The Bloodless Revolution

by Tristram Stuart

  As a towering figure in the Enlightenment of European culture, Voltaire plugged Hinduism into the mainstream of intellectual debate and he rightly congratulated himself for spreading Holwell’s account of Indian scriptures to the whole of literate Europe. His comments on vegetarianism greatly increased the attention given to the subject in European intellectual circles inspiring numerous copycat works, and strengthening the bond between radical liberal thinking and vegetarianism.47

  The points that he made in his philosophical and critical works he reintroduced in his fictional contes with an even freer pen. In a farcical scene in The Princess of Babylon (1768), a phoenix explains to the eponymous princess that his fellow animals no longer speak to humans because ‘men have accustomed themselves to eat us’ and declares uncompromisingly that ‘Men who are fed with carnivorous aliments, and drenched with spirituous liquors, have a sharp, acrid blood, which turns their brains a hundred different ways. Their chief rage is a fury to spill their brother’s blood.’48 But Voltaire also attempted to present Hindu vegetarianism in a reasonable, utilitarian light. Focusing on the anatomical similarity between man and beasts, the phoenix concludes his teaching with a delectable meal lavishly consisting of ‘a hundred delicious foods, among which was seen no disguised corpse. The feast was of rice, of sago, of semolina, of vermicelli, of maccaroni, of omelets, of eggs in milk, of cream-cheese, of pastries of every kind, of vegetables, of fruits.’ Voltaire’s Indophilia added new spice to the fashionable appetite for simple vegetarian food which had just been launched by his intellectual rival, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

  In his Lettres d’Amabed à Shastasid (1769) Voltaire developed the mock-travel genre which turned the tables on the ethnocentricity of European travel-writing. Amabed, a young Hindu traveller to England, expresses his shock at the contrast of civility and barbarity even in this ‘citadel of faith’:

  The dining-hall was clean, grand, and tidy … gaiety and wit animated the guests; but in the kitchens blood and grease were flowing. Skins of quadrupeds, feathers of birds and their entrails piled up pell-mell, oppressing the heart, and spreading contagion.

  In the fictional setting, Voltaire let the superstition of metempsychosis take a back seat and instead emphasised that meat-eating was at odds with refined manners and inflamed people with cruelty.49 Through Voltaire, Holwell provided a bridge between the seventeenth-century deists’ use of Hinduism and the later eighteenth-century radicals who embraced India as an alternative to the brutal oppression they saw in European culture. With the blood-abhorring Hindus as his foot-soldiers, Voltaire helped to engineer the – albeit hypothetical and impossible – bloodless revolution.

  Sir William Jones (1746–94) is remembered as the greatest pioneer of Orientalism in the eighteenth century. Under his aegis the Asiatic Society of Bengal was founded and for the first time translations of whole Sanskrit texts were made available to the stunned admiration of European audiences. It would be normal to contrast Jones’ diligent mastery of Indian languages and his careful historical methodology with the half-crazed fulminations of John Zephaniah Holwell – and before Jones travelled to India he had the opportunity to make that distinction himself. Acting as attorney in the Pembrokeshire courts in 1780 he successfully defended a man accused by Holwell of panic-mongering, and Jones took the opportunity to ridicule Holwell as a nabob-magistrate attempting ‘to import the Indian laws into England, by imprisoning and indicting an honest man’. Vegetarianism must have seemed an abomination to Jones; he wrote to his friend Viscount Althorp in a vein typical of the bloodthirsty English gentleman about his longing to go stag-hunting, and he fantasised that ‘I should prefer the more violent sport of the Asiaticks, who enclose a whole district with toils, and then attack the tigers and leopards with javelins.’50 When Jones finally arrived in India, however, it was not the hunting that impressed him, but the doctrine of ahimsa.

