Keywords in South Asian Studies, ed. Rachel M. Dwyer

Author: Parama Roy

Vegetarianism

Though it is commonplace to regard as vegetarian and India as the land of vegetarianism from time immemorial, scholarship and social fact call both these axioms into question; moreover, they demonstrate that the very meaning of vegetarianism has historically been, and continues to be, a matter of considerable contestation and of historical and regional variation.

The historical record demonstrates that members of the Harappan civilization, like the Vedic

Aryans who succeeded them in northern India, were carnivorous, as were the Dravidian civilizations of southern India. The (1700-800 B.C.E.) and the (1500-800

B.C.E.), which are the earliest of the Sanskrit sacred texts, list dozens of animals, including bulls, barren cows, buffaloes, rams, and goats that were deemed fit for divine sacrifice, hospitality, and human consumption. Other texts, including the great religious epics the and the

Mahabharata (committed to writing around 400 B.C.E.), the (a manual of statecraft dating from the reign of Chandragupta Maurya, around 300 B.C.E.), Panini=s Sanskrit grammar

(800-350 B.C.E.), and the medical treatises of Susruta and Caraka (cast in their present form at the commencement of the Christian era) also provide considerable evidence of the widespread consumption of animal foods by members of all castes in the Hindu social order. In his detailed analysis of the materia medica of the Ayurvedic medical tradition, Francis Zimmermann has underlined the importance of therapeutic remediesBincluding raw blood and the flesh of predatory animalsBthat depend very materially upon the hunting, slaughter, and consumption of animals, and that are considered efficacious in direct proportion to the violence they entail.

Zimmerman qualifies these observations in two important respects. He notes, first, the

1 2 importance of princely medicine and royal treatment in the texts of Caraka, Susruta, and their eleventh- and twelfth-century commentators; the emphasis on hunting and the consumption of game in the Ayurvedic catalogue of healing foods is thus produced for a social context in which violence is inseparable from the (religious/social duty) of warriors or kings. He also draws attention to the equivocal character of Ayurvedic prescription, committed as it is to a violence that is impure and immoral even as it is necessary and therapeutic. This tension is sought to be reconciled by consecrating the meat that is to be consumed. Nonetheless is always classed as one of the lesser or more impure sciences by virtue of its association with violence, pragmatism, and materiality.

The ambivalence about the violence of meat-eating that Zimmermann notes in the

Ayurvedic texts is registered in a marked way in the dharmasastras (the later Hindu lawbooks), particularly in the Manusmriti (first century CE). The thirty verses of the Manusmriti devoted to meat-eating situate it quite explicitly with respect to jati/ (caste) norms. , Manu says, may eat the meat that is consecrated in sacrifice, an act that is morally distinct from killing.

He also outlines the doctrine of apaddharma (deftly translated by A.K. Ramanujan as

Aemergency ethics@), which permits Brahmans to subsist even on the abominable ox-flesh and dog-flesh diet of Candalas and Svapakas (outcastes to the Hindu caste hierarchy; the latter term translates as Adog-cooker@) if it is necessary to preserve life. But, at the same time as it lists the permissible occasions and modes for the consumption of meat, the Manusmriti also extols the practice of (non-injury, non-killing).

The emergence of some prohibitions on meat-eating for caste Hindus, is, however, of earlier date, and tied to the cultivation of a renunciatory and ascetic ethic among Brahmans in

3 particular in the wake of a period of great social transformations in northern India. It was the combined influence of the heretical sects, and , that led to the eventual demise of Vedic animal sacrifice and to the dissemination of a vegetarian diet to significant sectors of the population. Buddhist rationalism, combined with its stringent critique of Brahmanical ritual, especially animal sacrifice, prompted a significant re-evaluation of Brahmanical codes of proper conduct. While the Buddha was strongly opposed to animal sacrifice, he rejected a suggestion by his cousin Devadatta that vegetarianism be imposed upon all monks, urging them instead to accept without complaint the food offered them by householders rather than fetishizing any form of dietary purity. While monks undertook a vow of nonviolence, poverty, and virtuous conduct, they, along with other followers of the Buddha, were permitted animal flesh provided they had not seen, heard, or suspected the slaughter. Thus, while vegetarianism was not necessarily enjoined upon Buddhists, meat-eating was hedged with cautions. Vegetarianism became a source of some controversy at a later period in the Buddhist monastic community, with the

