monboddo’s theory that orang-utans could be taught to speak; and Monboddo himself turned up for another meeting with the travelling pair.83
Vegetarianism circled the full gamut of eighteenth-century society; it was espoused by puritanical jesters, landowning aristocrats and metropolitan university lecturers. Distinctions could be drawn between the medical motives and the ethical ones, but the divergent traditions invariably ended up reverting to their shared assumptions about man and nature. It had become increasingly difficult to enjoy a beefsteak without at least considering the ethical implications. People connected their food with morality and they had mechanisms for dealing with the theological context of sympathy and the health impacts of meat. In the era before the French Revolution, the landscape was already dotted with wild men seeking for a union with nature which the Romantics would take to new extremes. From the anatomical observations of the scientists to the social anthropology of the Rousseauists, man’s nature as herbivore or carnivore had become a central preoccupation of European culture.
* * *
*Mealy grains.
*‘Dives’, literally ‘the opulent man’.
†Kaill: cabbage or any brassica broth; perhaps it should read ‘water-kaill’, ‘broth made without meat or fat’ (OED). Sowins: boiled oatmeal.
PART THREE
Romantic Dinners
NINETEEN
Diet and Diplomacy: Eating Beef in the Land of the Holy Cow
In 1602 the young Italian aristocrat Roberto de Nobili (1577–1656) arrived in south India to begin his vocation as a Jesuit missionary. Swiftly realising that his colleagues in the mission were reviled by the Brahmin priests for eating meat and consorting with low-caste Hindus, de Nobili decided to infiltrate the higher castes of Indian society. He perfected his Sanskrit and Tamil, and after a brief spell posing as a raja discarded his European black cassock and leather shoes to robe himself in the ochre cloth of a Hindu sanyassin, a renouncing holy man. Shaving his head, smearing a rectangle of sandalwood paste on his brow, and donning a Brahmin sacred thread, de Nobili passed himself off as an ascetic by the name of Tattuva Podagar Swami (The Teacher of Reality).
Aware that Hindus – especially in the Tamil south – believed that eating flesh or eggs was violent and bestial, de Nobili relinquished all animal food and vowed to live like a vegetarian sanyassin forever. ‘My food consists of a little rice,’ he reported, ‘with some herbs and fruit; neither meat nor eggs ever cross my threshold. It is necessary to observe all this, for if these people did not see me do such penance, they would not receive me as one who can teach them the way to heaven.’ Decamping from the European settlements to dissociate himself from their polluting influence, de Nobili moved into his private mud hut, learned to sit cross-legged on the ground and to eat from a banana leaf with the fingertips of his right hand. His senior missionary colleague Gonçalo Fernandez, a comparatively ill-educated ex-soldier from Portugal, was having none of these new-fangled integrationist techniques. Like many of his compatriots, Fernandez preferred to ridicule pagan follies such as vegetarianism in the hope of undermining the Hindus’ attachment to them – or even to convert Hindus forcibly by military conquest.1 So while de Nobili crouched on the floor in the corner eating a fleshless meal served by exclusively Brahmin servants, Fernandez continued to sit nonchalantly at table cutting up plates of meat with a knife and fork.
Robert de Nobili in sanyassin dress, from an original picture by Baltazar da Costa
These two figures symbolise the two radically divergent ways in which Europeans in India responded to the strange and novel culture around them. Riven by these alternatives, the Christian mission split down the middle and continued in tumult for more than two centuries. The pattern carried over into the domain of mercantile colonialism with the disagreement between de Nobili and Fernandez being replayed time and time again by East India Company servants. By the end of the eighteenth century, the stereotypical European ‘nabob’ in India would don Indian clothes, eat Indian food, and enjoy sexual relations – even marriage – with Indian women. Some really did bring Fernandez’s warnings to pass by losing their grip on Christianity and adopting not just the vegetarian practice of the Indians but their principles too. As well as enjoying exotic forays into an experience of ‘the Other’, this trend for ‘Indianisation’ allowed the British to step seamlessly into the shoes of the indigenous ruling classes. It was only during the nineteenth century, after the Wellesleys had made their mark and especially after the Indian Mutiny of 1857, that stringent racial boundaries were erected by bigoted scientists and administrators and Europeans were officially and effectively instructed to resist such temptations and like Fernandez to assert their European superiority by wearing impractical woollen broadcloth and importing food – at great expense – from back home.