  In 1783 Jones was knighted and sent out to Bengal as a judge of the Supreme Court, and he immediately set about translating The Laws of Manu or, as he called it, the Institutes of Hindu Law. It is often pointed out that the primary motive of this endeavour was the establishment of a legal framework for effectively governing the Hindus. But Jones’ exploration of Indian culture also had other, less sinister, aims. When Jones finally managed to get a Hindu to teach him Sanskrit – having worked his way around the objection that he was an untouchable feringhi (foreigner) – he was delighted by what he found. Casting himself as the new Pythagoras, he gloated that he understood Sanskrit and thus had ‘an advantage, which neither Pythagoras nor Solon possessed, though they must ardently have wished it’. ‘Nor is it possible to read the Védánta,’ he announced, ‘without believing, that Pythagoras and Plato derived their sublime theories from the same fountain with the sages of India.’ Even Christianity, he acknowledged, bore great resemblance to Hinduism: ‘The Hindus,’ he wrote, ‘would have less difficulty in admitting the Thirty-Nine articles; because if those articles were written in Sanscrit, they might pass well enough for the composition of a Brahman.’51

  However, in stark contrast to – and conservative reaction against – the likes of Holwell, Jones was absolutely committed to the authenticity of the Bible and he could not concede that Sanskrit scriptures pre-dated it. Instead, he insisted that the Hindu scriptures were much younger than Holwell had claimed, and he spent his entire career constructing the case that the similarities between Indian, Greek and Hebrew cultures could all be traced back to one antecedent common source. In his famous anniversary lectures to the Asiatic Society, he gradually revealed that this original source was the settlement in Iran of Noah and his three sons. The descendants of Noah’s son Ham colonised India, Italy and Greece, and they carried their particular culture with them. Pythagoras and Plato might have learned certain doctrines from the Hindus at a much later date, but well before that direct contact they already shared a common Noachic heritage. Jones picked out episodes in the Hindu scriptures and twisted them to corroborate the Bible’s history – and even its dating – of the universal Flood, the peopling of the earth and the tower of Babel. In this stubborn adherence to the presumptions of his own culture – no matter how seemingly objective the arguments he adduced to prove it – he can hardly be seen as exhibiting a more advanced methodology than Holwell’s. Holwell was ridiculed by his contemporaries principally because he admitted what most others would not: that the Bible was younger than Indian scriptures and therefore if any of their doctrines were true, the Indians had had the true religion first.

  Jones’ proposition that Indian and Greek culture were linked by a common origin was superior to (though not exclusive of) the crude stories about Pythagoras’ travels, and he thus brilliantly constructed the basis for the modern secular understanding of the Indo-European language group. But when people laud Jones for his spectacularly modern achievements, they often do not realise that he was operating within an ancient model of biblical exegesis. In tracing similarities between diverse cultures back to Noah, Jones was self-consciously extending the work of Sir Isaac Newton’s Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1727). However, even though Jones fixedly prioritised the Bible, whether he liked it or not, his reconstruction of the ur-religion was strongly influenced – just like Newton’s – by the Indian doctrine of ahimsa.

  The Laws of Manu in Jones’ 1794 translation stated that ‘Fleshmeat cannot be procured without injury to animals, and the slaughter of animals obstructs the path to beatitude; from fleshmeat, therefore, let man abstain.’ In response to such passages (and despite others that enjoin ritual animal sacrifice), Jones acknowledged in his Preface that ‘a spirit of sublime devotion, of benevolence to mankind, and of amiable tenderness to all sentient creatures, pervades the whole work.’52

  Jones even considered the doctrine of metempsychosis more ‘benevolent’ than the Christian doctrine of eternal damnation. ‘I am no Hindu;’ he insisted to his friend and former pupil, the 2nd Earl Spencer, ‘but I hold the doctrine of the Hindus concerning
a future state to be incomparably more rational, more pious, and more likely to deter men from vice, than the horrid opinions inculcated by Christians on punishments without end.’ Even though Jones turned away from reincarnation, he brought Hinduism into theological debate on a serious level with Christianity. Just as he manipulated Indian scriptures to fit in with his idea of the Noachic origin of the world, so when his interest lay in the other direction, he twisted the Bible’s statement about ‘eternal’ punishment into meaning ‘of a long but limited duration’.53

