Why the West still loses sleep over brown hands in rice

There are few things that still manage to unravel the seams of Western civility quite like a brown man casually eating with his hands. Unless, of course, he’s doing it while also winning elections.

Which brings us to Zohran Mamdani — not your chai-sipping, NPR-listening, non-threatening diversity hire, but a New York State Assemblyman, democratic socialist, and now the Democratic candidate for Mayor of New York City. He eats with his hands. On camera. With pride. And just like that, Twitter needed a wet wipe.

The sight of Mamdani mixing rice and curry with his fingers, like billions across Asia and Africa have done long before forks were fashionable, sent a certain section of the American political class into a full-blown existential crisis. One Republican Congressman took a break from defending AR-15s to thunder: “Civilised people don’t eat like this. If you can’t adapt to Western customs, go back to the Third World.”

Ah, yes. The eternal paradox: a country that celebrates finger food at Super Bowl parties but sees eating biryani with your hands as an act of sedition. You can eat a Philly cheesesteak with your hands and still be invited to Davos. But mix dal-chawal with your fingers, and you’ve apparently declared war on Western civilisation itself – something that, anecdotally, Mahatma Gandhi thought sounded like a good idea.

To understand this absurdity, you have to go back to the French. At the 1955 Cannes Film Festival, legendary director François Truffaut famously walked out of Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, muttering, “I don’t want to see a movie of peasants eating with their hands.” The French, who built an entire cinematic movement out of longing glances and cigarette smoke, couldn’t stomach a child scooping rice in black-and-white realism. That wasn’t cinema — that was too real.

But Truffaut’s walkout wasn’t just about cutlery. It was about power. About who gets to be seen, and how. And seventy years later, it’s the same fear, just with more pixels and subtweets. The problem isn’t eating with hands — it’s who’s doing the eating, and what that act says about who gets to shape the narrative.

Mamdani didn’t just commit the sin of cultural authenticity. He committed it in a suit, in English, in front of the Empire State. He is the West’s worst nightmare: articulate, brown, secular, anti-capitalist, and not the least bit apologetic. He doesn’t ask for inclusion — he arrives fully included.

And that’s the threat. Because eating with your hands, in this case, is not just a cultural quirk. It’s defiance. It’s saying: I belong here, and I will not trim the edges of my identity to fit your porcelain place settings.

Of course, the hygiene argument was deployed, like a butter knife at a gunfight. The same people who lick barbecue sauce off their fingers during tailgates were suddenly concerned about sanitation. It’s not about germs. It’s about skin. Pizza is rustic. Biryani is barbaric. Fries are comfort food. Chapati is a UN hygiene violation.

The fork, lest we forget, is not a neutral tool. It was never about efficiency. It was a marker — of class, of conquest, of cleanliness as defined by those who’d never deigned to touch the soil they stole. The fork was the West’s way of saying: we are too refined to touch our food — or our history.

I say this as a Bengali. And there is no Bengali — bhadralok (the genteel) or chhotolok (the riffraff), fish-eater or vegetarian-by-marriage — who would dare eat rice and machher jhol with a fork. You eat with your hands because it is the only way to navigate fish bones, mustard oil, and dignity. It is not optional. It is ancestral. It is etiquette passed down through generations of sticky fingers and silver bangles, perfected by toddlers and grandmothers alike.

To eat with your hands is to engage. To feel the warmth of the rice, the viscosity of the curry, the tart punch of the pickle. It is to slow down. To be present. It is to claim a kind of intimacy with food that the West, in its industrialised haste, has long forgotten. No spoon can teach you that.

Zohran Mamdani’s biryani video is not an affront to decency. It is a quiet, deliberate reclamation. A reminder that there is no one way to lead a city — or to eat in it. That dignity doesn’t come plated between forks and knives. That civilisation isn’t what you hold — it’s what you hold space for.

So let the Truffauts of the world walk out again. Let the Congressmen tweet. Let them flinch at every saffron-stained fingertip. Because if the sight of a brown man eating with his hands still unsettles you, maybe it’s not the hand that’s uncivilised.

Maybe it’s the eye that watches.

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