Part 3: History of Vegetarianism in India: It Was a PR Strategy | The Plate and the People

History of vegetarianism in India — ancient Jain stone carving representing the ahimsa philosophy that triggered one of the most consequential food culture shifts in human history

The Plate and the People: Vegetarianism Was a PR Strategy

Parts 1 and 2 of this series established something uncomfortable: India's oldest civilisations ate meat, the Vedic texts described it in detail, and the sacred cow became sacred for economic reasons, not spiritual ones. So how did vegetarianism become India's defining food identity? Part 3 is where that transformation happens — and the answer is not what most people expect. It was not a gradual spiritual awakening. It was a competitive crisis, a philosophical arms race, and ultimately one of the most successful rebranding exercises in the history of any civilisation. Two wandering ascetics started it. A threatened priesthood completed it. And somewhere along the way, a Mughal emperor built the most elaborate meat kitchen in Indian history while quietly going vegetarian on the side.

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Part 1: Fire Built Us

Part 2: Ancient India Food History and the Vedas

The History of Vegetarianism in India Begins Not With Faith — But With Competition

CHAPTER 5

The Buddhist and Jain Interruption

How two wandering ascetics changed the terms of every food conversation India would have for the next 2,500 years.

The history of vegetarianism in India is not the history of a civilisation that gradually, peacefully chose compassion over appetite. It is the history of a philosophical arms race — one triggered by two wandering ascetics in the 6th century BCE whose ideas threatened the religious establishment so thoroughly that the establishment had no choice but to adopt them, intensify them, and eventually claim they had believed this all along. What follows is that story: how ahimsa went from a cosmic ethical principle to a dinner table rule, how a threatened Brahmin priesthood turned vegetarianism into a social weapon, and how the Mughal court — which built the most elaborate meat kitchen in Indian history — fits into the same complicated picture.

In the sixth century BCE, the Gangetic plains of India were philosophically restless. The Vedic sacrificial system — with its elaborate rituals, its priestly hierarchies, and its rivers of animal blood — was beginning to face a new kind of challenge. Not from outside India, but from within it. Two men, born within a few decades of each other, both from warrior-caste families, both rejecting the Brahminical establishment, both walking away from wealth and comfort to sit under trees and think — arrived at conclusions about the nature of life that would rearrange the food habits of an entire civilisation.

Vardhamana Mahavira, the twenty-fourth and final tirthankara of Jainism, and Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, did not invent vegetarianism. The concept of ahimsa— non-harm to living beings — existed in earlier Indian thought. But what they did, each in his own way, was take a scattered ethical instinct and build it into a philosophical architecture so rigorous and so morally compelling that the existing establishment could not simply ignore it. It had to respond. And in responding, it transformed.

THE BUDDHA AND THE QUESTION OF MEAT

Let us begin with the fact that almost everyone gets wrong about the Buddha: he was not, by the standards of early Buddhism, a vegetarian. Or rather — the question is considerably more complicated than the word "vegetarian" suggests.

Early Buddhist monastic rules required monks to accept whatever food was offered during their daily alms rounds. Refusing food was considered arrogant and disrespectful to the lay community that supported the monastery. Meat was therefore acceptable — with one important qualification. The monk should not eat meat if the animal was killed specifically for him. This became known as the rule of tikotiparisuddha — the "three pure conditions": you may eat meat if you did not see the animal killed, did not hear it being killed, and had no reason to suspect it was killed on your behalf.

The most dramatic example of this complexity is the Buddha's last meal. The Pali texts record that shortly before his death at Kushinagar, the Buddha ate something called sukara-maddava at the home of a layman named Cunda. Scholars have been arguing about this word for over a century. It could mean "boar's flesh." It could mean "boar's delight" — a type of mushroom or truffle that wild pigs enjoyed. It might refer to something else entirely. What is not disputed is that the Buddha ate it, became seriously ill shortly afterwards, and died. Whether it was pork or a mushroom, the story does not read like the last meal of a committed vegetarian.

DID YOU KNOW?

The Buddha's disciple Devadatta — sometimes described as Buddhism's first villain — proposed that all monks should adopt strict vegetarianism as a monastic rule. The Buddha refused. He considered the proposal an unnecessary hardship that would make the monastic life inaccessible to ordinary people. Devadatta's attempt to impose strict vegetarianism on the early Buddhist community was thus rejected by the Buddha himself — a detail that tends to complicate the modern association between Buddhism and vegetarianism.

