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

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      Brahmin with cow, from Henry Lord’s A Display of two forraigne sects in the East Indies (1630)

      However, the protection of animals that were not useful flabbergasted even the most hardened travellers. The sixteenth-century Portuguese writer Duarte Barbosa was astounded by the ‘marvellous’ extreme to which the Indians took ‘this law of not killing anything’. ‘For it often happens,’ he reported, ‘that the Moors bring them some worms or little birds alive, saying they intend to kill them in their presence; and they ransom them, and buy them to set them flying, and save their lives for more money than they are worth.’⁵⁸ He was still more astonished – as future European travellers would be – to find that noxious insects like lice were looked after by special people allotted to the task of feeding them with their own blood.⁵⁹

      Christians thought that animals were made for humans, so an animal’s value was dependent on its usefulness. The Hindus and Jains, they perceived, had a fundamentally different system which attributed value to animal life independent from, and even at the expense of, man. In the 1590s the Dutch traveller to India John Huygen van Linschoten articulated this in his internationally best-selling travelogue Itinerario (The Journey), by explaining that the Banians ‘kill nothing in the world that has life, however small and useless it may be’. Despite his culture-shock, Linschoten rendered such morals comprehensible by giving them a Christian gloss: the Hindus, he explained, consider it ‘a work of great charity, saying, it is don to their even neighbours’.⁶⁰ It became common for Europeans to regard the Hindu value of animal life not so much as something completely alien, but as an extension of laws compatible with Christianity such as ‘loving thy neighbour’.⁶¹ In that framework, Hindus were seen by some as more virtuous than Christians. As one English gentleman put in the 1680s, it was ‘a sad thing’ that in respect of their treatment of animals ‘Christians, very many of them, may go to School, and learn of Infidels and Heathens to reform their Lives and Manners’.⁶²

      The ultimate surprise for the Europeans were the Indian ‘animal hospitals’.⁶³ Again, Europeans were most challenged by the fact that such hospitals expended effort and money on animals that were past their usefulness. ‘They have hospitals for sheepe, goates, dogs, cats, birds, and for all other living creatures,’ wrote Ralph Fitch, the first Englishman to write a travelogue on India in 1594. ‘When they be old and lame, they keepe them until they die.’⁶⁴ In Europe, sick animals or cattle past their productive age were automatically killed. The ‘ingratitude’ that this implied became a source of anxiety for Europeans.⁶⁵ Hindus appeared to be extraordinary exemplars of charity, which put some European noses out of joint. Many travellers responded to this with ridicule, but others were impressed by the workings of a moral system that was entirely neglected in the West.

      In dealing with this challenge, Europeans projected onto the Indians the simplified Pythagorean idea that they abstained from killing animals for fear of hurting a reincarnated human soul. This implied that the Hindus were not valuing the life of the animal itself, but the soul of the human trapped within it. Since most Christians dismissed reincarnation as a preposterous theological error, interpreting Hindu vegetarianism in this way deflected the ethical challenge and amputated their principle of non-violence (ahimsa). It meant that writers could fall back on the long-standing Christian tradition of ridiculing the Pythagorean objection to eating flesh, as the Christian theologian Tertullian put it in the second century AD, ‘lest by chance in his beef he eats of some ancestor of his’.⁶⁶ One author who assessed the scientific case for vegetarianism at the end of the seventeenth century, simply declared that the Pythagoreans didn’t count as vegetarians because their diet was based on ‘a Mistake in their Philosophy, and not a Law of Nature’.⁶⁷ Christians defused the moral strength of vegetarianism by reducing it to a comical superstition.

      Having projected Pythagoreanism onto the Hindus, some Europeans explained the similarity by claiming that Pythagoras had taught the Indians their vegetarian doctrines, rather than the other way round.⁶⁸ This gave Pythagoras the European a superior status, and it also meant that Brahmins could be more readily assimilated into biblical history by claiming that they and their philosophy were descended from the Egyptians. By the time the clergyman Samuel Purchas published his enormous anthology of travel literature in 1625, the idea that the Indians were identical to Pythagoreans was already widespread. Purchas himself thought Pythagoras must have been to India and he printed several authors who had noticed, as King James I’s ambassador to Jahangir, Sir Thomas Roe, put it in 1616, that the Indian ‘Pythagorians’ believe in ‘the soules СКАЧАТЬ