Mahayana school (of the first century CE) laying considerable stress upon the abjuration of the flesh of animals; this school was to enjoy some popularity in India and before taking hold decisively in Tibet, China, Japan, and Mongolia. The Lankavatara (a text that exists in several versions and was most likely compiled in 350-400 CE), which records the Buddha=s teachings in Sri Lanka, has a chapter that is severely deprecatory of meat-eating. The

Theravadin Buddhism that is currently followed in Sri Lanka does not impose dietary restrictions upon its followers, though there are monks and lay people who are practising vegetarians.

In India, it was in the emperor Asoka=s reign (269-232 B.C.E.) that the doctrines of ahimsa popularized by Buddhism found their greatest efflorescence. Asoka is commonly

4 depicted in Buddhist chronicles as having undergone a sudden conversion to Buddhism (and to the doctrine of ahimsa) after the tremendous carnage of the battle of Kalinga (260 B.C.E.), by means of which he consolidated his reign over the subcontinent, though Romila Thapar suggests that his turn to ahimsa and to what he called Dhamma was slower, more politically expedient, and more ethically complex than the conversion narrative would suggest, and that these orientations were not reducible to Buddhist doctrine alone. In any event, Buddhism was for

Asoka a social and intellectual movement in addition to being a religious belief. His principles, as defined in his Major and Minor Rock Edicts and the Pillar Edicts, expressed themselves in a concern for all living things and a turn away from the taking of life. Though he did not renounce either war or capital punishment entirely, some of his edicts were critical of war, conquest, and rule by force. He abandoned the royal hunt, criticized blood sacrifices, and stringently curtailed the cooking of meat in the royal kitchen, permitting only the daily slaughter of Atwo peacocks and a deer, and the deer not invariably.@ He added to the list of protected birds and beasts, though he neither forbade hunting outright nor insisted upon the vegetarianism of his subjects.

His example and his edicts were a powerful influence upon a Brahmanical thrown into crisis and rapidly transforming itself in response to the challenges of a number of heterodox sects. K.T. Achaya notes that the ritual animal sacrifice was eventually cast aside or sublimated by the major schools of Brahmanical thought, with vegetable and flour substitutes taking the place of the sacrificial animal.

Even more far-reaching than Buddhism in its impact upon the diet of caste Hindus was

Jainism, which came into its own at around the same time (the sixth century B.C.E.) that the

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Buddha formulated his critique of Brahmanical Hinduism and instituted another path to salvation. Like other religious renunciants (including the Buddhists and the Ajivikas) of the sixth century CE, the Jains rebelled against the morality of Vedic animal sacrifice and against the

Brahmanical establishment that enforced it, simultaneously sympathizing with the suffering of the sacrificial beast and guarding against the possibility of being eaten in turn in another life.

(Gail Hinich Sutherland urges us to remember though that such a critique must be read not only in terms of a revolution in values but also in terms of sectarian strife and competition for royal patronage in ancient India.) While there is historical evidence of the consumption of meat, whether in the form of alms or in times of famine or sickness, by early Jain ascetics, the turn to vegetarianism was absolute by the early medieval period. Ahimsa, or the renunciation of violence, became central to Jainism. This took a predominantly dietary formBwar was not prohibited for Jain believers--and was stringently interpreted by renunciants and the lay community alike. The range of dietary prohibitions instituted by Jainism to minimise the destruction of any living beings was greater than that of any other religion of the subcontinent.