Later Buddhist traditions — particularly the Mahayana schools that spread to China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam — developed stricter vegetarian doctrines, based partly on different sutras and partly on the practical concerns of settled monastic communities who no longer depended on alms. Chinese Buddhist vegetarianism, in particular, became extremely rigorous, extending even to avoiding pungent vegetables like garlic and onion. But this is a 4th–5th century CE development, not an original Buddhist position. The Buddha's early community ate what it was given.

JAINISM — THE MORE RADICAL, MORE CONSISTENT POSITION

If the Buddha's position on meat is nuanced and contested, Mahavira's is neither. Jainism produced the most philosophically rigorous case for vegetarianism — indeed, for the minimisation of harm to all life — that any tradition in the ancient world has ever attempted. And its internal logic, once you accept its premises, is genuinely difficult to argue with.

Jain philosophy holds that every living being — from a human to a microorganism in a drop of water — possesses a jiva, a soul. The ethical weight of harming a soul varies by the number of senses the being possesses. A human has five senses and a fully developed soul; harming one is the gravest possible act. A plant has one sense and the simplest form of soul; harming one is the least grave. But harming is always harming — it always generates karma that binds the soul and prevents liberation.

From this premise, the Jain food hierarchy follows with perfect logical consistency.

The logic is airtight, if you accept the premise. Jainism is not squeamish about food. It is systematic about it. And that systematism — the fact that you can follow the argument from first principle to dinner plate without a single logical gap — is precisely what made it so intellectually compelling to the merchant communities of western India, who adopted it in large numbers and became its most visible adherents.

DID YOU KNOW?

Strict Jains do not eat potatoes, onions, garlic, carrots, or beetroot — not because of taste, but because of philosophy. Root vegetables (anantakaya) are believed to house infinite souls within a single body, making their consumption equivalent to destroying countless lives in a single meal. This is also why Jain communities developed some of the most sophisticated above-ground vegetable cuisines in the world — centuries of constraint produced extraordinary culinary creativity.

THE COMPETITIVE RESPONSE — BRAHMINISM REINVENTS ITSELF

Buddhism and Jainism were not merely philosophical movements. They were, in the language of modern business, competitive threats to an established market. The Brahmin priestly class had held a monopoly on religious authority in India for a thousand years. Their legitimacy rested on their unique access to the sacred rituals — the yajnas, the sacrifices, the ceremonies of birth and death and marriage. Buddhism and Jainism threatened this monopoly by offering a spiritual path that bypassed the priest entirely. You did not need a Brahmin to meditate. You did not need a yajna to achieve liberation.

Worse — from the Brahmin perspective — these new movements explicitly challenged caste hierarchy. The Buddha famously said that a person's worth was determined by their actions, not their birth. Jainism was founded by a man from the warrior caste who rejected Brahminical authority entirely. Both movements were gaining converts at every level of society, including among the merchant and artisan communities whose economic support the Brahmin establishment needed.

"The Brahmin did not become vegetarian because he discovered compassion. He became vegetarian because his competitors were vegetarian — and he needed to out-pure them. Vegetarianism was competitive strategy, dressed in sacred clothing."

The response was elegant. If ahimsa was the new standard of spiritual refinement, the Brahmin establishment would not merely adopt it — they would make themselves its most rigorous practitioners. The Buddhist "three pure conditions" still permitted meat in certain circumstances. The Brahmin, adopting strict vegetarianism, went further. He could now claim a purity that even the Buddhist monk could not match. Vegetarianism became not just a practice but a marker of Brahminical identity — the clearest possible signal of ritual cleanliness and spiritual elevation in an increasingly competitive religious marketplace.

ASHOKA AND THE MACHINERY OF THE STATE

The philosophical competition between Brahminism and the Shramana movements was given an enormous practical push by one of history's most consequential rulers: the Mauryan emperor Ashoka, who reigned from approximately 268 to 232 BCE.

Ashoka's conversion to Buddhism following the devastation of the Kalinga war is one of history's great transformation stories. Appalled by the scale of suffering he had caused, he renounced further conquest and devoted his reign to the propagation of dhamma — a concept of righteous living that included, prominently, the principle of non-harm to living beings.

Ashoka's edicts are remarkable documents. They record that he reduced the number of animals killed for the royal kitchen — down, by one edict's account, from hundreds per day to two peacocks and one deer, and eventually with the aim of reaching zero. He banned certain animal sacrifices at court, planted medicinal herbs along roads, dug wells for animals, and appointed officers whose job was partly to monitor the welfare of living beings.

What Ashoka did not do — and this matters — is make vegetarianism mandatory for his subjects. His edicts encourage restraint and compassion; they do not prohibit meat eating. He was nudging, not legislating. But the nudge was delivered by the ruler of the largest empire the subcontinent had ever seen, across a territory that stretched from modern Afghanistan to Bengal. The cultural signal was unmistakable: vegetarianism was associated with power, enlightenment, and civilisational refinement.

