Beyond Curry: Decolonising the Way We Talk About Indian Food
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? Divya Ravindranath unpacks the imperialist history and racialised convenience of the term ‘curry,’ examining its role in erasing the diversity of Indian cuisine.
Editor’s note on February 10: We wish to clarify that the article's use of the words ‘curry’ and ‘Indian food’ is made purely and entirely in reference to Indian food in India, and so is the decolonization argument thus made. It does not seek to club all aforementioned diasporic communities into one general, oversimplified category of ‘Indian’. The writer acknowledges that there are Indian diaspora communities — such as South African Indians, Guyanese Indians, etc —for whom the word curry is reclaimed and carries a different meaning.
In my first week of moving to Copenhagen, a newly made acquaintance asked me if I liked eating curry. I remember freezing in response, confused about how to answer. “What do you mean? Indian food is much more than just curry,” I managed to get out. “Really? It all looks like curry to me though, always some yellow-red dish,” was the response. I turned away, desperate to end the conversation. Later that week, as I stood over my kitchen counter making dinner, I returned to the encounter. The weaponised ignorance of the question aside, what bothered me more was my inability to paint a better, more accurate picture of Indian food. I should have brought up dishes like idiyappam and stew, podi idli, bheja fry, bisebelabath, paniyaram, dal bhaat, litti choka, and so, so many more. But then, how would I have possibly explained these dishes?
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. There is no way I can describe a vathakozhambu to someone from the West without calling it a ‘South Indian, tamarind-based curry.’ Or a pav bhaji without, again, calling it a ‘curry with bread.’ It is impossibly hard to share Indian food with the West without calling it the very thing I believe it is not — a curry.
Rice with kootu and vathakozhambu.
Pav Bhaji
This begs the question: What is curry?
A quick Google search will tell you that it is a ‘sauce or gravy with heavy spices.’ But a reading of the colonial project will reveal that it is an invention of the West, born out of racist ideologies to hegemonise South Asian cuisine as a whole. When the Portuguese were in India, they started referring to any broth made of ‘the pulp of Indian nuts and all sorts of spices, particularly those of cardamom and ginger’ as Caril — a word they picked up from Tamil Nadu’s Karil or Kari (Taylor Sen, 2012). Here, Karil referred to a specific spiced dish featuring vegetables and meat. When the British arrived, they took the Portuguese caril and made it curry. As the spice trade got further established, mentions of curry in British cookbooks increased. By the mid-19th century, households in Britain started including curries in their weekly dinner rotation, inculcating it in the domestic sphere (Varman, 2016).
Today, Indian restaurants in the West will use this identity and perception of the ‘curry’ to profit and brand themselves — be it in their dishes or the name they give their restaurants. Packaged spice mixes in Indian supermarkets will be called ‘curry mix’, and are massively popular among the consumer base in the West. 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 (Varman, 2016). 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.
In 2001, for example, UK’s Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, proclaimed chicken tikka curry as Britain’s national dish, given its popularity and presence (Jahangir, 2009). The astounding, laughable irony of this aside, the postcolonial narrative of Indian food is still very much confined to the vocabulary and boundaries created by the West, for even in this widespread popularity of curry — Britain reinforces reminders of its position as the Imperial nation, and its citizens as subjects whose cosmopolitan lifestyles are framed by shifting from one colony’s appropriation to the other’s (Varman, 2016).
Mutton qorma.
Oxtail vindaloo.
Meen moilee.
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. She 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.
ALSO ON GOYA
