The Bloodless Revolution

by Tristram Stuart

  It is ironic that Ananda Ranga’s Hindu perspective on European behaviour in India does not endorse the commonly held view in contemporaneous English and French circles that Indians found the feringhi diet inherently abhorrent. Nevertheless it does illustrate a range of problems that Hindus experienced in their relations to Europeans, which played a significant part in the diplomacy of empire-building.

  What happened when people tried to pick their way through this diplomatic minefield the other way round – when a vegetarian Hindu came to the land of roast beef? The first official visit from a high-caste Hindu to Britain appears to have taken place in 1781 when Humund Rao, a vegetarian Brahmin, came uninvited to England on behalf of Ragunath Rao, the deposed Peshwa (sovereign) of Maratha, to ask George III for military assistance. Accompanied by an English-speaking Parsi, Manuar Ratanji and his son Cursetji Manuar, Humund Rao was at first unceremoniously ignored by the East India Company. Rao and his cortège were sent to reside outside the city of London in Islington until they were asked to leave Britain without even being informed of the Company’s decision.

  By this time, the Whig politician Edmund Burke – self-appointed champion of victims of British colonialism who brought Warren Hastings to trial for corruption and despotism in Bengal – had caught wind of the situation. He was outraged: the Maratha Peshwa was one of Britain’s most important allies, responsible for ceding to the East India Company highly valuable territories, and the fight to restore him was at a critical stage. Having failed to force the Company to treat them decently, Burke insisted, against entrenched opposition, that he should be allowed to entertain these Indian ambassadors at his house, and thus fulfil his perpetual preoccupation, to demonstrate to Indians ‘the decency of the English character’ and the ‘National honor’. Burke managed to get King George to agree that the conduct of the Company directors had been ‘shameful’ and to authorise Burke to spend £200 on gifts for the agents.

  Within a few days, Humund Rao had become a cause célèbre and was visited by a train of intellectuals and dignitaries such as the artist and critic Sir Joshua Reynolds. His visit became the topic of conversation and it was Burke’s sensitive accommodation of his eating habits that impressed most of all. Burke’s friend Mary Shackleton confirmed that Rao prepared his dinner on a flagstone in a greenhouse because ‘he would eat in no house which was not his own’. He refused to eat ‘animal food or wine, eating off the ground stripped from his waist up, and throwing away his dinner if any one came within a certain distance from him’.

  When the time came for his departure, Burke wrote to the deposed Peshwa to testify that his ambassador had done nothing in England to jeopardise his purity. ‘I endeavoured to make my place as convenient, as any of us are able to do,’ Burke asserted. But ‘for a person so faithfully strictly observant as he was, of all the rules and ceremonies of the religion, to which he was born, and to which he strictly conformed often at the manifest hazard of his Life’, there were inevitable teething troubles. ‘The sufferings this Gentleman underwent at first,’ Burke apologetically assured him, ‘was owing to the ignorance not to the unkindness of this Nation.’

  He assured the Peshwa that now the British had the

  benefit from the instructions he has given us relative to your Ways of Living, that whenever it shall be thought necessary to send Gentûs of an high Cast to transact any business in this Kingdom, on giving proper Notice and on obtaining proper License from authority for their coming we shall be enabled to provide for them in such a manner as greatly to lessen the difficulties in our intercourse and to render [England] as tolerable as possible to them.50

  Dietary diplomacy, Burke realised, was the oil of Anglo-Indian relations.

  Although political interests were Burke’s primary incentive, his willingness to accommodate Rao’s vegetarianism was no doubt accentuated by the fact that he had an ‘awe bordering on devotion’ for Hinduism, particularly because they ‘extend their benevolence to the whole animal creation’. In a letter to a friend, Burke expressly denied being a ‘Pythagorean’ vegetarian himself, but he sincerely wished to make the world ‘think more favourably’ of animals.51 In the second half of the eighteenth century, enthusiasm about Indian religion – especially the Hindus’ humane attitude to animals – reached such fever pitch it is difficult to discern what was mere diplomacy and what was genuine dedication to vegetarian principles.

