To me, put simply, 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. Banerji in Eating India puts it better. He describes curry as a “slippery eel of a word, bent and stretched to cover almost anything with spicy sauce, a king of misnomers” (Banerji, 2007). After all, the West’s inability to fathom the complexity of flavours and spices that exist in Southeast Asian cooking renders the curry a convenient descriptor of food, and an easy way out. It even gives the West a means by which they can continue to express their racism. Comment sections of an Indian reel that has reached the wrong audience are often littered with lines like “stop eating curry” and “take a shower to stop smelling like curry.” 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. A week before I left India, my mother handed me a packed bag of sambar podi and kootu podi — powdered condiments into which I could add water and vegetables to make myself a warm bowl of homemade food. I’ve seen her make these podis at home multiple times. For the sambar podi, she will use channa dal, toor dal, methi, dhaniya, red chillies and mustard, and for the kootu podi, she will replace the toor with urad dal and add pepper to the list. She will roast these for a good while, and finally grind it all up. For her, this is an easy, fool-proof recipe. But the truth is that the knowledge of which dals to use, the kind of mustard to select, and the temperature at which the roasting needs to occur is not knowledge that she simply holds. It is knowledge passed down — from her mother, her grandmother, and her great-grandmother.

To reduce this generational link and the art of mastering the skill of knowing how to extract flavours from certain ingredients, into the idea of the ‘curry’ is a degrading attempt to preserve and protect the imperial state. 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. On a personal level, how do I reconcile what I know to be true about Indian food with this Western concoction of the curry? How do I share the food I love, food from home with my friends here if the easiest thing to do is to call it a curry? 

It is terribly easy to call for the decolonisation of projects. Post-colonial academia seeks to decolonise knowledge, decolonise identities, and decolonise research. But what do these projects look like on an individual front? 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. Globalization has convinced us that narratives such as the curry are ultimately profitable because they popularise Indian Cuisine and create an appreciation, and therefore a market for it in the West. But this 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. 

There is no need for me to cater to words the West understands to explain the foods that make up my identity. I don’t need to call misal a ‘spicy curry’ just so they are able to contextualise it in their heads. Perhaps we start there. Call a misal a misal, and leave a mushroom masala at just that. It’s been many days since I had the encounter that set me down this spiral. I’ve come up with many alternative, snarky rebuttals I would use if I could go back in time to that moment. But truth be told, I might fall short of the right words yet again. And again. What I can do, however, is start with the simple things, and abandon the curry entirely. Perhaps it’s time we all do.

Works Cited
Banerji, Chitrita. 2008. Eating India: Exploring a Nation’s Cuisine. Penguin Books.
Jahangir, R. (2009, November 26). How Britain got the hots for Curry. BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8370054.stm 
Rohit Varman (2016): Curry, Consumption Markets & Culture, DOI: 10.1080/10253866.2016.1185814
Taylor Sen, C. (2012). Curry: A global history. Reaktion Books. 

Divya Ravindranath is currently pursuing her Masters degree in Integrated Food Studies from the University of Copenhagen and is interested in the confluence of food, politics and policy. She is also a dancer and binges reality TV in her free time. 

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