Meat-eaters also smelled bad to vegetarian Hindu visitors

From Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh. Page 307.

“The Americans underestimated the physical and cultural shock they would encounter in the sub-continent. During the Raj, the long sea voyage had given the British a gradual induction into the heat and the pervasive smell, with the shift to the exotic starting at Suez. Air travel meant travellers were hit in the face as they disembarked. Visiting US dignitaries blanched as they progressed through fetid slums from the airport to their sweltering quarters. The crush of people overwhelmed them, as did the ordure in the streets and the stray cows. Everywhere dusty heaps of rags stretched out begging bowls. Naked, wild-looking holy men went about with painted faces, and sepulchral Hindu temples, teeming with lascivious sculpted idols, were another shock to anyone disposed to moral outrage. The New York Times correspondent Cyrus Sulzberger wrote of a major place of worship in Old Delhi as being ‘hideously ugly’. Visiting academics spoke of ‘the dysentery circuit’. When John and Robert Kennedy visited in 1951 they both succumbed to ‘Delhi belly’, hiding curried chicken under lettuce leaves to avoid the perils of eating it.

The cultural gulf yawned even wider for the few Indians who visited the US, with the requirement of demonstrating an income of $12 per diem in order to obtain a visa proving a challenge even for junior diplomats. Although the Indian caste system, with light-skinned Brahmins and dark-skinned Untouchables, was self-evidently racist, Indian visitors purported to be outraged by white American attitudes to African-Americans. Meat-eaters also smelled bad to vegetarian Hindu visitors, despite the obsessive American concern with hygiene, while they loftily judged that cities filled with cars betokened an anomic absence of human solidarity that was no more evident in Brahmins outraged whenever an Untouchable Dalit crossed their cast shadow.