Beyond Curry: Decolonising the Way We Talk About Indian Food

Culture, Media, General
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A thoughtful article about how the vast portfolio of Indian food is discussed, 78 years after independence and with 1.4 billion native eaters.

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[The author] unpacks the imperialist history and racialised convenience of the term ‘curry,’ examining its role in erasing the diversity of Indian cuisine.

The West’s creation of the ‘curry’ has done more than just produce a narrow and ignorant view of Indian cuisine. It has also restricted the vocabulary of Indian food.

What began as a long history of contempt against Indian food, with the practice of calling it “filthy” and “smelly”; became an arc of appropriation when up-scale restaurants in London started using the imagery of the Empire in its royal existence to serve, market and orientalise Indian cuisine… This gave curries an “exotic otherness”, that ultimately helped reduce the stigma around Indian food within upper-class British society. It became only a matter of time until the curry got appropriated entirely.

…The curry is an invention of racist convenience. Reducing complex dishes like korma, rogan josh, vindaloo and moilee into the ambiguous ‘curry’ is nothing short of an imperialist masterstroke… The implication of the Curry therefore stretches far beyond plain oversimplification. It is, at the core of it, massively racist.

It is also an insult to centuries’ worth of culinary knowledge… Not only does it erase or leave out India’s impeccably rich culinary diversity, but also hegemonises the Indian food market and its global perception.

…Appreciation comes at the cost of erasing historic knowledge, skills, identities and experiences. At the cost of pandering to the orientalist gaze, and at the cost of forever remaining the empire’s subjects.

What does it mean, really, to decolonise food, and to decolonise curry? … When it comes to Indian food, perhaps we need to begin by letting dishes be explained by the name of the dish itself.

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If colonialism is a system of power, part of that power comes from the ability to name, simplify, and take away complexity.

…Take up space—tell your stories. It’s imperative to talk about where specific culinary techniques and cuisines originate to give credit and respect to the cultures they derive from.

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Oh, good subject.

My first discussion about Indian restaurants was in the mid 1960s, when I was in my mid teen. My late older cousin used to visit London for work a couple of times a year and would always have a meal at Veeraswamy - opened in 1926 and the UK’s oldest Indian restaurant still in existence. It all seemed very exotic and there was nothing like it in my area for a number of years.

And , even then, the “Indian” restaurants opening up in the 1970s were, unsurprisingly, first in the areas where the new wave of immigrants came to live. Restaurant owners quickly realised that marketing towards white customers would be more profitable and so the “British curry” developed. Back in those years, the restaurants along Manchester’s “Curry Mile” were in their infancy but all were developing a common cuisine. It was based on having a range of sauces based on chilli heat and customers could order any of the protein with any of the sauces. Most restaurant owners were from the Sylhet province of Bangladesh and probably still have that heritage. These were places for the lads to go after closing time in the pub. And, yes, I was one of them. Of course, by now chicken tikka masala had been invented by a restaurant in Glasgow - and Anglicised version of butter chicken. This was also at a time when large numbers of Britons were starting to holiday abroad and were becoming used to different cuisines. It all made it an ideal time for Asian restaurants.

In due course, the curry house moved from the immigrant areas out into the suburbs. And you would now be hard pushed to find a British village that didnt have its own Asian restaurant - all selling the identical “any protein with any sauce” Anglicised dishes. Folk would talk about a place being “authentic”, when in fact that was complete bollocks.

The change is slowly happening in the 21st century. Restaurants are opening owned by Indians and selling regional food. I eat Mumbai street food, Kashmiri kebabs, Gujarati vegetarian dishes, South Indian dosas.

The change is being brought about by restaurateurs and it is only in this way that we will decolonise the attitude to food. If restaurants keep calling it a curry, customers will call it a curry.

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Restaurants didn’t flatten the entirety of Indian cuisine to the word “curry” – there was a several hundred years old political and social precedent to that. So it’s not their problem to solve. Most / all restaurant menus don’t call everything a “curry” anyway – there are specific names associated with most dishes.

You are a thoughtful consumer who takes care to use the correct names for different dishes, and to seek out regional cuisines beyond the mix-and-match sauce+protein/veg (not that those aren’t tasty, but again, flattening).

But many / most other people are quick to use “curry” even when it’s not – it’s intellectually lazy and perpetuates the inherent cultural racism in the “convenience” of the term. (Tbh even Indian immigrants to the west succumb to a perceived pressure of assimilation by using “curry” to describe things that just aren’t – hence the oxymoron of a “dry curry”.)

People don’t call all Italian food “pasta” – if it contains no pasta. Or all Chinese food “noodle” or “stir-fry” (though the latter as a description of cooking technique is less problematic imo).