DID YOU KNOW?

Ashoka's edicts are among the first known examples in history of a government issuing animal welfare policy. Rock Edict I explicitly records the king's reduction of animals killed for the palace kitchen. Rock Edict II mentions the creation of medical facilities for both humans and animals, and the planting of medicinal herbs for their treatment. This is, by approximately 2,200 years, the world's oldest animal welfare legislation — issued by a Buddhist emperor in 3rd century BCE India.

WHAT IT COST EVERYONE ELSE

The Brahminical adoption of vegetarianism had consequences that extended far beyond the Brahmin household. As vegetarianism became the defining marker of ritual purity and high-caste status, meat eating — which had been a normal part of life across all communities — began to acquire a stigma it had never previously carried.

The communities that continued eating meat were increasingly those at the lower end of the caste hierarchy: the agricultural labourers, the artisans, the Dalits whose traditional occupations involved handling animal products. The very act of eating non-vegetarian food became, over centuries, a marker of social position. Not because meat eating had always been associated with lower status — it hadn't, as the Vedic texts make abundantly clear — but because vegetarianism had been claimed by the upper end of the hierarchy as its defining characteristic.

This is the inversion that still echoes in Indian food culture today. A Brahmin family in Tamil Nadu may be strictly vegetarian while their Dalit neighbours, their tribal neighbours, and their Muslim neighbours are not — and the difference is read, by some, as a difference in refinement or spirituality. What it actually is, historically, is the residue of a competitive strategy adopted by an established religious class under pressure from philosophical rivals, approximately 2,300 years ago.

The Jain merchant communities of Gujarat and Rajasthan took vegetarianism furthest of all, embedding it so thoroughly into their identity that it became inseparable from their business ethics, their social networks, and their sense of self. They are today among the most visibly vegetarian communities in the world. They are also among the wealthiest.

The association between vegetarianism and refinement that Buddhist-Jain competition and Brahminical response created has served them extraordinarily well.

Buddhism faded from India by the 12th century CE, absorbed and outcompeted by a revitalised Brahminical tradition that had learned its lessons thoroughly. But it left behind, baked into the cultural DNA of the subcontinent, the idea that not eating animals was a mark of the spiritually elevated. That idea proved far more durable than any institution that created it.

The stage is now set for the medieval chapter — for the arrival, from the northwest, of a food culture with an entirely different relationship with meat: celebratory, communal, generous, and entirely unashamed. The Mughals are coming. And they are bringing the biryani.

PART II · CHAPTER 6

The Medieval Kitchen

Invasions, spices, and three waves of outsiders who arrived with excellent food and no interest whatsoever in vegetarianism.

By the 8th century CE, the great philosophical contest between Brahminism, Buddhism, and Jainism had produced a clear winner among the upper castes: vegetarianism had become the definitive marker of ritual purity and social refinement. The Brahmin priest did not eat meat. The Jain merchant did not eat root vegetables. The Buddhist monk accepted whatever he was given — but the popular association between spiritual aspiration and plant-based food was, by now, firmly established in the cultural imagination of the subcontinent's elite.

And then, from the northwest, through the mountain passes of Afghanistan and across the Sindh desert, came people who had never heard of this arrangement. Or rather, people who had heard of it and were not remotely interested.

The medieval period brought three distinct waves of outsiders into the Indian subcontinent, each carrying a food culture shaped by entirely different geographic, religious, and historical circumstances. The Arab and Persian traders and conquerors of the Delhi Sultanate arrived first. The Mughals, descended from Timur and Genghis Khan, came second. The Portuguese sailed around the tip of Africa and arrived by sea. Between them, they introduced cooking techniques, ingredients, flavour principles, and social rituals around meat that permanently and irrevocably changed the Indian plate.

THE MUGHAL KITCHEN — MEAT AS STATECRAFT

No document in Indian history tells you more about how food and power are intertwined than the Ain-i-Akbari — the administrative record of Emperor Akbar's reign, compiled by his court historian Abul Fazl in the 1590s. Among its sections on military organisation, provincial revenue, and court etiquette sits a remarkably detailed account of the imperial kitchen. It reads, in places, like the world's first Michelin guide.

The Ain-i-Akbari records that Akbar's kitchen produced food weighed on scales and measured with military precision — every dish required to meet exacting standards before it was allowed into the royal presence. The food was transported to the emperor's table in sealed vessels, to prevent tampering, and tasted by a senior officer before being served. This was not paranoia. At the Mughal court, food was power — and power was always in danger.

