18-07-2025
Civilisation is always in the eye of the beholder
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.
Ziegenbalg with his long curly golden hair, is all over the Danish quarter, his name as ubiquitous as Nehru's. Ziegenbalg Printing Press. The Ziegenbalg Museum of Intercultural Dialogue. The Ziegenbalg Home for Boys. A big street sign proclaims him as a man of many firsts. The first Protestant missionary to India. The first to bring the printing press to India. The first to print the New Testament in Tamil. The first to introduce the free noon meal scheme and a school for girls. The list goes on for some 24 painstakingly compiled items. What it does not mention is why he made the arduous eight-month sea voyage to India despite ill health. It was because his mentor August Hermann Francke, professor of divinity at the University of Halle in Saxony, proposed he kindle the holy spark in 'the heathen at Tranquebar". At the Zion Church in Tranquebar, a sign on the wall commemorates his first five converts, baptised in 1707.
In India, history books always open with the Indus Valley Civilisation. That's roughly 3300-1300 BCE. Since then many other civilisations 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 civilisation. It's a picture-postcard village—golden beach, blue waters of the Bay of Bengal and the houses of the long- departed Danes blindingly white in the hot sun. Many of the houses are being carefully restored. They bear plaques from INTACH (Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage) and the foundations in Denmark. But they are mostly shuttered as if unsure of their purpose in the afterlife.
The Commander's House has become a Maritime museum but it's half-hearted. One shelf in the display cabinet has a heap of old cameras. Another has 'coat buttons from old period". Yet another has a junk store's worth of old-school typewriters. Someone put up a display shelf of empty bottles of alcohol—not Danish spirits but more mundane entries like Captain Morgan's Spiced Rum and Johnnie Walker sitting next to little murtis of gods like Krishna. One room has more evidence of the 'civilising" mission of colonialism—black and white photographs of the short-lived Danish attempt to colonise the Nicobar islands. The exercise went nowhere. Most of the colonists died from 'Nicobar fever", most likely malaria, and eventually the whole project was abandoned. The only vestige of civilisation 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 civilised viewers. The museum sells tiny bottles filled with blue-and-white pieces of Danish pottery to tourists. For ₹300 you can take home the broken shards of civilisation.
In his book Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of Modern Hindu Identity, Lounge columnist Manu Pillai recounts many fascinating stories of this clash of civilisations as devout missionaries came upon this teeming country of heathens. Missionaries only had one way to access god, which was through the Bible, says Pillai. So anything that was not god had to be Satan. Pillai writes that it's likely they turned a temple to the Devi in Calicut into the 'Devil of Calicut" because as he says, 'people come with their own cultural filters and apply that to an unfamiliar culture to make sense of that culture." Even those who went native, like Robert de Nobili who called himself an Italian Brahmin and dressed like a sanyasi or Ziegenbalg who translated German hymns into Tamil, were convinced of their superior civilising power. They just felt dressing it up in Hindu clothes would help them sell it better to the Indian masses they wanted to convert.
Over time that civilising mission entered deep into the Indian DNA as well. It's easy to bristle at Brandon Gill. How dare the country that exported the KFC slogan 'finger lickin' good" now call eating with fingers uncivilised? Commentators rightly called out racism with some remembering how French filmmaker Francois Truffaut sneered he didn't want to see 'a movie of peasants eating with their hands" after watching Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali, which opens with just such a scene. Former parliamentarian Jawahar Sircar pointed out in the Indian Express recently that forks were actually unknown to the West till a Byzantine princess brought them to Venice in the medieval period. The Church at that time saw it as decadent, not in accordance with Christian values because it wasn't essential to life, rather something brought by 'a seductress of the East."
Yet many of the members of Kolkata's plummy gentlemen's clubs, civilised by a couple of centuries of exposure to colonial manners, would not be unsympathetic to Brandon Gill. The rules of many of the clubs remain starchily archaic. Civilisation becomes not so much about refinement as it is about aping the manners of the colonial masters. And there are plenty of brown sahibs around to ensure old rules live on.
But in Tranquebar, the long-departed Danes seem to have left nothing behind other than empty buildings. The Danish fort, once the second largest in the world, is now just a place where Indians take selfies next to the cannons without much regard to its history. A vendor sells fried fish outside, to be eaten with fingers. Whatever civilisation the Danes intended feels like a whitewashed facade of an empty building.
But then civilisation is always in the eye of the beholder. No one has a monopoly on it. On that same trip, as we had a beer at a small dark bar in Trichy, the waiter kept bringing us little plates of munchies—chickpeas, chilli chicken, slices of boiled eggs, Fryums, idli chunks with podi, wedges of watermelon. 'So much food!" we cried in alarm. 'But it's complimentary," the waiter protested. 'You must have some chakna with your drink." Used as we were too one measly bowl of salted peanuts with our drinks, whether in Kolkata or in New York, 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 eaten with your fingers.
It all felt, dare I say it, so very civilised.
Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against. Sandip Roy is a writer, journalist and radio host. He posts @sandipr.