So the burden should be on generic users of “curry” to pay attention to what they actually mean, and call a dish by its actual name when it has one.

“Curry” in my family describes exactly one dish – a thin, watery, coconut-based preparation eaten with rice – recipes originally from Goan family friends. My Muslim friends don’t use the word “curry” at all – it’s “saalan” if it has a watery sauce meant for rice. Maharashrians may use “rassa” if there’s not a specific other name. The famous Bengali prawn malai “kari” came back from SE Asia – all liquidy Bengali dishes have specific names. No generic “curry” across North India either – korma, nihari, champaran, rogan josh, makhani, and so on.

The food of India is so vast and diverse that the cuisine actually changes every 100-200kms, with community, terrain, ingredients, and cooking methods. It’s such a disservice to both the culture and to the eater to be limited by the flattened concept of “curry”.

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I’ve never heard anyone in the U.S. refer to all Indian food as curry. I wonder if that’s a regional phenomenon.

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I’d venture a guess that you’re on one of the coasts in an area with a significant presence of Indian food.
(But even there, it’s interesting to read descriptions even on this food board.)

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That may be the case where you are. It isnt where I am. Menu descriptions are generally as I outlined in my earlier post. That reflects how a generic Anglicisation of South Asian food has developed in the UK over the last 50 years.

By the by, in the early part of the 20th century, British soldiers carried a pocket book of useful information. One section related to food, giving recipes that a man might cook for himself or his section. There were several stews, including “curry stew”.

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Thoughtful and thought-provoking. Thank you for posting it.

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He’s in western Colorado.
I would echo his sentiments. I’ve never heard of all Indian food referred to as curry either, as another western American.

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Well, yes.
The whole flattening of “curry” and spread outside India happened as a result of English soldiers and officers alike traveling from there and carrying “curry” with them.
Japanese introduction to curry via the English navy, for example.

I didn’t see menu descriptions in your earlier post, aside from the meat+sauce low end places.

Many British indian restaurant menus I see have similar descriptions to American places — as in: korma, vindaloo, makhani / tikka masala, and so on. Those are all distinct dish names.

Coinciding with immigration around independence-related timing from South Asia — Bangladeshi immigrants in the early 70s: the results of 1970 elections in then-East Pakistan not recognized by Pakistan, resulting in their war of independence in 1971, and culminating in independence at the end of that year.

My first indian meal in the UK in the ‘90s, it turns out. It was excellent then, and I hear has held up over the years.

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Well, that’s positive for your regions!

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I am not sure what to think of this. I used to live in a fairly cosmopolitan area, the Washington DC area, where we had quite a few restaurants that specialized in one or another of the regional cuisines of India. But I moved to Montana and the restaurants we have there tend to serve “Indian Food” as a whole. And they serve the dishes that are thought to be Indian, the Tikka Masala, the Rogan Josh, Saag and Biryani, and I really have no way to identify the authenticity of one dish or another. Other than from what I read, say about the historic background of a dish like Chicken Tikka Masala.
But even in Montana, there is an effort to try to classify curry as being just one type of Indian cuisine. I do remember people describing curries of varying sorts, but there was also an attempt to try to make regional dishes that at least imitated the techniques used for the dishes in their home areas.
India Grill is what I would call a Pan-Indian restaurant in my old home town, Billings Montana. And they tried to separate the curry dishes from the other, more regional, dishes.
I think many of these “Indian” dishes stray a good bit from how they would be prepared in India, but there is a legitimate attempt to make them as close as possible. I do not see an attempt like that made by the Thai food council in decades past to just go with simplified versions of Thai dishes in the Stop Light/Red/Yellow/Green manner that did such a dis-service to Thai food elsewhere in the world.
But I do not know enough about all the different cuisines that make up “Indian Food” to be making an educated judgement on that.

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Yes, that was exactly my point.

Those “low end” places are the overwhelming number of “Indian” restaurants in the UK.

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The initial encounter which kicks off the Goya article - to me it highlights that Europe is an area of the world which lags behind in understanding Indian cuisine. The image of Indian food amongst the native populations of places like France, Switzerland, Italy, Scandinavian countries appears to be light years behind the UK and the USA, probably because there aren’t very many Indian people living in those European countries. I think the UK has moved on from the generic Bangladeshi-run ‘curry house’ because there are now Indian restaurants run by actual Indians catering to Indian communities in the UK and trying to appeal to others in the UK as well. I guess this is probably the case in the USA as well (though they probably didn’t have the history of Bangladeshi-run curry houses).