  Just like Newton, Jones claimed that the Indian doctrine of nonviolence to animals had its roots in the original laws of Noah. In 1787 he told Earl Spencer that ‘kindness to all living creatures’ was ‘one great article of the primitive religion delivered by God to man’. Jones became so convinced of the fundamental importance of this doctrine that he took up the protection of animals as one of his pet subjects. He now upbraided Earl Spencer for enjoying hunting and quoted his translation of his favourite couplet from Firdausi: ‘Ah! spare yon emmet, rich in hoarded grain:/ He lives with pleasure, and he dies with pain.’ Making a dramatic break with his English hunting past, he claimed that ‘I cannot reconcile to my notions of humanity the idea of making innocent beasts miserable and mangling harmless birds. I should be laughed at in many companies for this sentiment.’ Yet far from reserving such ‘laughable’ statements to private correspondence, in his Tenth Anniversary Discourse to the Asiatic Society (1793) he pointed the same accusing finger at naturalists who shoot animals in order to study them:

  I never could learn by what right, nor conceive with what feelings, a naturalist can occasion the misery of an innocent bird and leave its young, perhaps, to perish in a cold nest, because it has gay plumage … or deprive even a butterfly of its natural enjoyments, because it has the misfortune to be rare or beautiful.

  The mandate of the Asiatic Society was to study both man and nature in the region, but Jones made one extraordinary caveat on the extension of research into India’s fauna: ‘though rare animals may be found in all Asia, yet I can only recommend an examination of them with this condition, that they be left, as much as possible, in a state of natural freedom, or made as happy as possible, if it be necessary to keep them confined.’54 India had turned Jones into a prototype of the animal welfare campaigner.

  On his own idyllic Indian estate, Jones forbade the killing of animals for the sake of science, and he even extended kindness to his domestic animals including a tame tiger cub. He spoke of his home in Krishnagar as ‘my Indian Arcadia’, reminiscent of ‘what the poets tell us of the golden age; for, not to mention our flocks and herds that eat bread out of our hands, you might see a kid and a tiger playing together’.55 In the Laws of Manu, Jones had found the ancient medical injunctions for abstinence: ‘The man, who forsakes not the law, and eats not fleshmeat, like a bloodthirsty demon, shall attain good will in this world, and shall not be afflicted with maladies.’56 Jones – afflicted with ‘bad digestion’ in India – followed the concordant advice of the tropical medics by observing ‘extreme temperance’, eating a ‘light and sparing’ diet rich in home-grown vegetables and citrus juice, and avoiding ‘solid food’ (i.e. flesh-meat).57 To all intents and purposes, this one-time bloodthirsty English huntsman had been transformed into a proponent of the Hindu doctrine of ahimsa.

  As Professor Nigel Leask explored in his Anxieties of Empire, the colonialist tendency to ‘reverse acculturation’ (i.e. ‘going native’) could be used as a way of demonstrating national splendour, so long as the Self was not threatened by absorption by the Other. Jones did not go as far as Holwell; rather, he clung even more tenaciously to the fundamentals of biblical doctrine. But the effects of reverse acculturation worked on a spectrum, and Hinduism not only transformed Jones himself, it altered his whole interpretation of the original religion to which he clung.58 Holwell’s conversion was definitely beyond the pale, but in the era of early colonialism even the most revered figures shifted within received traditions of European doctrinal, philosophical, social and political anthropocentrism towards the Indian philosophy of harmlessness. While Europe was spreading its wave of technological and mercantile power on the subcontinent, an undertow of cultural influence was flowing back to the European heartland and threatening to overturn its cherished predatory principles.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The Cry of Nature: Killing in the Name of Animal Rights in the French Revolution

  In 1782 John Oswald, the son of an Edinburgh goldsmith, arrived in Bombay as an officer in the Black Watch. His regiment was to fight Britain’s foes – Hyder Ali, the ruler of Mysore, and his son Tipu Sultan who had made a hostile alliance with the French. Oswald was an unruly young man in his early twenties and he had, as legend has it, nearly killed his commanding officer in a duel on the journey out. After only a few months in active service, his rebelliousness crystallised into ideological dissent. Witnessing massacre and rape perpetrated by the avaricious British, he perceived that the Indians were exploited by the same imperial machine as the pre-Independence Americans had been, and as the British working masses still were.1 The oppressed of the world, he concluded, must unite to throw off the tyrannous yoke. Oswald dissociated himself from his colonial masters, resigned his commission in the army and went on a walkabout among the Hindu populace.2