Not only were meat, fish, and eggs forbidden, but also those vegetables and fruits whose consumption involved any potential violence; thus roots, bulbs, and tubers (which had to be wrenched forcibly out of the earth, causing injury to worms and insects), fruits and vegetables with numerous small seeds, unboiled or unfiltered water (which was teeming with countless minute life-forms), and honey were on the catalogue of forbidden foods. Onions and garlic, conventionally considered Ahot@ and passion-inducing foods in the Ayurvedic alimentary scheme, were also prohibited, as was eating after dark. The ascetic community, whether of the

Digambara or the Shvetambara sect of Jainism, had to observe even stricter rules, fasting at

6 regular intervals, and covering the mouth and sweeping roadways to avoid ingesting or crushing tiny organisms by mistake. The most complete abjuration of the violence that is cooking and eating was manifested in /samadhi maran, a controlled wasting away through fasting that purified the body of its sins and culminated in a death that approached the sacral status of sacrifice; the Afounder@ of Jainism, , is said to have ended his life in this manner.

Sallekhana has rarely been practised after the twelfth century.

For the Jain faithful, restrictions on diet were supplemented by restrictions on modes of subsistence, such as agriculture, milling, and the breeding of livestock, that injured or destroyed life-forms. In contemporary times however the Jain lay community has come to take a relatively liberal view of the potential for violence in the various trades and professions. And, it goes without saying that as far as dietary practices are concerned, not all Jains live in a state of consistent self-denial, though decisions about diet continue to be a significant component of the ethics of quotidian life.

Jainism=s dietary asceticism has had an impact upon the subcontinent to a degree that is belied by the small size of the Jain community. Its commitment to vegetarianism eventually established itself as the dietary norm among most (though not all) communities and even some non-Brahman caste Hindu communities in the subcontinent, though in a less uncompromising form. The Vaishnava sects that emerged all over the subcontinent from the (reformist, devotional, and initially anti-caste) movement of the medieval period, for instance, enjoined a strict vegetarianism upon their adherents, including the avoidance of onions and garlic. Among the best-known of modern Jains was Raychandbhai Mehta who, over the course of a short life (1867-1901), distinguished himself by his spiritual exercises and his

7 asceticism. He is best known for having been Gandhi=s counsellor on metaphysical questions, diet, and brahmacharya (male celibacy). Indeed, Gandhi=s distinguished career in gastropolitics is clarified enormously by situating it in the context of the Jain dietary and ascetic practices that prevailed in the Kathiawad of his youth.

Gandhi=s lifelong interest in the ethics of ingestion, abstention, and elimination constituted an innovative recasting of the normative vegetarianism of his western Indian milieu; for him, mastery over the voracity of bodily appetites was key not only to spiritual self- perfection but also to nationalist self-fashioning. Indeed, what is his nearest approach to an autobiography (what he calls The Story of My Experiments With Truth) is substantially a history of his palate=s transactions with the world. Thus his earliest memories were of his devout

Vaishnava mother=s many and rigorous fasts. This instance of self-denial was in conflict for the young Gandhi with another culinary model that identified vegetarianism with Hindu susceptibility to conquest and urged meat-eating as a form of virilization and of nationalist duty.

Gandhi recalled a doggerel in fashion among schoolboys in his youth: A>Behold the mighty

Englishman/ He rules the Indian small,/ Because being a meat-eater/ He is five cubits tall.=@ This led to the youthful Gandhi=s furtive and short-lived experiments with meat-eating, experiments that invariably also involved financial impropriety and sexual guilt. When his mother enjoined him to forswear meat, alcohol, and sexual relations with women for the duration of his stay in

London, where he was to train as a barrister, he assented but without any conviction about the ethical correctness of the prohibitions. Ironically, it was in Britain that he became a vegetarian by conviction, discovering the work and the company of vegetarians, anti-vivisectionists, health reformers, Fabians, pacifists, and socialists. When practising as a barrister in South Africa, his

8 commitment to vegetarianism led him to further refinements in dietary asceticism and self- purification, including experiments with a saltless and spiceless diet, raw foods, and fasting. His vegetarianism also became more expansive in its scope as he pondered the biomoral qualities of various items of food and sought to link the restraint of the palate with other forms of somatic/ethical restraint such as brahmacharya. It was at this time that he eliminated cow=s milk from his diet, concurring with Raychandbhai that it was a spur to sexual desire (and departing from the Ayurvedic axiom that milk is the purest of foods). At this point, he also came to situate meat-eating (and violence against animals in general) with the entire violent order of modernity, including armed conflict, colonial exploitation, and the sordid calculations of realpolitik, an industrial order built upon the violence of competition, and an allopathic medicine that was both narrowly materialistic and dependent upon brutal practices like vivisection. It is important to remember these multiple and intricately knotted entailments of vegetarianism for a figure like Gandhi. To the violent practices listed above Gandhi counterposed an arsenal of nonviolent practices and orientations--vegetarianism, fasting, and satyagraha (Atruth-force@).

