More On 'Anamika'

In the first post here, I had wondered whether in ancient India, the ring was indeed worn on what is known today as the 'ring finger' (this finger has the name 'Anamika' in Sanskrit, which possibly signifies lack of any distinctive features like, say, the ring).

Yesterday, I encountered an interesting fact. In a Jewish wedding, the bride wears the ring on her INDEX FINGER (source: 'The Spinoza of the Market Street' by Isaac Singer). Here is a page with some relevant info.

From the above, it seems clear that the 'ring finger' was no constant across the cultures of the world. In India, the 'Anamika' might well have got fixed as the ring finger due to Christian influence...

An aside: I remember reading somewhere that 'Saundaryalahari', a famous devotional poem in Sanskrit attributed to Sankaracharya, is considered to be of South Indian origin by experts due to (among other things) the fact that the poem contains a reference to the nose stud ('mookkutti'), an ornament apparently not worn in the North.