  Having switched political allegiance, Oswald adopted the identity of his new associates: ‘he imitated the Gentoos, abstained from animal food, and regularly performed the usual ablutions,’ explained one contemporary. ‘[H]e lived a considerable time with some Brahmins, who turned his head,’ wrote another. ‘From that period he never tasted flesh meat, from what he called a principle of humanity.’3 Oswald’s sympathy with the political cause of the Indians merged into acceptance of their sympathy for all members of oppressed species.

  After wandering among the holy men of India, Oswald made an epic journey through Persia and the territory of the Central Asian Kurds, all the way overland to Britain, where he soon appeared, in the words of one onlooker:

  so changed by the manners and dress he assumed, as to be unknown to his friends. He became a convert so much to the Hindoo faith, that the ferocity of the young soldier of fortune sunk into the mild philosophic manners of the Hindoo Brachman. During his stay in England he uniformly abstained from eating animal food, that rather than pass through a Butcher’s Market, he would go any distance round about.4

  Such eccentric figures were becoming familiar in Britain and critics immediately tried to dismiss him as a faint-hearted fool like Holwell, whose reason had clearly been addled in India. The Utilitarian moralist Philip Doddridge, in a defence of meat-eating in his Lectures on Pneumatology, Ethics, and Divinity, noted in an aside that ‘Mr Holwell and Mr Oswald, both of whom have resided in the East-Indies, have embraced the principles of the Hindoos, and written against the use of animal food.’5 The mention of this pair of cultural vagrants was bound to raise a titter in the audience. When William Julius Mickle published his attack on Holwell and other converts to Hinduism in the European Magazine in 1787, he may have had his sights also set on Oswald, with whose employer in Grub Street, William Thomson, Mickle often worked. Within three years, the same magazine made a similar swipe directly against Oswald:

  The religious and philosophic opinions of this gentleman are said to be extremely singular. He adheres to the doctrines of the Hindoo system of worship, and turns with an abhorrence truly Braminical from every species of animal food. To a gentleman who urged him to assign reasons for an aversion so singular, he replied, ‘that he thought it cruel to deprive of life an innocent animal, and filthy to feed upon a corpse.’6

  It was disingenuous of the European Magazine to claim that Oswald had converted to ‘the Hindoo system of worship’, for everyone knew that despite his admiration for Hindu ethics, as the quotation from Oswald actually implies, and as one friend later clarified: ‘He did not, however, enter into the whole theology of the Brahmins, for he was a professed atheist
and denied the Metempsychosis.’7 For Oswald, Hinduism embodied a natural law of humanity to which the religious doctrines were merely auxiliary. The claim that he had followed in Holwell’s footsteps was an attempt to push Oswald further beyond the pale than he had really gone. Critics wished to distort Oswald’s statement in this way partly because they knew he represented a growing and threatening political voice in Britain. It was not vegetarianism per se that journals like the European Magazine had a problem with: the very same edition of the magazine gave a respectful account of the vegetarian advocate Lord Monboddo and a eulogistic interview with the late philanthropist John Howard, who lived so long and healthily because ‘for many years he had not tasted animal food’; in other issues it praised the toast-eating teetotal asceticism of the highly esteemed atheist American revolutionary Thomas Hollis; gave a rave review of Saint-Pierre’s fruitarian Paul et Virginie; and described the novel Hartly House whose heroine converts to Brahminical sympathy for animals as ‘virtuous’ (albeit ‘uninteresting’); it even ran four long articles that defended the intelligence of animals and condemned anyone ‘who can hear, without being moved, the plaintive cries of an animal’. What set Oswald out from the rest – what really led contemporaries to try to anaesthetise the threat he posed – was the anti-imperialist implications of identifying with the Hindus, and more generally the revolutionary politics for which he was by now notorious.8 As the publisher Thomas Rickman reported, Oswald was one of the ‘select few’ friends of Thomas Paine, architect of the American revolution and foremost advocate of republican revolution in Britain.9