Zohran Mamdani, who has Indian blood running in his Mississippi-long veins, has become New York mayor. Yet most Indians and expats, who had burst crackers when Rishi Sunak kissed the king’s hand, are washing their hands off him. Bad grammar, bad politics.
First the grammar. If you don’t want to be responsible for what someone else is doing, the right thing to do is to wash your hands of it—not off. Read King James Bible. Roman magistrate Pontius Pilate washed his hands of the Jesus case, when Jewish priests asked for his blood. Did Covid-era rules prevail under lex Romana?
Modern judges don’t get into this handwash business. They recuse themselves, or cite limited jurisdiction. They’d have said the Jesus case involved Jewish law, whereas they had been sent to administer Justinian’s law, and disposed of the case.
Illustration: Deni Lal
Rightly so, juridically and grammatically. Most of us dispose off the stuff that we want to throw away, when we can actually dispose of all the stuff with a single f.
Now let’s talk politics. Indians usually toast with scotch—these days distilled in India, and named Indianly as Indri or Amrut—when anyone with an Indian first name, middle name or surname makes it to a town crier’s post in Thimphu or Timbuktu. Yet Mamdani, who has become the lord of the richest city in the richest country, hasn’t been adopted by flag-wavers in India or Diwali lamp-lighters in America.
Last July, Mamdani had made a strong case before them. He set the Mississippi (with his mother-made masala) on fire by eating rice with hands. Yankee WASPs and such nasty creatures in the west stung him like hornets on social media with unsocial comments.
I thought all the cultural rightists and those of us who lead hand-to-mouth lives in the literal sense would jump to his side and beat the cutlery-armed white knights with bare hands. Nothing of the sort. Most of them kept their hands off him, rightly with a double f.
Why? Simple! Though his mother has an Indian surname that is spelt like a Malayali but is actually Punjabi, he was fathered by an India-born Ugandan citizen of Muslim faith.
The libs and the lefties have since adopted him to trash the Trumpists, racists, monoculturists, cultural supremacists, and running dogs of imperialists. Sociological treatises are being readied in PhD factories about culinary imperialism, bromatological bias, and gastronomical racism, while cultural nutritionists are coming out with WhatsApp treatises on the health benefits of eating with hand, quoting all the medical and spiritual texts from Arabic to Persian to Sanskrit. The hypotheses are already out on social media.
I’d say—hands off, manyavar, janab and gentlemen! When in Rome, do as the Romans do. Ayurvedic texts may tell us that it’s healthier to eat with hands, but Cardinal Richelieu invented the table knife because you can’t eat a steak with bare hands. Try it, and William Hanson will cook you alive and eat you with Sheffield cutlery.
We don’t have to impose our values on others. Eating a banana leaf-spread Kerala sadya with knife and fork would be as ridiculous as eating fish-and-chips with bare hands. There’s nothing nationalistic about either; Gandhi, the greatest nationalist who wore loincloth, also ate with a fork.
The rule is simple. Eat western food with your household silver or restaurant cutlery; eat your roti-rice and curry with your hands. Eating habits are conditioned by climatic conditions and culinary traditions.
And the ultimate lesson—eat with your hands, fork or chopsticks, but wash them well before eating.
prasannan@theweek.in