The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India

This is the title of a book written by Tristram Stuart. It talks about the Indian connection in European vegetarianism.

From the observer review:

Stuart makes clear that the Western encounter with India provided crucial weight to pro-vegetarian arguments. Here was a civil, peaceful, enlightened society successfully fuelled by vegetables, pulses and grains. Such a diet seemed an escape from the corruption, debauchery, pollution and strife in the West. Many conservative Christians mocked the Hindus' quaint belief in transmigration, but the doctrine of non-violence is a guiding ethical principle that manifests itself through abstention from meat. 

The story of the reverence and awe in which India was held in certain streams of Western thought is a notable corrective to those who see the history of imperialism as solely the high-handed and brutal imposition of Occidental values on indigenous populations. John Zephaniah Holwell, a survivor of the Black Hole of Calcutta, governor of Bengal and a passionate vegetarian, effectively converted to Hinduism. 

The brilliance of Stuart's book is to demonstrate that the study of attitudes towards food is the gateway to appreciating how people understood their place in society, their relationship to their environment and the significance of being human.

A scintillating study of vegetarianism and its India connection.