Truth and Vegetarianism
Despite not being at all religious, I seem to have spent quite a lot of time reading and writing about very religious people. I wrote my PhD – which I’m turning into a book at the moment – on Dutch Reformed evangelicals and their interest in childhood in the late-nineteenth-century Cape Colony. Want to know about the surprisingly complicated theological battles that raged, viciously, between warring factions of Dutch Reformed ministers in the 1850s and 1860s? Then I’m your woman.
One of the most interesting diaries I came across during my research was written by Caroline Molteno (1853-1937), the daughter of the Cape Colony’s first Prime Minister. (The Cape was granted responsible government in 1872, and John Molteno served as Prime Minister until 1878). Caroline was not a member of the DRC, but her journals written during her early- and mid-teens opened up the world of white, middle-class girls and young women in Cape Town in the 1860s and 1870s.
Caroline’s diary was useful because she was deeply conventional. She worked hard at school, left when it was socially appropriate to do so (shortly before her seventeenth birthday), travelled to Europe with her father, and attended the round of balls, parties, teas, and cricket matches which helped her to find an eligible husband. She married Charles Murray – the future president of the South African Medical Association – in 1876, and they had eight children. She devoted herself to her family and good works.
Caroline wanted desperately to fit in to white, middle-class Capetonian society. Her older sister Betty (1852-1927), though, did not. Betty was as prolific a diary- and letter-writer, but fought against the life path that her sisters followed, apparently, so meekly. (Alongside Caroline there was another sister, Maria, and seven brothers, three of whom followed their father into politics.)
Betty refused to leave school, choosing to board at their girls’ institution in the city centre, rather than returning to the Molteno home in the leafy, prosperous suburb of Claremont. She trained as a teacher and, after some opposition from her family, travelled to Britain, where she studied at Newnham College, Cambridge. On her return to South Africa she met her partner Alice Greene (a relative of the better known Graham Greene), and the two spent a long, shared life in teaching – they worked at Collegiate School in Port Elizabeth – and activism. They were friends with Olive Schreiner, knew Emily Hobhouse, and were close associates of Gandhi.
These two peripatetic feminists – they returned, eventually, to the UK and are buried side-by-side in Cornwall – were also members of the Theosophical Society. Founded in New York in 1875 by the Russian-born spiritualist Helena Blavatsky, Theosophy was, in many ways, part of the broader Victorian interest in the occult. But its interests extended beyond séances and efforts to contact the other side. Mark Bevir explains:
The theosophists adopted three basic aims: to promote the brotherhood of man, to investigate the hidden powers of life and matter, and to encourage the study of comparative religion.
So for all its interest in belief and the unseen, Theosophy encourages greater contact and understanding between people of all faiths. Its maxim, ‘There is no religion higher than truth,’ captures, I think, the path it walks between the spiritual and the temporal.
The Melbourne Theosophical Society.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Theosophy was attractive to a disparate group of nineteenth-century radicals, the best-known being Rudolf Steiner and Annie Besant, both of whom held prominent positions within the organisation. Besant led Theosophy after Blavatsky’s death in 1891. In fact, Besant is a prime example of how, as Sheila Rowbotham writes in her biography of Edward Carpenter, ‘left politics and lifestyle were inclined to fuse.’ These ‘alternate lifers – socialists, anarchists, Theosophists, vegetarians’ – clustered together, joining one another’s societies and supporting one another’s causes.
Besant, like GB Shaw, was a member of the Vegetarian Society and a suffragette. Leah Leneman has written about the surprisingly high numbers of vegetarians in the British women’s suffrage movement. She argues that feminists’ interest in vegetarianism stemmed partly from their opposition to animal cruelty and vivisection, but was also the product of the Theosophical Society’s influence over so many late-Victorian women. Theosophy’s willingness to countenance sexual equality and to allow women to occupy important positions within the movement, made it attractive to educated, politically left-leaning women.
