Feeding off each other

VEGETARIAN MOVEMENTS IN SOUTH ASIA AND THE WEST GREW WITH MUTUAL SUPPORT AND VALIDATION

- AKSHAT JAIN

JULIA HAUSER's A Taste for Purity is a detailed historical account of the formation of the global vegetarian movement in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It centralises global connections in the rise of vegetarianism in the different national contexts of Britain, Germany, US and South Asia.

In India, vegetarianism got much of its early support from vegetarian movements in Europe and America. The two parties colonial Euro-America and colonised South Asia-reinforced each other. While vegetarians in India needed the scientific gloss of the "White Man" to make their ideas appear secular or modern, those in Europe and America needed the spiritual gloss of the "merciful Hindoo" to make their anti-Semitic or eugenicist ideas appear moral and traditional.