The Bloodless Revolution

by Tristram Stuart

  When Shah Jahan (r. 1628–58) came to power, he rejected Jahangir’s receptiveness to local religions and strove to purify Islam in India. But even he broke the Islamic rule against representing human and animal figures in art by having his throne in the Red Fort in Delhi embellished with inlaid semi-precious stones depicting Orpheus charming animals with his music. Shah Jahan was almost certainly evoking the figure of King Solomon who extended his fabled power over the animals, like Kayumarth the first king of mankind in the Golden Age. As the art historian Ebba Koch has illustrated, these images were frequently used to express part of the Mughal imperial ideology. They were also closely linked to the numerous depictions of the fictional character, Majnun, in the desert with the animals, and even the Christian icon of the wolf lying down with the lamb which had been popular in Mughal art since the time of Akbar. It is also possible that the Orpheus image was chosen to appeal to Shah Jahan’s Hindu and Jain subjects who had comparable artistic traditions, including the depiction of musicians charming wild animals.17 The artists who prepared Shah Jahan’s throne may have been unaware of Orpheus’ standing as Greek antiquity’s pre-eminent vegetarian cult-leader, though the idea that his follower, Pythagoras, had taught the Indians their philosophy was widely disseminated by Muslim Neoplatonists. At the very least, the appearance of Orpheus on the throne of an Islamic Indian ruler remains a striking irony and a testimony to the fusion of Eastern and Western traditions.

  Later Indian artists came to see the Orphic musician as a bridge between European and Indian ideas. A school of late seventeenth-century artists from the Deccan produced a number of paintings showing figures in European dress charming animals and placed them alongside traditional Indian paintings of women surrounded by animals.18 Perhaps unintentionally, these remarkable paintings represent the European encounter with, and assimilation into, the Indian practice of kindness to animals.

  Even Shah Jahan’s son Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707) – renowned for his orthodox Islamic practice and distaste of his forebears’ openness to local religions – signified his penance for murdering his brothers by eating (to the astonishment of European onlookers) ‘nothing which has enjoyed life. As he lives upon vegetables and sweetmeats only.’19 The last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah II (r. 1837–58) was eulogised for taking after Akbar in his treatment of his Hindu subjects. Born of a Rajput mother in 1775, Bahadur Shah sometimes dressed as a Brahmin, visited Hindu temples, wore the sacred thread and a hallowed mark on his forehead. He abstained from beef as a concession to both Hinduism and Sufism, and banned cow-slaughter in 1857 in an attempt to cement Hindu – Muslim concord during the Indian Mutiny.20

  This royal dynasty of vegetarian advocates provides a fascinating insight into the attitude of Mughals to the culture they conquered. The Ain-e Akbari was one of the first Indian texts to be translated by the English Orientalists and it gave useful tips for the new phase of European colonialism.21 Several Englishmen followed Akbar’s example and gave up eating meat, but there were many more who ignored such accommodating efforts. Indeed, as meat was much cheaper in India than in Britain, colonists took the opportunity of gorging themselves in a manner impossible at home.22 Some administrators did intermittently ban cow slaughter but, with beef as the British national dish, and bigotry now ingrained in the empire-building exercise, disregard for local traditions gradually prevailed.

  The result of British insouciance about native food taboos was cataclysmic. In 1857 it transpired that Indian sepoys were being supplied by their colonial masters with a new sort of rifle cartridge which had been greased with beef and pork fat. As cartridges needed to be bitten before use, it was impossible for the sepoys to do so without defiling themselves. It was even whispered in camp that the British were adulterating flour rations with bone-dust. No Indian – Hindu or Muslim – was safe, for such religious defilement was believed to be a preparation for forcible mass-conversion, an idea some missionaries did espouse and express (and for which the missions in general were later severely blamed). Grievances against the British colonial power had been building up for years. This new development was used to fan the flames of rebellion. When the army predictably started punishing anyone who resisted, resentment flared: the sepoys killed their officers and triggered the greatest ever Indian rebellion against British power – the Sepoys’ Revolt, or Indian Mutiny – which almost toppled the Raj and convulsed the region in over a year of bloodshed. Well into the twentieth century riots were sparked by British attempts to legalise cow slaughter, and sharing meals with Hindus remained a tortuous minefield of misunderstanding.23

