Will handshakes become history?

To shake or not to shake hands? That is the Hamletian dilemma most of us will be facing until the Covid-19 pandemic ends.

Ever since fears of the infectious coronavirus spread, lockdowns came into force accompanied by social distancing. Suddenly, physical touching became taboo and one of the casualties is the age-old habit of a handshake. It has changed the way we greet one another.

Greeting customs are varied across the world but the handshake, the most common physical form of greeting people, has an interesting history, albeit foggy, dating back to the fifth century B.C in Greece. Ancient sculpture, engravings and texts are replete with early representations of the practice, which the Greeks called dexiosis, roughly meaning “to take the right hand.”

One of the earliest recorded handshakes occurred in the ninth century B.C when the Assyrian King Shalmaneser III struck an alliance with a Babylonian ruler. Shalmaneser III (859-827 B.C) had intervened directly in Babylonian politics to ensure the ascendancy of the heir to the throne of Babylon. The meeting between the Kings of Assyria and Babylon sealing a peace treaty and extending equality to Babylonia with a handshake was carved as a relief found on the throne pedestal of the Assyrian King.

Notably, handshakes also began as a gesture of peace and it is believed the custom originated as a means to convey peaceful intentions between meeting parties. By extending the right hands openly and shaking them, strangers could assure each other that there is nothing up their sleeve (weapons, for example) and bore no hostility towards each other.

However, the popularity of the modern handshake is largely attributed to the 17th century Quakers – a Christian faith group committed to working for equality. In comparison to bowing, tipping the hat or kissing the hand, the handshake served as a more egalitarian gesture as it put both parties in equal positions. By the 19th century, the gesture was counted as an essential etiquette and was often included in manuals.

And so, shaking hands was deemed a good method of greeting, became acceptable as a symbol of equality and went on to become the most ubiquitous greeting around the world.

Handshakes became common during a meeting, greeting or parting; on finalizing business deals, diplomatic agreements, meetings of heads of State, even offering congratulations or expressing gratitude, not to mention as a sign of true sportsmanship. It is the handshake at any important occasion that gets photographed the most, signalling the purpose – trust, respect and equality.

Most of us remember historic handshakes published in newspapers and magazines or on television - the Hitler-Chamberlain handshake of 1938 just before the end of World War II, Anwar Sadat-Menachem Begin pact in 1979 with Jimmy Carter, the 1970 Nixon-Elvis Presley handshake and even long-running handshakes to break Guinness records. Former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt set a record for a head of state by shaking hands with 8,513 people at an official function at a New Year’s Day White House presentation on 1 January 1907.

In recent memory – the world saw the famous Trump-Macron handshake that lasted for 29 seconds when the two leaders, along with their wives were present at a military parade celebrating Bastille Day. During a pause in the music, the leaders grasped hands and neither let go.

Tragically, one handshake led to the killing of U.S. President William McKinley in 1901. Mckinley agreed to a long round of public handshaking at an exhibition when a man, Leon Czolgosz, shook the president’s left hand and fired twice. The president died after a week.

On a lighter note, once, an ardent fan of George Bernard Shaw asked to kiss the hand that penned his literature only to be told that the same hand had done many unsavoury things!

Shakespeare too wrote in As You Like It that two characters “shook hands and swore brothers.” However, today, a handshake draws critical and even condemnatory comments. Many on our planet are aware of the risks of physical contact, preferring to avoid a handshake as our palms could carry bacteria and viruses. Already the handshake is being replaced by different forms of greeting that we have been seeing - the elbow touch, fist bump, a tap on the back, a simple wave or a bow of the head, a namaste or even the ‘Wuhan Shake’.

All said and done, with a history of thousands of years, will the handshake itself become history? Only time will tell.

(The writer is a senior journalist)