  * * *

  *Monastic followers of the Egyptian Desert Fathers.

  *Ants.

  TWENTY

  John Zephaniah Holwell: Voltaire’s Hindu Prophet

  John Zephaniah Holwell was the archetypal nabob. He left England a surgeon’s mate on an East Indiaman bound for Calcutta in 1732 and came back thirty years later a fantastically wealthy man.1 He built himself an extravagant mansion in Steynton near Milford Haven, called it Castle Hall, and later retired to one of the finest residences in Bath. While the Bath house still stands overlooking a peaceful valley – a classic statement of Georgian pomp – Castle Hall testifies to his zealous Indophilia: it was said to be the first country house built in the ‘Hindu style’ and rumour has it that there was an Indian-influenced outbuilding – something like a pagoda – at the far end of the estate. Sadly, although his sweeping landscape garden is still extant, surrounded by forbidding twelve-foot walls and coastal cliffs, the house itself was demolished by the Ministry of Defence in the 1950s, and all that is left of the nabob’s enigmatic outbuilding is a small pile of stones. Holwell may or may not have owned a private Hindu temple, but he was not ashamed to let everyone know that he prayed to Hindu deities and regarded Hinduism as the greatest religion on earth.

  For the startled British public, these unpalatable facts were made worse by Holwell’s otherwise conservative demeanour. An upstanding member of the establishment, he had long been regarded as a hero of British colonialism.2 Born in Dublin in 1711, Holwell had trained for medicine in London before joining the East India Company. After a few years following armed trading ventures around the subcontinent, he was made assistant surgeon to Calcutta Hospital and from there worked his way up the administrative ranks of the Company. In 1736 he became an alderman, and in 1748 on a visit to England sent proposals for the reform of the Zamindar’s court (which dealt with the native population) to the directors of the Company. They enthusiastically adopted his recommendations and Holwell was appointed to the twelfth highest position in the governing council and perpetual Zamindar of Calcutta.

  As Zamindar, which literally means ‘landlord’, Holwell was responsible for governing the native courts and collecting land taxes and trade tariffs which had supposedly been ceded to the Company by the Mughal ruler, the Nawab of Bengal, in 1698.3 Holwell quickly realised that the Company could make far more money by taxing local populations than it ever would on trade, and thus he laid the foundations for the transition of the East India Company from a commercial partner to a colonial power.4 He promised to double the Company’s annual income of 60,000 rupees, and after five years he had been so phenomenally successful that the directors tripled his salary and made him seventh in the council, applauding the fact that he had ‘greatly en-creased’ their revenues, without, they assumed, ‘imposing any new duties or oppressing the poor’. Indeed, Holwell was said to have alleviated ‘Mughal tyranny’ over Hindus; he commuted most corporal punishments into fines and set in motion the Company’s realignment of their court system in accordance with ancient Hindu customs. Holwell convinced himself that he could be a philanthropic Indophile at the same time as filling the coffers of the Company.5

  But in June 1756 disaster struck when the new Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daula, sent an army to lay siege to Calcutta after the British had illegally fortified their settlements and reneged on other agreements. Most of the pitifully unprepared British residents made a haphazard and ignominious retreat by ship down the Hooghly River. Holwell and a few soldiers were stranded in Fort William, which after a brief resistance led by Holwell, the Nawab promptly sa
cked and had the prisoners herded into a tiny airless dungeon that would become infamous as the Black Hole of Calcutta. According to Holwell’s traumatic report, 123 of them stifled to death, while the remaining 23 survived by drinking sweat from their own clothing and fighting for air at the only window. Later scholars have argued that the number of dead was no more than 69, and even that it never happened; but as far as the British were concerned, Holwell was a living martyr to the British imperial mission against Mughal despotism and his story became a justification for British territorial conquest in India. Within months the British had despatched a force led by General Robert Clive, which defeated the Nawab’s army at Plassey and set the precedent for Britain’s future imperial expansion. Even in the twentieth century, the viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, totemised the Black Hole and hailed Holwell as a founding father of British India. In memory of those who died, or rather as a dark reminder of the British right to conquer, Holwell erected a monument which became the focus for rising tides of Indian national protests and was destroyed, rebuilt by Curzon and finally removed after Indian independence. In gratitude for his heroism he was offered the governorship of Bengal, which he apparently refused, but when Clive returned to England Holwell took the post of governor for a few months until he was nudged aside by a coterie of opponents who accused him of giving and taking bribes, having an affair with another man’s wife and generally being wholly untrustworthy.6

