Civilisation is always in the eye of the beholder

In the former Danish outpost of Tranquebar, dining without cutlery offers a compelling perspective on the true meaning of being civilised

- SANDIP ROY

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 Tamil Nadu, assured us that was not a problem.

We sat on the veranda, next to trees laden with pink and white magnolias, while dragonflies swooped around us, waiting for our fish kozhambu (curry) and banana leaf biryani. The food arrived but without plates. When we pointed that out, a flustered waiter ran off to get plates. Later Bishan realised 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 Tharangambadi, or Tranquebar as the Danes called it, would have made of our table manners. But eating with your fingers in the age of Zohran Mamdani felt like an assertion of post-colonial cultural pride.

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 Indian-origin wife Danielle D'Souza Gill insisted that even she never grew up eating rice with her hands.

Civilisation 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. Their patron was Frederick IV, king of Denmark. Ziegenbalg brought not just Lutheranism but also a printing press. He printed the Bible in Tamil but at the house where he lived, it says the first book printed in Tamil was Abominable Heathenism in 1713. Missionary zeal was about the word of God but it also was always about civilising the abominable heathens.