Fernandez took de Nobili’s refusal to eat with him as a slap in the face, and he was appalled that his new partner had apparently gone native. Nobili ‘behaves in everything as a man of another religion’, complained Fernandez to the missionary inspector from Rome in 1610. ‘The dress of the Father is that worn by the pagan Sanyassins,’ he wrote. ‘The serving and the food are according to Brahmin usage, which is everything except meat, fish and eggs.’ As far as Fernandez was concerned de Nobili had been swallowed up by the dark continent. Indian vegetarianism was the ultimate sign o
f pagan superstition and animal worship; it put man on a level with animals and denied his unique place in the universe. It literally turned the world upside down. By giving way to Indian customs, de Nobili seemed to undermine the superiority of European culture and the very purpose of the Christian mission itself.
De Nobili – who read Sanskrit scriptures a century and a half before the famed English Orientalists – did respect ancient Indian culture and believed that it contained distant revelations of divine truth. Following detailed discussions with Hindu teachers, he wrote one of the most profound comparative studies of Hindu metempsychosis. He was happy to see the similarities between their culture and his own, and pointed out that his vegetarianism was just like Christian asceticism. Even those who disapproved of de Nobili’s methods acknowledged that ‘no Carthusian monastery is more strict … no anchoret or hermit of Thebais* more abstemious’.2 But in 1613 de Nobili’s provincial superior in India, Father Pero Francisco, ordered him and his followers to let up on vegetarianism for the sake of their health: ‘The abstinence from meat and fish etc., must not be observed so strictly and rigorously that, even in case of necessity, sickness, disgust or natural weakness, they do not touch meat, for experience has shown that on such occasion it is absolutely necessary to yield to nature and help it by eating meat, and this must be done.’
The dispute reached Rome, and before he knew it de Nobili was spearheading a doctrinal dispute. He explained in his vehement defence that his behaviour was in line with the Apostles: St Timothy circumcised himself to adapt to the Jews and thus convert them; even St Augustine of Canterbury had allowed the Brits to continue sacrificing oxen; as St Paul had said, be ‘all things to all men’. The founding father of the Asian mission, St Francis Xavier (1506–52), as well as de Nobili’s immediate predecessor, the educated Neapolitan aristocrat Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606), had fully developed this into the technique of ‘accommodation’ which was now widely used all over the East. In Japan, Valignano had controversially ordered the Jesuits to dress like Buddhist monks and learn how to eat with chopsticks squatting at low Japanese dining tables. In order to win converts, Valignano had said, it was imperative that missionaries overcome their ‘initial repugnance’ and follow the Japanese diet of ‘salted raw fish, limes, sea snails and such bitter or salty things’, for the Buddhists had an equally ‘great revulsion from eating any kind of meat’.3
De Nobili won a resounding success when, in 1623, Pope Gregory XV issued a bull endorsing almost all his points. But the dispute raged on and spilled over into the ‘Malabar rites’ controversy about whether converts could keep their native customs. Despite the claim that de Nobili’s techniques had won tens of thousands of converts, in 1704 the apostolic delegate for India overruled the papal allowances and insisted that Christianity in India should be practised just as it was in Rome – beef, pork and all.4
But he could not squash the practice. There were obvious advantages to acquiring high caste status – and it was clearly impossible to demolish the local culture of vegetarianism. If Europeans were to take on the mantle of teachers or even rulers, they would have to make some concessions to local customs. In 1710, when Joseph Constantius Beschi joined the mission founded by de Nobili in Madura, he took to wearing the luxurious purple gown and pearl earrings of an acarya, a Saivite or Vaishnavite raja-guru. Members of the vegetarian Tamil Pillai castes flocked to him, and later in the century the convert A. Muttusami Pillai eulogised the fact that ‘From the time of his arrival in this country, he abstained from the use of flesh, fish, etc.’5
Eating anything else, many realised, was literally a recipe for disaster. The seventeenth-century Venetian freebooter Niccolao Manucci claimed that there was a riot when locals discovered that the Portuguese Jesuits at Tanjor were not ‘Roman Brahmins’ as they claimed, but beef-eating feringhis (foreigners) and the Christians had been persecuted ever since. One Jesuit was caught cooking up a beef stew by another member of the mission who flung it outside in fear, exclaiming that ‘the Jesuit fathers were not pariahs and low caste; they did not eat cow’s flesh.’6
In Protestant missions also, Hindus stuck to their vegetarian customs after converting to Christianity. ‘If you tell them of the christian liberty in victuals and drinks,’ reported the Protestant missionary Philippus Baldaeus in 1672, ‘they reply, that they are not ignorant of it, but as the essence of christianity does not consist in eating and drinking, so they did not think themselves obliged to feed upon such things as are contrary to their nature and education, being from their infancy used to much tender food, which agrees best with their constitution, and makes them generally live to great age.’ Baldaeus’ report gives an exceptional insight into the contribution the Indians themselves were making to the debate, and he was evidently impressed, for he concluded that these Christian Brahmins ‘are for the most part men of great morality, sober, clean, industrious, civil, obliging, and very moderate in eating and drinking’.7 He made their diet more palatable by reconceiving it as an expression of the Christian ethic of temperance.