  As many commentators pointed out at the time, such misadventures could have been avoided if the British had learned to be more sensitive to local dietary taboos. The revered Jesuit missionary Abbé Jean-Antoine Dubois (1765–1848) had anticipated the trouble to come in his authoritative Hindu Manners, Customs, and Ceremonies, in which he recommended extending the missionaries’ use of ‘accommodation’ into a wider approach to diplomatic relations. When the Liberal Governor-General of Bengal Lord William Bentinck (1774–1839) received a copy, he immediately recognised its potential as handbook for Europeans in India and announced that it ‘might be of the greatest benefit in aiding the servants of the Government in conducting themselves more in unison with the customs and prejudices of the natives’.

  Dubois sarcastically observed that ‘the Europeans do not seem disposed to adopt the same rules of abstinence as are followed by the people among whom they live, and that, without paying any attention to the disgust which they cause, they continue to eat beef openly. It is certain that this conduct estranges them from all the better classes of Hindus, who, consequently, in this respect place them far below the Pariahs.’ Europeans should not be lulled into a false sense of security by the apparent passivity with which Hindus allowed these slaughters to continue, he warned prophetically, for insurrection was bubbling beneath the surface. Such was the Hindu abhorrence, he said, that ‘to offer meat at a meal with a guest with whom one is not intimate, would be the height of rudeness’.

  Taking after de Nobili, Dubois had adopted the white turban, Indian robe and bamboo staff of a Hindu pilgrim the moment he arrived in India. He preached under the name Doddhaswâ-miayavaru (Great Lord), ‘Embracing,’ as he put it, ‘in many respects, the prejudices of the natives; living like them, and becoming all but a Hindu myself’. Even eating meat in secret, he cautioned, was not advisable, for ‘People who abstain entirely from animal food acquire such an acute sense of smell that they can perceive in a moment from a person’s breath, or from the exudation of the skin, whether that person has eaten meat or not.’24

  Dubois’ text illustrates the continuities between the theology of accommodation from the time of its nurture by the Renaissance humanists, de Nobili and Valignano, through to the early colonial practice of Indianisation. But Dubois was not just a diplomatic master of strange table manners. His theoretical apparatus for the interpretation of Hinduism actually led him to identify within it a concealed kernel of truth.

  Demolishing the persistent myth that Hindu vegetarianism was based on the belief in reincarnation, Dubois insisted that when Pythagoras came and learned about vegetarianism and metempsychosis from the Indians he had muddled or deliberately exaggerated their principles. ‘As a matter of fact,’ announced Dubois, ‘everything induces us to believe that the Hindus, though foolish enough in many respects, are not so foolish as to believe, when they show repugnance to feeding on anything which has had life, that they might be swallowing the limbs of their ancestors.’ The religious doctrines used by the priests to enforce vegetarianism were not reincarnation, he explained, but the deity of the cow, the ‘fear of pollution’, the horror ‘of feeding on the remains of a dead body’ and ‘the horror of murder’. Dubois thus rightfully reinstated the doctrine of ahimsa at the heart of Indian vegetarian philosophy.

  Just like previous Europeans, however, Dubois refused to see the legitimacy of ahimsa, portraying it as a cowardly and eff
eminate doctrine. But he went on to explain that the real historical origin (as opposed to the more recent religious rationale) for vegetarianism and cow protection was that cattle were essential for local agriculture, and meat was indigestible and putrid in a tropical climate. ‘There is no doubt,’ he concluded, ‘that it was for the sake of health and cleanliness, in the first instance, that Hindu lawgivers inculcated these principles of defilement and purification.’ Dubois’ immediate inspiration for this influential utilitarian interpretation (which anthropologists still partially maintain) was Montesquieu’s notorious De l’Esprit des Lois (1748), but both authors were ultimately drawing from Bernier’s use of an ancient empirical method. The idea that vegetarianism had really been imposed because of the hot Indian climate meant that it had little validity as a universal moral stricture; nevertheless, Europeans in India were encouraged to learn from local example. In direct agreement with the original sanitary intentions of the ‘Hindu lawgivers’, Dubois declared that ‘I have known many Europeans who entirely left off eating meat for this reason, because they found that they could not eat it without suffering afterwards from indigestion.’ The implication for the European reader was clear: if you don’t give up meat for the sake of your host, then give it up for your health.25