  Having rebuffed the charges, he returned to Britain with his honour officially intact and immediately set about publishing an array of political and historical books on India. Holwell’s variegated writings reveal that he had spent much of his spare time in India collecting sacred Hindu texts and having them explained to him by Hindu pandits. All his papers had been lost in the siege of Calcutta, but this was perhaps a blessing in disguise, for with the help of his memory and fertile imagination, Holwell set about reconstructing a Hinduism tailored to his tastes.

  His initial publications – supposedly translations from scraps of the Hindu Shastah, or scripture – did not reveal the extent of his devotion for Hinduism. But in 1771, after much delay and a change of publisher, Holwell finally released the third part of his Interesting Historical Events under the extraordinary title ‘A Dissertation on the Metempsychosis of the Bramins, or Transmigrations of the fallen Angelic Spirits; with a Defence of the original Scriptures of Bramah, and an occasional comparison between them and the Christian Doctrines’. This was the first full-scale defence of Hinduism in Europe, and Holwell its pioneering evangelist. At the top of his agenda, needless to say, was the institution of a worldwide vegetarian reform.

  Holwell’s attempt to convince Europe that he had finally unlocked the secrets of ancient Hinduism would seem laughable if it were not the case that his work was among the most influential sources on Indian religion for decades. Monboddo drew his knowledge of Indian vegetarianism from Holwell; and Voltaire applauded him as the first to have ‘revealed for us what has been hidden for so many centuries’. The French Revolution sympathiser and unorthodox clergyman Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) – most famous for his discovery of oxygen – built his demonstration that Christianity was full of fictional doctrines on Holwell’s translation of the Shastah in his Comparison of the institutions of Moses with those of the Hindoos (1799).7 Through Voltaire and Priestley, Holwell provided an arsenal of information for the radical deists and their epoch-making assault on the Christian hegemon.

  Like the seventeenth-century travellers, Holwell was struck by the similarity between Hindu doctrines and those of the Chinese, the Zoroastrians and the ancient Greeks, notably Pythagoras and Plato.8 Holwell noticed, as Sir William Jones later proved, that some Sanskrit words bore a close resemblance to European equivalents and that Greek mythology and cosmogony were related to Sanskrit myths.9 He discerned that Hindu scriptures told the story of a vegetarian Golden Age and three subsequent ages of decay and decline,10 and he showed that they even contained the fundamental Christian tenets – the unity of the Godhead, the immortality of the soul, and a future state of rewards and punishments. To explain this mind-boggling coincidence, he jumped to the logical conclusion that Hinduism was the oldest religion, and the source of all the others.

  Holwell allowed that Moses’ revelation was genuine, but he stressed that it had occurred at a much later date than the scriptures of the prophet Bramah.11 Indeed, Moses was a reincarnation of the prophet Bramah, and Jesus Christ, according to Holwell’s audacious interpretation of world religion, was an avatar of the Hindu god Birmah who had incarnated in various forms to remind man of his obligations at various points in human history.12 The warlike archangel Michael was in fact the destroyer god Siva, and Gabriel was the benevolent Vishnu. These three divine beings, created by one supreme God, were the original trinity – of which the Christian Trinity was an idolatrous corruption.

  Quirky though this may seem, Holwell’s decision to credit Hindu scriptures over Christianity was based on his reasonable supposition that, as they contained many of the same doctrines as the Bible and yet pre-dated it by hundreds of years (he credulously dated the Shastah back to 3100 BC), they had to be the original revelation from God. Gazing into the vast, unknown abyss of global history, Holwell found he could no longer believe that Christianity had a monopoly over truth. That all other world religions seemed also to bear otherwise inexplicable resemblance to Hindu doctrines confirmed to him that they too were derived from the ancient Indian revelation delivered to the prophet Bramah.