The tradition of dietary accommodation was by no means unique to European visitors. Indeed, it seems to have been a widespread – even common-sense – response. Europeans were intrigued to find that the Syrian Christian community, established in Kerala and Cochin from at least the sixth century, used many Hindu rites and accommodated itself to the Nayar Brahmins by ‘abstaining from animal food’.8 In 1630 Henry Lord noted that the Zoroastrian Parsis – who fled from Persia to India as early as the eighth century AD – abstained from beef ‘because they will not give offence to the Banians’, and another traveller reported that they were granted asylum on the condition that they did not ‘Kill any Beasts or living Creatures’.9
Indeed, these diplomatic agreements bear much resemblance to the ancient Indian practice by which non-vegetarian Hindu castes adopted vegetarianism in order to ingratiate themselves with, and even attain the status of, higher castes. Ruling Rajputs and Jats often relinquished their traditional meat-eating warrior customs to legitimise themselves in the eyes of the Brahmin priesthood.10 This was an indigenous model which the early Mughal emperors adopted, and pre-imperialist Europeans probably took a pragmatic cue from these predecessors.
When the Afghan Muslim leader Muhammad bin Ghur invaded northern India in the twelfth century he was characterised in Hindu texts as a beef-eating mleccha, or barbarian. Punning on his name (Ghur), the word for foreigner (Gori), and cow (go-), a Kashmiri poet called the invader ‘the evil Gori – him who was given to eating foul foods, the enemy [ari] of cows [go-], from whence he got his very name’.11 The culture clash continued to pose serious problems for Muslim – Hindu integration, and the Mughals soon realised the benefits of deploying dietary diplomacy.12
The Emperor Akbar the Great (r. 1556–1605) went further than merely being polite about local mores. He took Hindu wives and was immensely impressed by Jainism, especially the doctrine of ahimsa. Throughout his reign he issued numerous farmans (imperial orders) forbidding the killing of animals and fish and discouraging meat-eating for up to six months in the year. Such far-reaching legislation against animal-killing had hardly been seen in India since the Buddhist King Ashoka issued his rock edicts in the third century BC. Akbar’s Jain subjects expressed their gratitude in abundance.13 His official chronicler Abu ‘l-Fazl ‘Allami (himself friends with high-standing Jains) made an astonishing announcement in the Ain-e Akbari, which reveals that Indian vegetarianism produced a powerful impression on the Mughals, just as it did on Europeans:
His majesty has a great disinclination for flesh: and he frequently says, ‘Providence has prepared a variety of food for man, but, thro’ ignorance and gluttony, none seems to have an eye for the beauty inherent in the prevention of cruelty, he destroys living creatures, and makes his body a tomb for beasts. If I were not a king, I would leave off eating flesh at once, and now it is my intention to quit it by degrees.’14
Akbar’s articulation of the case for vegetaria
nism is particularly remarkable for its similarity to ancient European arguments familiar from Plutarch and Ovid. He also adapted Indian vegetarianism to make it compatible with the Semitic proscription of blood-eating, just as Sir Thomas Roe did after visiting the Mughal court: ‘Blood is the principal of life,’ said Akbar, ‘To avoid eating thereof is to honour life.’ According to Akbar’s favourite Jain courtier, the revered monk Shantichandra, Akbar adopted these arguments for vegetarianism after Shantichandra requested permission to leave court the day before the Muslim festival of ‘Eid because so many animals were going to be slaughtered; he explained to Akbar, on the basis of Islamic doctrine as well as Jain, that ‘ahimsa is the only way to God’. Akbar horrified his fellow Muslims by fusing Indian religions and Sufism into his own eclectic sun-worshipping cult Din-i-Ilahi, in which he stipulated that beef should be forbidden (while pork, blasphemously, was allowed).15
Akbar’s son and successor Jahangir (r. 1605–27), born of a Hindu mother, eulogised his father for confining himself to vegetarian ‘Sufi food’ for nine months of the year. Jahangir issued his own Jain-influenced farmans and in 1618 made a shocking break with court tradition by vowing (in penitence for having murdered Abu ‘l-Fazl) to forbear his passion for hunting and ‘injure no living thing with my own hand’. In his Memoirs, he claimed that wild beasts had become so tame during his reign that they wandered harmlessly amongst people.16
The Bloodless Revolution Page 33