But the Akbar paradox deserves particular attention. Here was a man who had built the most elaborate meat-cooking infrastructure in the history of the subcontinent, whose feasts could feed thousands, whose kitchen employed hundreds of specialists — and who periodically abstained from meat himself. His court included scholars from every religious tradition. His most trusted advisors included Jains, Hindus, and Muslims. Somewhere in the philosophical cross-currents of his court, Akbar developed a personal food ethic that sat awkwardly alongside his political one. He saw no contradiction. His kitchen fed his empire. His personal plate fed his conscience.

DID YOU KNOW?

The Mughal emperor Jahangir — Akbar's son — recorded in his memoir, the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, that he gave up meat entirely for several years after witnessing the slaughter of a deer that had been reared as a pet at the palace. He then resumed eating meat. Then gave it up again. His relationship with the subject reads, frankly, like that of someone who had discovered modern vegetarian social media and was finding it difficult. The point is: ambivalence about meat is not a modern invention.

THE PORTUGUESE AND THE ACCIDENTAL REVOLUTION

When Vasco da Gama's ships anchored off Calicut in 1498, the Portuguese were not thinking about Indian food. They were thinking about pepper. Black pepper — Piper nigrum — was worth more than gold by weight in medieval European markets. It was used as currency, as medicine, and as a preservative. The entire Portuguese maritime project was, at its root, a pepper-acquisition strategy.

What they brought in return — when they established Goa as a colony in 1510 — was, among other things, pork. And vinegar. And, most consequentially of all, a fruit from the Americas that they had picked up in Brazil on the way: the chili pepper.

SPICES AS PRESERVATIVES — THE HIDDEN LOGIC

There is a question that food historians ask about Indian cuisine that most people never think to ask: why is Indian food so heavily spiced compared to almost every other culinary tradition? The answer is not, or not primarily, about flavour preference. It is about meat preservation.

In a hot climate, without refrigeration, meat spoils rapidly. The bacterial growth that makes meat dangerous begins within hours of slaughter. Heavy spicing — with turmeric, which has antimicrobial properties; with cloves and cinnamon, which contain eugenol, a powerful antibacterial compound; with black pepper, which has its own preservative qualities — was, for most of Indian culinary history, a survival strategy as much as a flavour strategy. You spiced meat heavily because it kept you alive.

"India became the most heavily spiced meat-cooking culture in the world not because Indians loved flavour more than everyone else. They spiced because they had to. Climate made it necessary. Tradition made it art."

India's position at the centre of the global spice trade — which for millennia ran from the Malabar Coast to the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean — meant that the preservative ingredients were always available, always cheap locally, and always being refined in their application. The sophistication of Indian meat cookery is not accidental. It is the direct product of centuries of necessity, economic advantage, and culinary intelligence working together.

THE HARDENING OF THE BINARY

The medieval period had a paradoxical effect on India's food identity. On one hand, it introduced an extraordinary range of new ingredients, techniques, and traditions that permanently enriched the Indian table. On the other hand, it hardened a social binary that had been forming since the Buddhist-Brahminical competition of the 6th century BCE: meat-eater versus vegetarian; Muslim versus Hindu; outsider versus the tradition.

This binary was always a gross oversimplification. The majority of Hindus ate meat — as the NFHS-5 data shows, and as the Vedic texts make clear, and as a visit to any fish market in Bengal or any mutton shop in Andhra Pradesh confirms. Many Muslim communities in India — particularly the poorer ones — ate meat infrequently, because they could not afford it. The binary mapped social anxiety more accurately than it mapped reality.

But the association stuck: vegetarianism as Hindu purity; meat as Muslim permissiveness. It would be exploited — sometimes with lethal consequences — by political actors for centuries to come. And it would shape, in ways that still echo today, how different communities in India understand themselves through what they eat and what they refuse to eat.

With the medieval chapter closed, we move from history to geography. Part III takes us across the map of modern India — state by state, community by community — to ask the question that the statistics in the Prologue raised and left unanswered: if most of India eats meat, why does only part of India's map show it?

Vegetarianism in India was not discovered. It was constructed — by competing philosophies, economic pressures, and a Brahminical establishment that adopted its rivals' strongest argument and made it its own. By the end of the medieval period, the plate was set: a vegetarian upper caste, a meat-eating majority, and a food identity exported to the world as ancient and unanimous. Neither was true. Part 4 maps the actual geography of what India eats — state by state, community by community — and the numbers, frankly, will surprise you.

Part 4: 70% of India Eats Meat — Here's the Map → https://www.rathodm.com/post/non-vegetarian-population-india-by-state-part-4