  In addition to the doctrine of reincarnation – which he found replicated in faiths all over the world – Holwell was fascinated to discover that Hindus believed the story told in various Sanskrit texts that the demons (asuras) rebelled in heaven and were cast down to hell by the gods (devas). This struck him as undeniably similar to the Greek and Christian myth of the war in heaven and the fall of the angels. He concluded that God created the world as a place of punishment and purgation for Moisasoor (Maha-asura, Great-demon) – or Lucifer as he was known in Christendom – and his rebel angels, or Debtah (deva). Each spirit was imprisoned in the body of an animal – the worst into carnivores, the best into herbivores – and were forced to reincarnate eighty-eight times, ending up in the divine form of the Ghoij, or cow, before finally passing into Mhurd (man). If, in this main phase of trial and probation, the spirit showed itself to be truly repentant for its primeval sin of rebellion, it would pass up the ladder of fifteen planets, or Boboons (Sanskrit, bhavana), to be purified before finally returning to heaven.13 Spirits that sinned in their lives as humans would be plunged into the hellish Onderah and begin the whole cycle again.

  Having established the identical nature of human and animal souls, Holwell felt that it was clear that the consumption of meat was an unnatural sin. How could we justify murdering animals when they were animated with exactly the same sort of soul as our own, and with whom we had once joined in sinful rebellion? ‘The mortal forms wherewith I shall encompass the delinquent Debtah are the work of my hand,’ God declared in Brahmah’s scripture, ‘they shall not be destroyed.’ The delinquent Debtah, it instructed, ‘shall not eat of the Ghoij, nor of the flesh of any of the mortal bodies … whether it creepeth on Murto [earth], or swimmeth in Jhoale [water], or flyeth in Oustmaan [the air], for their food shall be the milk of the Ghoij, and the fruits of Murto’.

  The sin of meat-eating, Holwell explained, had been introduced on earth by the arch-demon Moisasoor who tricked the early priests into believing that sacrificing an animal shortened its punishment and sent it up a rung in the chain of reincarnations.14 Any human who ate flesh was condemned to start the cycle of punishment all over again. Meat-eating bred further violence and curtailed human life by causing disease.15 In this way Moisasoor kept his kingdom on earth well populated, while completely cutting off the flow of purified spirits returning to God. Alcohol, too, was a principal weapon in the devil’s arsenal, for it induced such inebriation that humans wilfully murdered their fellow creatures. �
�To give the devil his due,’ wrote Holwell with his characteristic alacrity of phrase, ‘it must in justice be acknowledged, that the introduction of these two first-rate vices was a master-piece of politics.’16

  Having set out the theological background, Holwell launched into a full-scale vegetarian diatribe that posited the most extreme of animal rights philosophies. He gave an Indian gloss to arguments from the Western vegetarian tradition, pointing out that eating meat was ‘in opposition to the natural and obvious construction of the mouth and digestive faculties of Mhurd’. Trained in medicine in the era of George Cheyne and once treated in Leiden by Hermann Boerhaave, Holwell had also been impressed by the Indian prescription of vegetable diets to prepare patients for smallpox inoculation – a procedure he described in 1767 which eventually became the standard practice in Europe.17 He pointed out that Hinduism endorsed all the sanitary and agronomic arguments for vegetarianism and cow protection, for the cow not only yielded ‘delectable food, but was otherways essentially serviceable in the cultivation of their lands; on which depended their vegetable subsistence’. But contrary to the claim of commentators since Bernier, Holwell insisted that these utilitarian arguments were secondary to the original religious reasons.

  The theological question about the status of animals, he pointed out, was still not resolved in Western philosophy, though some, such as Richard Dean, had given it their best shot by arguing that animals had souls and could get to heaven. Holwell felt that he had come up with the conclusive answer to Descartes’ troubling query about the misery animals experienced on earth: they were undergoing punishment for their primeval sin.18 However, the Bible was wrong to endorse man’s ‘use and abuse’ of the creatures, for as Hinduism showed ‘the world was made for the fly, as much as for him’.