  Dubois’ suggestion was endorsed by a widespread tradition of European tropical medicine. From at least the seventeenth century European medics had been warning that meat was a ‘heating’ food and was therefore particularly dangerous when consumed in a hot climate. God, they pointed out, had benevolently ensured that humans everywhere were supplied with just the right sort of food: and in the tropics this was clearly indicated in the lavish quantities of cooling fruit.

  Other Europeans, by contrast, persisted in believing that consuming meat and liquor while in India was essential if one was to avoid melting into the feeble ‘effeminacy’ of the natives.26 Several medics pointed out that it was because of such ignorant prejudices that thousands of Europeans – especially ‘ignorant’ sailors and soldiers – perished soon after arriving in India. In 1680 John Fryer noted that while the debauched English died in Bombay like exotic plants transplanted from their native soil, ‘the Country People and naturalised Portugals live to a good Old Age, supposed to be the Reward of their Temperance; indulging themselves neither in Strong Drinks, nor devouring Flesh as we do.’27 Vegetarians like Thomas Tryon, who had personal experience of living in the tropics, built these medical prescriptions into their critiques, arguing that only ‘idle sottish People that understood Nature no more than Swine’ failed to realise that the fruitarian ‘Natives of most hot Countrys might be our Examples’.28

  Taking their cue from the travellers who noted just how healthy and long-lived the Hindus were,29 by the end of the eighteenth century it had become standard advice that Europeans should give up or severely limit their flesh intake on arrival in India.30 As the medical historian Mark Harrison has observed, learning how to survive in the tropics was important to a people who aimed to colonise the world.31

  In the authoritative Influence of Tropical Climates, more Especially the Climate of India, on European Constitutions (1813), the naval surgeon James Johnson exported European dietary medicine to the Indian context. He was perfectly aware of how his ideas merged with the ethics of Pythagoreanism, and he interspersed his medical advice with poetic renditions of George Cheyne’s principles and playful allusions to Erasmus Darwin’s Pythagorean edict that man ‘Should eye with tenderness all living forms,/ His brother-emmets,* and his sister-worms’.32

  Johnson was a follower of William Cullen and he frequently warned that many disorders suffered in Europe, especially in England, were caused by the ‘irritating’, over-stimulating qualities of meat. In India’s warm climate in particular, he advised that ‘vegetable food, generally speaking, is better’, although having acclimatised he allowed that Europeans could safely transfer from ‘the Hindoo model’ to ‘adopt the Mahomedan manners’. He was no fan of Hinduism, but he acknowledged that Hindu vegetarianism contained sound medical knowledge and (like Montesquieu) that it helped to ‘diffuse a more humane disposition among the people’. Finally, in his Economy of Health (1837), he reluctantly declared that ‘although Brahma and Pythagoras greatly overrated the salutary influence of their dietic systems on health, they were not totally in error.’ Living on the ‘slender and unirritating food of the Hindoo’, he admitted, could be healthier for Europeans not just in India but even at home. Observations on the healthiness of Indian vegetarians reaffirmed the tradition of medical vegetarianism in India; but now it seems that medical vegetarianism in turn allowed Europeans to see Hinduism in a new and more positive light.33

  European records were full of reports about how much Hindus were revolted by meat-eating Europeans. Well-worn yarns circulated about Indians pulling down their own houses if a European so much as stepped on their porch.34 Europeans had an incentive to exaggerate as they often wished to portray Hindus as irrational fanatics. But finding records written by Hindus expressing this abhorrence for early European settlers is a much harder task.