All through his life Gandhi strove mightily to perfect himself in these practices, progressively simplifying his meals, undertaking purificatory fasts, and seeking to persuade his antagonists (and occasionally his friends) through suffering love. And yet neither his vegetarianism nor his practice of satyagraha could be said to be a self-evident or conflict-free achievement. What is worth noting, rather, is the profoundly uncertain, transactional, and experimental character of his gastropolitics. This is especially marked in those chapters of the

Autobiography where he faces a crisis in his character as a vegetarian patriarch. Gandhi narrates two instances in which he was forced to confront the ethical limits of his vegetarianism. In one

9 instance his wife Kasturba was suffering from internal haemorrhaging and in the other his ten- year-old son Manilal was suffering from an acute case of typhoid. Both were in grave danger of death, but Gandhi, after anguished soul-searching, withheld permission to administer beef tea or eggs as advised by the doctors, and managed to save them through his nursing. In this Gandhi repudiated not so much the therapeutic character of meatBindeed he says little about its efficacy or lack of itBbut an Aemergency ethics@ that saw the preservation of life or of health as an unquestioned good, superceding any ethical absolutes. The decisions were deeply vexed ones for Gandhi, and irreducibly gendered; they speak powerfully to the difficulty of encountering

(and exorcizing) the occasionally troubled limits of his commitment to ahimsa.

Vegetarianism is unevenly manifested among the different communities of the subcontinent. A religiously mandated vegetarianism among Jains is near-absolute, while historically it has been relatively rare among Christian and Muslim communities, with the exception of some Sufi saints of the medieval period. Vegetarianism is likewise a common practice only among a few Sikh sects such as the Namdharis. Among caste Hindus abstention from meat is, and always has been, inextricable from the eater=s jati/varna (caste) status, gender, ashram or stage in the human life-cycle, regional origin, state of bodily health, personal disposition, and other contingencies (such as travel, famine, etc.). Foods are moreover subject to classification according to their gunas (biomoral properties). Sattvik foods (milk products, fruits, and vegetables) are pure in origin and conducive to celibacy; rajasik (onions, garlic, alcohol, flesh, and highly spiced) foods stimulate lust, energy, and anger and constitute an appropriate diet for those in military occupations; while tamasik (rotten, putrid, and leftover) foods are debasing in character, and produce lethargy in their eaters. In most parts of India, Brahmanical

10 status is associated with a vegetarian diet, though the Brahmans of Kashmir, the Punjab, and

Bengal are exceptions to this rule. Brahmans are by no means the only vegetarians among caste

Hindus; significant numbers of non-Brahman caste Hindus also conform fully to a vegetarian diet, especially in northern and western India. Vegetarianism, along with sexual abstinence and other forms of asceticism, is theoretically incumbent upon those males in the first

(brahmacharyaBcelibate student) and last (sannyasBascetic renunciation) stages/ashrams in the caste Hindu life-cycle, though in practice this is extremely rare. In general married and unmarried caste Hindu women are more likely than men to be vegetarian and to function as custodians of alimentary purity. Widows in most instances are subjected to a severely ascetic regimen that disallows a variety of bodily pleasures, including those of sex, food, and bodily adornment. Caste Hindu widows in have traditionally been forbidden not only meat, fish, eggs, onions, and garlic, but also certain types of lentils believed to be Aheating@ in their effects.

