The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India. Tristram Stuart

designed to protect animals for their own sake, but ultimately for the benefit of humans. He was following a common tradition that had long been used to clear Pythagoras from imputations of superstition, exemplified by the third-century Epicurean biographer-philosopher Diogenes Laertius, who claimed that Pythagoras never believed in metempsychosis, but that ‘his real reason for forbidding animal diet’ was to give people ‘a healthy body and keen mind’.⁷⁹ Indeed, this interpretative technique had been used by Christians on the Bible, for example when St Thomas Aquinas insisted that if Moses appeared to care for animals, he was really just trying ‘to turn the mind of man away from cruelty which might be used on other men’.⁸⁰ Erasing from Hinduism the ethic of respect for animal life, and replacing it with European ideas of diet, agronomy and temperament, may seem like aggressive manipulation, but in doing so Bernier was treating Hinduism in much the same way as Christians treated the Bible. By transposing exegetical traditions onto Indian practice and regarding the Hindus as pseudo-Pythagoreans, Bernier developed a humanist interpretation of Indian culture that detected a reservoir of ancient sagacity behind their ‘fables’.

      Having identified its potential, Bernier was astonished by the advantages of vegetarianism, noticing in particular that it was India’s greatest military asset. Whereas European armies were weighed down with barrels of salted beef and tankards of wine – without which the European soldier would absolutely refuse to fight – Indian armies were perfectly content with readily transportable dried food such as lentils and rice. He looked on with disbelief as Aurangzeb’s immense army transported enough provisions for ‘prodigious and almost incredible’ numbers of people.⁸¹

      Such concrete evidence of the benefits of vegetarianism made a sizeable dent in the typical European argument that meat-eating was essential for sustaining human life, or at least for strength and virility. It was commonly supposed that anyone who abstained from flesh must be effeminate, weak and lazy. This, Europeans said to themselves, was what made it so easy for meat-eating Muslims and Europeans to conquer Indian vegetarians.⁸² This idea of Asian effeminacy, which dates back at least 2,500 years to Hippocratic medical ethnology, became one of the most pervasive means of denigrating Hindus, especially towards the end of the eighteenth century.⁸³ But it was counterbalanced by the recognition that the Hindus’ frugality made them at least as long-lived as Europeans, and fuelled their admired industriousness and resilience to disease.⁸⁴

      The Europeans’ idea that meat-eating was normal, or essential, was swiftly being demolished by the discovery of vegetarian peoples all over the world. Europeans gradually realised that instead of representing the norm, they were an exceptionally carnivorous society. In Africa and America travellers found people living in primitive simplicity ‘before’ the luxury of civilisation had corrupted them – a state with both Edenic and barbaric connotations.⁸⁵ In the East vegetarianism had been preserved beyond the state of nature by virtuous temperance and the institution of sacred laws against killing animals.⁸⁶ Such discoveries were to provide grist to the mill of any European who wished to argue that eating meat was by no means a nutritional necessity.

      Bernier’s attempt to understand and even learn from this Hindu doctrine has to be considered as liberal, especially compared to the invectives of his European contemporaries at the Mughal court, such as the Venetian Niccolao Manucci who described the Indian vegetarians as ‘a people who do not deserve the name of man’.⁸⁷

      Bernier’s acquaintance Jean-Baptiste Tavernier was less vituperative than Manucci, but furnished plenty of sensationalist examples of Indian vegetarianism in his Travels in India (1676), warning prospective visitors with the story of a Persian merchant who was whipped to death for shooting a peacock, and noting the extreme lengths taken to ensure that relatives were not killed – in the form of ants in firewood. Tavernier praised the high morality of the Hindus, but he – like many others before and since – could not but see an absurd contradiction in preserving the life of vermin, and yet happily burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands.⁸⁸

      Surprisingly, the most enthusiastic seventeenth-century travel writer was an English clergyman, the Reverend John Ovington, who travelled to India in 1689. Ovington accepted Bernier’s utilitarian rationale: vegetarianism clearly made the Indians less cruel, just as healthy, and spiritually and mentally ‘more quick and nimble’. But Ovington even endorsed the Indians’ animal protection practices on their own terms: ‘India of all the Regions of the Earth, is the only publick Theatre of Justice and Tenderness to Brutes, and all living Creatures,’ he said, ‘a Civil Regard … is enjoyn’d as a common Duty of Humanity’. Their innocence, said Ovington, made the Hindus comparable to ‘the original Inhabitants of the World, whom Antiquity supposes not to have been Carnivorous, nor to have tasted Flesh in those first Ages, but only to have fed upon Fruits and Herbs’. Ovington concluded by giving Hinduism a carte blanche of philosophical integrity: ‘there is not one of these Customs which are fasten’d upon them by the Rules of their Religion, but what comport very well, and highly contribute to the Health and Pleasure of their Lives.’⁸⁹

      The way was paved for Europeans to take Indian vegetarianism, if not as a lesson in philosophy and justice, then at least in medical health. The voyages of discovery and the new wave of early anthropology that followed in their wake impelled Europe towards a combination of cultural syncretism and relativism. Attempts to sustain the idea that European Christians had the best society often crumbled in the face of evident virtue and integrity in other peoples. International vegetarianism, which plugged directly into European discourses on diet and the relationship between man and nature, proved a serious challenge to Western norms. As readers back home assimilated the information in the travelogues, Indian vegetarianism started to exert influence on the course of European culture.

^*For an account of deism, see chapter 9.

       FIVE ‘This proud and troublesome Thing, called Man’: Thomas Tryon, the Brahmin of Britain

      Thomas Tryon gazed out over the sugar plantations of Barbados. What he saw chilled his heart. With horror he watched lines of slaves labouring under the inhuman whip of their European masters. The cruelty of men claiming to be Christians surpassed all belief: the expatriated Africans were starved until they would eat putrefying horse meat; their limbs were crushed in the sugar mills; they died by thousands in the open fields. While Restoration England grew fat on their sweat and blood, Tryon complained, Barbados was perishing. The forests of the Americas were being depleted at a shocking rate; even the soil was suffering under the insatiable greed of the white man. After years of forcing the ground to produce the same cash crop, Barbados had gone from being ‘the most Fertil’st Spot of all America’, to ‘become a kind of Rock’ which grew nothing without dung fertiliser.¹ All this destruction was committed only to supply luxury goods back in London – that stinking heap of human corruption Tryon had left behind. Everything had gone horribly awry: America was supposed to be a New World in which laws of justice between man and beast would bring about a Golden Age of peace and harmony, not the ransacked sewerage of the Old World.² This was the opposite of what Tryon, in his youthful dreams, had imagined.

      Born on 6 September 1634 in the Gloucestershire village of Bibury, Tryon had been sent out to spin wool at the age of six without an education. Working as a shepherd in his spare