THE BLOODLESS REVOLUTION: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India

by Tristram Stuart

Harper Collins ₤25, 416 pages

Socialism, for George Orwell, conjured up a “picture of vegetarians with wilting beards”; it drew to it “every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, Nature Cure quack, pacifist, and feminist in England”. Tristram Stuart’s new book explores precisely this nexus of beliefs: how did vegetarianism come to be conflated with pacifism, alternative medicine, religious sectarianism and radical politics? He argues forcefully that almost all Enlightenment history relates in some way to vegetarianism. It runs from the World-Turned-Upside-Down of the Commonwealth to the roots of the romantic movement. Along the way, there is much literary criticism, flatulence, and a brief history of scurvy.

For Stuart, the reason for the entanglement of vegetarianism with radical politics lies in the European encounter, from the 17th century, with India. Indian vegetarianism challenged western notions of man’s God-given place at the centre of the universe. Pythagoras, as the classical champion of vegetarianism, spanned the two worlds - opinions differed as to whether he had learned his vegetarianism from India, or had taught it to the Indians.

Some in the west ridiculed Indian vegetarianism as a superstition founded on the heretical belief that animals contained the souls of people: in caricature, that the Indians refrained from eating meat for fear of eating an ancestor. But others saw Indian vegetarianism, based as it was on the principle of ahimsa or non-violence, as the extension of Christian concern for others to its logical extreme.

The same ambivalence was in evidence in the different ways Europeans treated Indians. Stuart picks out the tactics of two missionaries who arrived in India at the start of the 17th century. Goncalo Fernandez ostentatiously despised vegetarianism as a pagan folly; his fellow Jesuit Roberto de Nobili relinquished meat and lived as a sanyasin. “If the people did not see me do such penance,” he reasoned, “they would not receive me as one who can teach them the way to heaven.”

Various strands of vegetarian thought developed in the west. Some saw vegetarianism as a way of getting back to man’s state before the Fall; there was general theological agreement that Adam ate no meat. Some backed vegetarianism for its health-giving properties. The Cartesians saw nothing wrong in eating animals, but Descartes nonetheless abstained from meat in the belief that it would “lengthen out his life span to equal that of the Patriarchs”. (He died at 53.)

Some avoided meat out of solidarity with animals. This was where political radicalism came in. The great flowerings of vegetarianism in Stuart’s book coincide with the 1640s and the 1780s, two times when revolution was in the air. The archetypal figure here is John Oswald, who went to India with the Black Watch, but was repelled by the British treatment of the Indians and switched sides. Returning to Europe, he became a militant revolutionary and took part in the French Revolution, dying in battle for it. Oswald’s vegetarianism was tied up with his politics, to the extent that he saw meat-eating as an act of predation analogous to the rule of the aristocracy.

At the end, Stuart reveals his own colours as an ecologist. He allows that, in some cases, “ecologically sustainable ways of procuring meat…[cause] less harm to animals than arable cultivation”, but insists that, in most cases, industrial meat production is simply unsustainable for the planet. The ultimate case for vegetarianism lies not in its romantic appeal, but in its efficiency.

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