Dietary practices, however, are far from being fixed. Large-scale transformations in diet are often associated with the process denominated as ASanskritization@ by the anthropologist

M.N. Srinivas. This process of vertical mobility within the jati/varna hierarchy is widespread in the subcontinent, including groups both within the caste Hindu community and outside it. It is defined as the process by which a lower-ranked caste, tribe, or other community emulates the customs, rituals, beliefs, ways of life, and even the caste-denomination of a higher, particularly a dwija (Atwice-born@: Brahman, , or ) caste; such a move, says Srinivas, generally follows upon the improvement in political or economic status of the lower-ranked group, or from its increased exposure to and self-consciousness about the AGreat Tradition@ of

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Hinduism. Such Sanskritization involves, among other things, changes in forms and objects of worship, the adoption of the sacred thread, new restrictions upon women=s sexuality, mobility, and economic activity, and changes in diet. In the Brahman and Vaishya models of

Sanskritization, a turn to vegetarianism and teetotalism is common; this is not true of the

Kshatriya model. It should be noted that Louis Dumont=s contention that the practice of vegetarianism is associated with greater ritual purity and higher status in the jati/varna hierarchy is belied by social fact in at least some cases. The meat-eating royal ranks above the vegetarian merchant, and the caste Hindu Bengali widow=s vegetarianism is a sign of her ritually degraded

(rather than elevated) status.

Among the twice-born, are not bound by prohibitions against the consumption of flesh. Neither are lower-ranked members in the jati/varna hierarchy, outcastes, and members of the subcontinent=s tribal communities. (In fact Kancha Ilaiah, the /outcaste critic of

Brahmanical Hinduism, has suggested sardonically that the turn to meat and alcohol among the previously vegetarian be characterized as ADalitization@ rather than ASankritization.@) The deities of such communities, who generally rank low in the pantheon of Vedic/Brahmanical

Hinduism, are sometimes the recipients of blood sacrifices and/or food offerings of meat or fish.

Frequently it is goddesses who are non-vegetarian in their tastes: , to whom goats are often sacrificed, is among them. It should be noted that though some of these non-vegetarian goddesses such as Kali are of tribal origin, their devotees are also drawn in the present day from the more elevated members of the jati/varna hierarchy. Among the best-known and hyperbolically scandalous of the non-Vedic practices is Tantra, commonly identified as a radical practice that involves acts normally prohibited in caste Hindu worship, including sexual

12 intercourse and the consumption of consecrated meat, fish, and wine.

No account of vegetarianism in the subcontinent can ignore the historical and ongoing controversy around cow slaughter and cow protection. While the prohibition against the eating of beef came to be instituted in the early medieval period, and only for caste Hindus, the cow emerged in late-nineteenth century northern and central India as a sacred symbol of the Hindu nation requiring protection from the violence of non-Hindus. For newly emergent middle-class

Hindu males, gomata (the cow as mother) was an important symbol of a glorious tradition defiled by Muslim rule in India, and cow protection became one of the most significant forms of an embryonic between 1880 and 1920. When the Cow Protection Movement failed to prevail upon the colonial government to institute a ban on cow slaughter, it sought to arrest the slaughter of cows forcibly by distributing pamphlets, performing plays, producing petitions and appeals, instituting boycotts of Muslims, attacking Muslim villages, and engaging in violent riots during Muslim festivals. Since the achievement of national independence in

1947, several states in the Indian union have instituted bans upon cow slaughter; as recently as

August 2003 the Hindu nationalist government at the centre proposed a nation-wide ban on the practice. Such moves are clearly directed against the beleaguered Muslim minority in India, but they also have a potential impact upon beef-eating Dalit and untouchable communities. An issue such as this one underlines the fact that the abjuration of meat, or of some kinds of meat, is by no means straightforward or even nonviolent; vegetarianism in the subcontinent, and particularly in

India, continues to be haunted by conflict, controversy, and ambivalence.

Select Bibliography Achaya, K.T. Indian Food: A Historical Companion (: Oxford University Press, 1994).

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White, David Gordon. AYou are What You Eat: The Anomalous Status of Dog-Cookers in ,@ in The Eternal Food: Gastronomic Ideas and Experiences of Hindus and Buddhists, ed. R.S. Khare (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992): 53-94. Zimmermann, Francis. The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats: An Ecological Theme in Hindu Medicine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).