Given his belief in their common roots, Evelyn was particularly interested in the similarities between Christianity and Hinduism. In his own copy of John Marshall’s account of ‘the Heathen Priests commonly called Bramines’ (published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society) he excitedly pencilled marginalia on the features of Hinduism that appeared to agree with Christianity. He was intrigued to discover that the Hindus believed in a supreme immaterial God, heaven, hell and eternal life, that they practised ascetic fasting, and had a story about the original man in a garden being tempted by a woman, and of a flood destroying the earth until it was repopulated by a small band of survivors.35 Evelyn regarded the Hindus as distant relics of divine tradition, and this can only have spurred his interest in them. He was also an avid reader of the Indian travelogues; as well as the ancient Greek records on India and Bysshe’s Palladius, Evelyn had pored over the modern descriptions of India by Garcia d’Orta, Jacob Bondt, Johann Albrecht von Mandelslo, Duarte Barbosa, Pietro della Valle and others.36 Although he did not share Tryon’s enthusiasm, the Indians nevertheless played a crucial role in his vegetarian argument.
The biggest obstacle to Evelyn’s proselytisation of the ‘herby-diet’ was that most people thought it was not just ordinary to eat animals, but necessary for survival. While it may originally have been possible to live on vegetables, they thought that Noah’s Flood had sapped the earth of all its goodness, leaving the vegetables less nutritious than they had been; and that the human constitution had been slowly degraded and was now so feeble it needed the stronger nourishment of animal flesh.
To combat this, Evelyn trawled through ancient, medieval, Renaissance and modern texts ‘to shew how possible it is by so many Instances and Examples, to live on wholsome Vegetables, both long and happily’.37 Unfortunately for Evelyn, nearly all the vegetarians he found existed only in ancient records. Pythagoras, Adam and Eve, the inhabitants of the Golden Age were all long gone, shrouded in aeons of dust and beyond the reach of empirical observation.
But the Brahmins saved the day. In a triumphant declaration (and trying to conceal that the Brahmins were the only living example he could name), Evelyn cited ‘the Indian Bramins, Relicts of the ancient Gymnosophists to this Day, observing the Institutions of their Founder’ ‘who eat no Flesh at all’. These foreign vegetarians were not the unverifiable products of hearsay, but the extant people whose habits had frequently been recorded, as Evelyn proudly put it, in ‘the Reports of such as are often conversant among many Nations and People’, and ‘who to this Day, living on Herbs and Roots, arrive to incredible Age, in constant Health and Vigour’.38 He thought of India as a living Eden, a place ‘the most pleasant & smiling of the World’ where plants grew in their paradisiacal perfection, and he credited the travellers’ reports that the Garden of Eden had been situated on ‘Adam’s hill’ in Sri Lanka.39 The Golden Age itself might not be achievable, but vegetarianism was the closest mankind could get.
The fact that the Hindus were still alive provided one of the few pieces of concrete empirical evidence that the vegetable diet was really viable. It was empirical evidence that his colleagues at the Royal Society demanded, rather than the heap of classical authorities he had accumulated. Evelyn envisaged a wholesale experimental investigation into this vegetarian people designed to determine what exactly made them capable of living solely on vegetables ‘whether attributable to the Air and Climate, Custom, Constitution, &c.’ It was his opinion that such an enquiry would prove that living on vegetables was something all humans could do.
Evelyn has been hailed as a forebear of modern environmentalism for his campaign against urban degradation and for encouraging forest conservation and replanting. He revered trees as sacred, especially ancient natural ones, ‘such as were never prophaned by the inhumanity of edge tooles’. Evelyn harked back to the Druidic sacred groves and noticed that sylvan rites were scattered across the world – from Abraham’s Quercetum to the Indians’ holy Banian Tree.40 His famous treatise Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest Trees (1664) successfully encouraged English landowners to plant much-needed timber trees, which had been consumed by the greedy furnaces of the iron industry and ravaged by desperate commoners during the interregnum. Forests provided shelter for game, and the trees themselves produced food such as chestnuts (‘a lusty, and masculine food for Rustics’), beech-mast and acorns (‘heretofore the Food of Men … till their luxurious Palats were debauched’). Careful planting could provide country people with most of their food and drink ‘even out of the Hedges and Mounds’, making England more self-sufficient. Not only an act of political restoration, tree-planting, he concluded, was akin to God’s foresting of Paradise.41 Evelyn even lobbied Parliament to introduce laws to curb air pollution, revolted, like Tryon, by the ‘horrid stinks, uiderous and unwholsome smells’ emitted by the meat manufacturers, and the ‘rotten Dung, loathsome and common Lay Stalls; whose noisome Steams, wafted by the Wind, poison and infect the ambient Air and vital Spirits, with those pernicious Exhalations’.42
But although many of these themes seem similar to Tryon, Evelyn’s universe was fundamentally different. The existence of Hindus did help Evelyn to propose a more harmonious relationship with nature, and to reverse the artificial habits of urban society. But Hinduism did not make Evelyn step outside the confines of his religious orthodoxy. Nature did not have a value independent from mankind in the way it did for Tryon; nature, for Evelyn, was just part of God’s man-centred Providence. For Evelyn, creating harmony in and with nature was just a part of the human spiritual quest and a prerequisite for the millennium.
Nevertheless, whether it was his original intention or not, Evelyn did formulate a new position for the status of man’s relations with animals. Having empirically demonstrated that the vegetable diet was viable, Evelyn shifted the ground on which stood the usual justification for killing and eating animals. While most regarded meat-eating as a necessary cruelty – determined by the order of nature and the constitution of man – Evelyn had shown it to be nutritionally unnecessary. If meat-eating was unnecessary, the cruelty it entailed could be considered morally reprehensible. Evelyn did make emotional and moral appeals against ‘the cruel Butcheries of so many harmless Creatures; some of which we put to merciless and needless Torment’. Now that he had shown that it was possible to live by the innocent sport of gardening without shedding a drop of blood, he could judge that meat-eating was cruelty and intemperance.43
A similar idea is suggested in Book XV of Ovid’s Metamorphoses where Pythagoras points out that ‘The prodigall Earth abounds with gentle food;/ Affording banquets without death or blood.’44 But Evelyn made it relevant by transforming it from an ancient poetic ideal into a scientific observation. In that the Brahmins were a keystone in Evelyn’s rational, empirically substantiated argument, Hinduism had a role in developing a new position with regard to animals.
The case for or against Brahmin vegetarianism became the subject of a much wider