Although vegetarianism is not a prerequisite for membership of the Theosophical Society, it certainly promotes vegetarianism – and this is partly a result of Blavatsky’s interest in Hinduism. Indeed, one particularly prominent member of the London Vegetarian Society was Gandhi, who joined while a student in the UK between 1888 and 1891. He also became interested in Theosophy. Stephen Hay explains:
After a year or so in London the young Hindu made the acquaintance of a number of Europeans deeply interested in the culture of ancient India. The first two were members of the newly founded Theosophical Society… [and they] took Gandhi to meet Madame Blatavsky and her recent convert from atheism, Annie Besant. He subsequently read Blavatsky’s Key to Theosophy which ‘stimulated in me the desire to read a book on Hinduism and disabused me of the notion fostered by the [Christian] missionaries … that Hinduisim was rife with superstition.’
These British theosophists and members of the Vegetarian Society were, through their interest in Indian society and religion, early supporters of Indian nationalism. Besant had a long and complicated relationship with this movement: she founded the Indian Home Rule League in 1916 and was a member of the Indian National Congress.
What she and her fellow vegetarians and theosophists opened up to Gandhi and other western-educated Indians was a new way of understanding India: one that embraced Hinduism as a sophisticated set of beliefs, and which celebrated India’s rich and ancient history.
As Theosophy drew on a range of belief systems, it spread outwards from the United States and Britain. Theosophical Societies were established in South African cities too. As far as I can see, there were branches in Cape Town, Pretoria, and Johannesburg by the early years of the twentieth century – and they are still in existence.
Betty Molteno and Alice Greene – feminists, vegetarians, political radicals – were early South African Theosophists too. When Gandhi lived in South Africa (1893-1914), he seems to have been involved in the Johannesburg Lodge’s activities, reading occasionally from the Bhagavad Gita – a text which he had first read in translation while in England.
The Cape Town Theosophical Society.
Theosophy helped, then, to reframe Gandhi’s understanding of India – not as a place needing reform from civilised foreigners, but, rather, as a nation which could draw on its own histories and traditions. (Of course, this new idea of India was as heavily constructed as that taught to Gandhi and other western-educated Indians.) Vegetarianism did something similar: associated with self-control, purity, and a profoundly ethical relationship with the world, vegetarianism became symbolic of Gandhi’s own form of political struggle and vision for a free India.
What understanding the origins of the vegetarian movement and other, related organisations – like Theosophy – demonstrates, is that choices around what we eat have long been political: they are connected with the ways in which we choose to think about and wield power.
Sources
Mark Bevir, ‘Theosophy and the Origins of the Indian National Congress,’ International Journal of Hindu Studies, vol. 7, nos. 1-3 (2003), pp. 99-115.
Stephen Hay, ‘The Making of a Late-Victorian Hindu: MK Gandhi in London, 1888-1891,’ Victorian Studies, vol. 33, no. 1 (Sept. 1989), pp. 75-98.
Baruch Hirson, The Cape Town Intellectuals: Ruth Schechter and her Circle, 1907-1934 (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2001).
Isabel Hofmeyr, Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013).
Leah Leneman, ‘The Awakened Instinct: Vegetarianism and the Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain,’ Women’s History Review, vol. 6, no. 2 (1997), pp. 271-287.
Sheila Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter: A Life f Liberty and Love (London: Verso, [2008] 2009).
Tangerine and Cinnamon by Sarah Duff is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Tangerine and Cinnamon 
Mar 9
Cows Come Home
Last week, Maharashtra, India’s second-biggest state and home to the country’s commercial capital Mumbai, approved legislation which would ban the sale or possession of beef. The slaughter of cattle – cows, bulls, and calves – is now illegal. The right wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has been in power both nationally and in Maharashtra since May last year, argued that the Maharashtra Animal Preservation (Amendment) Act saves an animal revered by many Hindus as holy. In their view, this represents a victory for pious Hindus.
