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Chapter 3 - Gothic Vegetarianism

from Part I - Origins

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 June 2018

By
Parama Roy
Edited by
Gitanjali G. Shahani
Gitanjali G. Shahani
Affiliation:
San Francisco State University
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Summary

This paper examines the travel accounts from the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of a number of European travellers to and sojourners in the coastal cities of western India. Among the ethnographic details that attracted the attention of these observers was an ensemble of practices broadly glossed as “Gentile” or “Gentoo” vegetarianism and protection of nonhuman animals. To many European observers these Gentiles were distinguished by a religiously mandated compassion towards nonhuman life that for many functioned as a rebuke to the ways of putatively more bloodthirsty European compatriots. But, as many noted with bemusement, shock, and occasional horror, Gentile endeavours to protect nonhuman life exceeded these benevolent measures, extending to the establishment of animal hospitals, some of which offered sanctuary to noxious and verminous forms of nonhuman life. Such putatively extreme or perverse forms of vegetarianism or nonviolence coexisted, as many noted, with unusual and perverse forms of cruelty, especially against widows and carnivores, and gave subcontinental vegetarianism a strikingly gothic character.
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Food and Literature , pp. 75 - 97
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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