Your sharing this article, and your response to it, evoked all my memories and feelings too.
Mine is not the first/only intercultural marriage in my family and we have been married almost 30 years, but before we married, DH visited India with me, and among other things we all went to my father’s ancestral village in South India where we got the full hospitality treatment: the floor-seating banana-leaf vegetarian feast. Sit cross-legged, bend forward so nothing lands on you, and eat rice with drippy dal, rasam, yogurt plethora of sabzis, etc. very neatly with your right hand fingers only (DH is a leftie). He passed this ordeal with flying colours and the leaves and leftovers were folded and fed to the cows waiting in the shed in the back. Wash hands before and after eating in the small outside area behind the kitchen.
Yes, we were also taught to eat neatly and correctly with fingers and also with spoons etc. And when to deploy which cultural mode - part of the code switching strategies that all urban desis seem to absorb. I am also pretty OK with chopsticks.
Some Indian dishes lend themselves to Western cutlery less than others. I feel quite sad when I see desis in eateries here eating their idlis, dosais, vadais, parathas, naans, for example with knife and fork - seems pretentious, like they think it’s great to be so Western that you reject some basic aspects of your roots. I am sure there are other regional dishes that are just better approached with fingers than attacked with metal implements. I don’t know if Iranian people traditionally eat their food with fingers or cutlery, but a quip attributed to the last Shah of Iran is that eating with fork and knife is like making love through armor.
I was also raised with the Ayurvedic notion that touching your food has various benefits. Other than these and aside from the sensual enjoyment, when someone is feeding someone who cannot eat on their own (e.g. babies, very elderly, etc.) touching the food also ensures that temperatures are comfortable and no hard or poky bits get into the mouthful.
My kids like Indian food and when young I taught them to eat with fingers, so they can do it, including chapatis torn with one hand and not rolled up and bitten. Occasionally I sent them to preschool / elementary school with something like baby idlis with dip, and had to push back at the teachers who tried to discourage them from eating with fingers. Nowadays, they eat chapatis, parathas, idlis, dosais, etc with fingers but dal/rice and yogurt/rice with spoons.
I also remember a couple of my professional colleagues in the US whom I now think of as jerks, making fun of Indian food / finger eating with rude gestures in front of me, while I was to shocked to say anything. One of them was Asian American and one was Euro American.
I also remember in upscale Indian restaurants in India, at the end of the meal, finger bowls (with warm water and lemon slices) would be provided to guests to wash their fingers at the end of the meal right at the table, though most people would after that go to the washroom and again wash hands and rinse mouth. Nowadays finger bowls are kind of rare because most urban desis have Westernized to use utensils in restaurants, and even those who eat with fingers will just wait and go to the washroom.
I think you described that eating pizza with fork and knife would be seen as a faux pas in the US. I recall another HO thread where the poster’s husband would only eat pizza with knife and fork due to his Canadian/British culture. I have hosted guests from the Netherlands who ate their tacos with knife and fork while we rolled them up and ate them with our fingers.
Most non Indians claim a pass for not eating Indian food with their fingers but using cutlery instead, on the grounds of unfamiliarity. But I know I will never get the same pass for eating IDK, pasta or chili or something, with my fingers.