  One such rare source is the twelve-volume personal diary written in Tamil between 1736 and 1761 by Ananda Ranga Pillai, the chief dubash (a personal assistant dealing with ‘native’ affairs) of the most powerful Frenchman ever to have ruled in India, the Governor of Pondicherry, Joseph François Dupleix. Stuffed with fascinating detail about historical and social events, religious practice and day-to-day life in this crucial period, this diary provides one of the best insights into early European colonialism written by an Indian.

  As chief dubash, Ananda Ranga was locally known as the ‘head of the Tamils’ and he wielded exceptional powers.35 It was Ananda Ranga who helped to reverse the Jesuit influence that had dominated earlier in the century. He was so successful that a Jesuit priest – vainly trying to convert him – complained that, thanks to his patronage, Hindus thrived while Christian converts were ailing.36 Ananda Ranga was highly censorious of European misdemeanours, taking the rank-and-file to task for ‘feeling the breasts of, and otherwise shaming and molesting women’, raping them and killing their men.37 He furnished Dupleix with horoscopes prepared by Brahmin astrologers,38 and was honoured with being the only native allowed to wear shoes in front of the governor.39 But there remained, nonetheless, a significant point of friction which both he and his European friends spent a great deal of energy trying to overcome – their dietary differences. As Ananda Ranga makes clear, it was a diplomatic impasse.

  Being a Pillai – a subset of the south Indian Vellala/Idaiyan caste – Ananda Ranga was a staunch vegetarian, and like most of his compatriots he could not eat at table with his European or Muslim colleagues.40 He watched others consume sumptuous feasts of mutton, pork and fowl, but he himself could not partake.41 Instead, each day at lunchtime, he would retire to a specially made godown – or to his home when he had time – bathe himself according to Hindu ritual, and eat his home-cooked rice, dhal and ghee alone.42 He noted that even prisoners had to be permitted to do so.43 On a few special occasions he entertained Europeans, counting among his guests the Comte de Montmorency, a director of the East India Company. In such situations he would usually offer rice, dhal, fruit, sweets, milk or coffee,44 but at least once he arranged for others to supply his guests lavishly with goat, deer, hare, partridge, poultry and fish. The implication was that they could eat what they wished – as long as his personal purity was not impugned.

  Europeans were extremely solicitous that Ananda Ranga should return their visits, and took the extraordinary measure of having ‘their food prepared by a Brâhman that I might partake of it’.45 With so much focus on Ananda Ranga’s need to avoid being defiled by Europeans, these experiments in reciprocal hospitality had mixed results. After cumulative tensions such as these, the governor Dupleix finally lost his temper and subjected Ananda Ranga – with whom he was usually very cordial – to a lengthy tirade of insults. As Ananda Ranga himself recalled, Dupleix shouted:

/>   Tamil food is not worth eating. They eat animal fodder. What else is their vegetables and curry stuffs? It is not food fit for men. Now a Muhammadan pilaû is something; but there is nothing like our food in the world, either for cooking or ingredients; and it is served at a well-laid table, where wives, husbands, relations and friends all sit round and eat at their leisure in social enjoyment. The Muhammadans and Tamils always want our food but we don’t want theirs. We don’t like their vegetable food … Tamils have long lived with us, still they say it is against their custom, and speak ill of us, comparing us, in their brutal ignorance, to Pariahs.46

  Ananda Ranga recorded these comments in his usual careful manner, merely stating with a measure of cool diffidence that Dupleix ‘thus depreciated our food, dwelling on its defects’. But he made no rejoinder to Dupleix, even in private, and nowhere does he explicitly criticise the European diet.47 Ananda Ranga was not shy of criticising European behaviour when he did feel appalled; for example he was triumphant when Dupleix had an officer fined and imprisoned for committing the ‘outrage’ of shooting and eating a stray bullock.48 While Ananda Ranga was vociferous in his censure of Christian blasphemy against Hinduism, his highest praises were reserved for the British Governor of Madras, Thomas Saunders, who in contrast to Dupleix ‘used to eat Tamil food – rice, dhall, ghee, pepper, pepper water, pachadi, etc – and now he never comes to table’, preferring to eat alone like a Hindu.49