As many have pointed out, although some Hindus may be in favour of a ban on the slaughter of a beast which they believe to embody divinity, the consumption and sale of beef in India is a complex and contradictory business. Firstly, the beef trade is controlled by the country’s Muslim minority, and beef is consumed mainly by them and the even smaller Christian portion of the population. Despite the fact that India is supposed to be a secular state, this law is aimed directly as these religious minorities. Vashna Jagarnath writes:
In Gaborone, Botswana.
Secondly, this is not the first time that there have been efforts to control the slaughter of cattle in India. Several states have made the killing of cows illegal, and there are laws which limit the sale of beef in some areas. Indeed, the Maharashtra Animal Preservation (Amendment) Act has taken nineteen years to pass. The Bill was sent to the then-President to sign into law in 1996, but it floundered – only when the BJP was re-elected in 2014 was it able to recommit to making the ban real.
And the ban has caused widespread outrage in India – and not only among Muslims and Christians. This is the third point: some Hindus eat beef too. Not all Hindus stick absolutely (religiously?) to vegetarianism. In 2001, the historian DN Jha faced harassment and attempts to prevent the publication of his – by all accounts fairly dry – monograph, The Myth of the Holy Cow. His not particularly fresh thesis was that Hinduism’s ban on beef is a relatively new phenomenon. Pankaj Mishra explains:
The cow became holy first for upper-caste Hindus between the seventh and the thirteenth centuries CE. These were the people who could afford not to spend most of their time producing their food. What changed, though, to identify vegetarianism with Hinduism?
The implications of these nationalist beginnings during the Raj are now playing out in Maharashtra.
My final point is one that I found the most surprising: the effects of the ban on the export of beef. India not only exports water buffalo – the red meat of choice for many Indians – but twenty per cent of the world’s beef comes from India. The Maharashtra Animal Preservation (Amendment) Act has implications, then, for the global food supply. Beef has been a commodity traded on national and international markets since improvements in transport – railways, shipping – and, more importantly, refrigeration, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the United States, the price of beef dropped in the 1870s and 1880s because of the opening up of huge ranches in the west which were connected by rail to packing centres in large cities, most notably (and notoriously, given the revelations in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906)) Chicago.
Something similar happened in South Africa, when the politician and wildly successful businessman Sir David de Villiers Graaff, 1st Baronet, pioneered refrigeration, allowing fruit, vegetables, and meat to be transported across the country’s vast interior without spoiling. His Imperial Cold Storage and Supply Company – founded on the eve of the South African War (1899-1902), out of which De Villiers Graaff profited nicely – became one of the biggest meat packing businesses in Africa.
This and large-scale tax avoidance were at the root of the wild success of the Vestey brothers’ beef empire in the early twentieth century. By 1922, Vesteys had, as Ian Phimister writes, ‘interests in South America, China and Russia, and extensive land holdings in South Africa; it gradually extended its operations to embrace Australia, New Zealand and Madagascar.’ The business shipped beef – produced cheaply under appalling conditions for both workers and cattle – around the world with ‘five steamers refrigerated and fitted for the carriage of frozen meat’.
A poster in Williamsburgh’s Spoonbill & Sugartown bookshop.
The demand that drove the expansion of ranching and packing in the US, and De Villiers Graaff and the Vestey bothers’ businesses, was a growing middle-class taste for a meat once prohibitively expensive. Beef became – like sugar, chocolate, and tea – an affordable luxury once an industrialised food chain caused prices to fall. A similar process is currently underway in India, as an ever-bigger middle class chooses to add more beef to its diet. Although a small, committedly nationalist middle-class was partly responsible for making Hindu diets vegetarian in the nineteenth century, the opposite is happening now. Part of a global circulation of both commodities and ideas – middle classes in other developing nations are also eating more red meat – to what extent will this large middle class be able to negotiate the demands of right wingers keen to protect the lives of holy cows, and the attractions of a more varied and ‘modern’ diet?
Sources
Ebbe Dommisse, Sir David de Villiers Graaff: First Baronet of De Grendel (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2011).
Harvey A. Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003).
I. R. Phimister, ‘Meat and Monopolies: Beef Cattle in Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1938,’ Journal of African History, vol. 19, no. 3 (1978), pp. 391-414.