From Pather Panchali to Zohran Mamdani: Why brown people eating with their hands gives the West nightmares - decoding the culture war

Time of India

15 hours ago

The Mamdani Controversy: Rice, Rituals, and MAGA Outcry
This summer, a viral video showed New York politician
Zohran Mamdani
eating biryani with his hands during an interview. In response, Texas Congressman Brandon Gill fumed that 'civilised people in America don't eat like this.
If you refuse to adopt Western customs, go back to the Third World.
' His wife Danielle D'Souza Gill – an India-born MAGA pundit – piled on, declaring she 'never grew up eating rice with [her] hands' and 'always used a fork,' insisting her Indian Christian relatives did the same.
The outburst ignited a social media firestorm. Critics noted the hypocrisy: Americans routinely devour burgers, tacos, fries, and pizza by hand, yet Gill condemned hand-eating as 'uncivilised.'
Many pointed out that billions eat with their hands daily, labelling his comments as pure racism. Images of President Trump eating pizza with his bare hands swiftly made the rounds, mocking the idea that hand-eating is somehow barbaric.
In the end, people across Asia stood up for the common practice of eating with one's hands, underlining that dining customs run deep in culture and are not to be dictated by Western lawmakers with fragile sensibilities.
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Undo
Ray's
Pather Panchali
and Western Snobbery
This isn't the first time Western audiences have bristled at seeing Asians eat authentically. When
Satyajit Ray
's
Pather Panchali
debuted in 1955, some Western critics recoiled at its realism. The story begins with a rural Bengali family eating rice with their hands, and French filmmaker François Truffaut quipped he 'did not want to see a movie of peasants eating with their hands.' The New York Times reviewer similarly sniffed that the film was too loose and listless, despite its understated poetry.
Even in India, some officials feared the film was 'exporting poverty,' with former actress-turned-politician Nargis Dutt famously making that charge.
Ray's work later became a world classic, but the initial response reflects an old bias: Western gatekeepers found an honest portrayal of humble, hand-to-mouth life unacceptable. Poor brown people eating with their hands was not what the Cannes set wanted with their champagne.
Why Eating with Hands Feels Better
For millions of Indians, eating with one's hands is not just tradition but pleasure. The act engages all five senses. You feel the warmth of the rice and dal as your fingers mix them together. You mould a perfect bite-sized morsel, adding curry or pickle to balance the flavours. The touch tells you if the roti is still soft, if the rice has cooled enough, if the fish bones have been removed.
In Ayurveda, eating with your hands is said to activate energy centres connected to digestion.
Even without mysticism, there is practicality. Indian food – with its gravies, rice, rotis, and layered textures – is designed to be mixed and balanced bite by bite. Forks and spoons reduce it to awkward scooping, like trying to paint watercolours with a ballpoint pen. Fingers are the original cutlery, tailored to your own grip, temperature tolerance, and tactile sense.
The food becomes an extension of you rather than an object to be speared and lifted.
Evolution of Etiquette: From Fingers to Forks
In truth, using hands to eat is an ancient, global tradition. In Asia – and many parts of the Middle East and Africa – meals are still commonly eaten with the right hand. Indians traditionally wash their hands thoroughly before dining, then use fingertips to feel the temperature of the food and combine flavours. Rice and curry are picked up between the fingers and thumb and brought to the mouth. The left hand is kept clean and used only for serving or passing dishes.
This is not unsanitary by local standards; careful handwashing and using only fingers (not whole hands) is part of the practice.
By contrast, formal cutlery arrived in Europe relatively late. Forks spread westward through Byzantium to Italy, and only by the 1500s were forks seen among European elites. Catherine de' Medici famously brought forks to France in 1533, but even then they were a novelty. In Britain, medieval diners ate with fingers and knives until forks became fashionable in the 1700–1800s.
Grand dinners with silver knives and forks became the standard only then.
Before that, finger-eating was universal. But with the fork's adoption, by the 19th century, finger-eating in polite society was denounced as 'cannibal' behaviour. Western table manners, therefore, are a recent invention, codified after centuries of changing habits.
Colonial Attitudes and Modern Double Standards
These new Western norms carried moral overtones in the colonial era. British colonialists often disparaged Indian dining customs as primitive.
By the mid-1800s, finger-eating was so taboo in polite society that etiquette guides labelled it savage. This historic snobbery resurfaced in the 1950s with Pather Panchali: showing peasants eating rice by hand was literally too unrefined for some Western eyes.
Today, the Mamdani case highlights the absurdity of these attitudes. Critics who call hand-eating 'uncivilised' conveniently ignore that Americans and Europeans themselves handle many foods bare-handed.
Westerners may scoff, yet most Americans eat pizza, burgers, sandwiches, fries, and chicken wings – with their hands. It is pure hypocrisy. The backlash to Mamdani shows that many people now recognise this: labelling hand-eating as unsanitary or uncivilised is little more than prejudice dressed up in etiquette.
The Bottom Line: Etiquette is Cultural
In the end, dining manners are deeply cultural and ever-changing. Whether one uses a fork or fingers is a matter of upbringing, not of inherent civilisation.
To millions of Asians, using hands is as natural and polite as using cutlery is in the West. Judging one another's table habits misunderstands history. Forks are only a few centuries old, whereas eating by hand dates back to prehistory. Perhaps true civilisation is less about utensils and more about respect – keeping hands clean, sharing food generously, and eating with dignity.
In a globalised world, demanding everyone conform to Western-style dining is an anachronism. Rather than policing plates, a more gracious etiquette is recognising that many cultures have perfectly respectable, time-honoured ways of eating – forks or hands included. Because at the end of the day, if you're offended by someone else's fingers touching their rice, it says more about you than it does about them.