People will always find ways to denigrate things they don’t understand. An Evangelical Christian colleague of mine once told me Hinduism was ‘a bunch of fairy tales’ (Not sure why she felt the need to announce that. I’m an atheist anyway and think religion in general is a weird concept). I just said that wasn’t a very nice thing to say about a religion followed by almost a billion people.

I don’t think the term curry is as blanket-like as that. Nobody calls biryani a rice curry. Most of the time dal is called dal but occasionally you get the term ‘dal curry’ (which I find really annoying) in menus or online recipes.

I use the term curry to describe certain dishes to non-Indian people who are interested in my Indian cooking. In Bengali, generic vegetable curries are usually called ‘torkari’ - a term which wouldn’t be recognised by anyone other than those familiar with Bengali food. And liquidy meat or fish preps are called the generic term ‘jhol’ (gravy), another term which isn’t in common parlance. I can make my cooking more accessible to the understanding of non-Indians and Indians from other regions who I don’t share a common language with by using the word ‘curry’ judiciously. If I was talking about a torkari with a colleague who speaks Hindi, I would say ‘sabzi’ to describe the dish.

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Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post did (and in a grotesque way imo) I think. I also think that maybe it involves being a bit more attentive to how people talk about it. I’ve known way too many Americans who declare they don’t like Indian food and then liken it all to “curry” and to a particular set of spices. It might be that you’ve not noticed this phenomenon but it’s definitely out there in all sorts of ways.

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I should have said “I have never, in person, heard anyone in the U.S. refer to all Indian food as curry.” That’s why I was wondering if it might be regional. I vaguely remember the Weingarten flap.

My Indian restaurant experience is mostly in Colorado (my local Indian restaurants all happen to be Nepali-Indian and Denver’s Indian restaurants which are more varied) and with Salt Lake City’s Indian restaurants. I have more Indian cookbooks in my collection than any other cuisine, so my experience with Indian food isn’t limited to restaurants.

This thread did get me thinking about what I consider to be curries (and what I don’t) and seeing what Perplexity had to say about it. My concept of curry is much narrower than Perplexity’s. Is there anything you consider to be curry or is it all individual dish names for you? Same question for Saregama and anyone else who wants to chime in.

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There’s also an older discussion of the topic, which I haven’t read. The OP isn’t exactly very specific, but perhaps the comments include some of the definitions / input you were looking for (?).

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I see there’s a current curry thread in the Cooking section now, too. Hadn’t noticed that one.

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Yes, I started that one a few days ago. Always trying to expand my culinary horizons :slight_smile:

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While that was a mea culpa / CYA, I did appreciate this bit at the end (which is usually what triggers the strong feelings in people from whichever culture is in question in these types of discussions):

People have asked me if I’m sorry I wrote the Indian section of the column… I regret it mostly because of two letters I got from young Indian-American women… They explained to me, in almost identical terms, that it was hurtful to them because they grew up with friends telling them that their family’s food was “stinky.”

Naively, this surprised me, because I am the only person in my ambit of friends and colleagues who doesn’t love Indian food.

Had I known of the ubiquity of this cultural prejudice, and how early it attaches, I never would have written it.

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That said, my view when the article was linked here was that I thought blowing up a humor column was a PR stunt for Padma Lakshmi, because the writing was clearly self-deprecating and not directed at the cuisine.

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The way I eat now is generally as both medgirl and I have mentioned - places owned by Indians, proud of the regional cuisine. But this isnt what the vast majority eat when they “go for an Indian”. Many probably have never heard of “misal pau” or “lal maas”. But they will know what Anglicised sauce they like, based on its chilli heat. There’s a whole range of them. Just looking at the menu one of the three restaurants in the village, there’s korma, bhuna, Madras, vindaloo, samber, rogan josh, pathia, dhansak, tikka masala and dopiaza. And you can have any of them with chicken, chicken tikka, prawn, lamb, lamb tikka, mixed vegetables. Basically, pick your protein and then pick your sauce depending on how hot you like your food.

I’d probably regard all of these to be curries. It’s a generic name and this is pretty generic food. Britons have grown up with it over the 50 years or so. But I do see it starting to die out. Or, at least, reduce significantly in number. They are starting to close already. Manchester’s “Curry Mile” was once home to around 70 “Indian” restaurants along the half mile strip (all serving pretty much identical “curry house” menus). Now there’s only a handful left, their sites taken over by the latest wave of immigration from the Middle East and Afghanistan - so we now have shisha bars, kebab cafes, etc.

The original Bangladeshi owners are now of an age where they want to retire and, in many cases, the younger generation is not choosing the hospitality industry as a career.

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