At lunch they forgot the cutlery.
To be fair, my partner Bishan and I had arrived after normal lunch hours. But the gracious hotel, housed in a beautifully restored 17th century colonial building in Tharangambadi, a former Danish colony on the coast of Tamilnadu in Southern India, assured us that was not a problem.
We sat on the verandah, next to trees laden with pink and white plumeria, waiting for our fish curry and biryani. The food arrived but without plates. When we pointed that out a flustered waiter ran off to get some. Later Bishan realized we had no cutlery either. By then the wait staff had vanished as well.
“It’s okay,” I said. “We’ll just eat with our hands anyway.”
I don’t know what the ghosts of dead Danes surrounding us in Therangambadi or Tranquebar as the Danes called it, would have made of our table manners. But eating with my fingers felt like an assertion of post-colonial cultural pride. We live after all in the age of Zohran Mamdani.
This is Sandip Roy in Tranquebar.
After a video surfaced of Mamdani, the man who wants to be New York’s next mayor, eating biryani with his fingers, Texan Congressman Brandon Gill said “civilised people in America don’t eat like this. If you refuse to adopt Western customs, go back to the Third World.” His India-born wife Danielle D’Souza Gill insisted that even she never grew up eating rice with her hands.
Predictably that caused an uproar in India where millions of people eat with their hands everyday. And with forks and spoons as well. Former parliamentarian Jawahar Sircar pointed out in the Indian Express that forks were actually unknown to the west till a Byzantine princess brought them to Venice in the medieval period. But the Church at that time saw it as decadent, not in accordance with Christian values.
The journalists of NDTV news channel even ate with their fingers on camera as if to say Talk to the Hand
NDTV: And Mr. Gill needs some food for thought, and. This is our life, and there's nothing unhygienic about it. When you put a KFC ad which says finger lickin’ good, that's okay?
Civilization was very much on my mind as we wandered around Tranquebar. This was where the Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg and Heinrich Plütschau landed in July 1706, the first Protestant missionaries in India. The European missionaries are gone but the church is full on a Sunday morning.
SERMON1
The guide says Ziegenbalg brought not just Lutheranism but also a printing press. He shows us an old German press with wooden type.
PRESS
Ziegenbalg printed the Bible in Tamil but the first book printed in Tamil was Abominable Heathenism in 1713. Missionary zeal was about the word of God but it also always about civilising the abominable heathens.
In India history books always open with the Indus Valley Civilization. That’s roughly 3300-1300 BCE. Since then many other civilizations rose and fell up and down the Indian subcontinent. Yet missionaries still felt they needed to show Indians the light.
Tranquebar feels haunted by the ghosts of that exercise in civilization. It’s a picture postcard village - golden beach, blue waters of the Bay of Bengal, bleating goats and the houses of the long departed Danes blindingly white in the hot sun.
GOATS
The Commander’s House has become a Maritime museum. One room has more evidence of the “civilizing” mission of colonialism - black and white photographs of the short-lived Danish attempt to colonize the Nicobar islands. Most of the colonists died from “Nicobar fever” most likely malaria and eventually the whole project was abandoned. The only vestige of civilization left? In one photograph of the Shompen tribe, the men all discreetly hide their genitals with their hands, so as not to offend the sensibilities of more civilized viewers.
But then civilization is always in the eye of the beholder. On that same trip as we had a beer at a small dark bar, the waiter kept bringing us little plates of munchies - chickpeas, chili chicken, wedges of boiled eggs, idli rice cakes, watermelon. “So much food!” we cried in alarm. “But it’s complimentary,” the waiter protested. “You must have some chakna or snacks with your drink.” Used as we were too one measly bowl of salted peanuts with our drinks, whether in Kolkata or in San Francisco, we stared at the veritable picnic spread before us in amazement. Even more surprisingly, I found out later in Tamil slang chakna is called “touchings”, literally food to be touched with your fingers.
It all felt, dare I say it, so very civilized.
This is Sandip Roy in Tharangambadi.