Curry

This feels like something of a tangent (from what?), but I thought of it today so I thought I would post it. It might be edifying. One of my long standing pet-peeves is the word 'curry'. 'Curry', as will be shown, is a colonial neologism that is as vague as it is inauthentic. Currently it seems to refer to any 'soupy' Indian dish, or more generally any dish that uses a mix of spices, and so, practically, to all of "Indian" cuisine (by which most people mean Punjabi cuisine). And also to Thai food, for some reason.


Let us look into the history of the word, shall we:

Most people in the world today know what a curry is - or at least think they do. In Britain the term ‘curry’ has come to mean almost any Indian dish, whilst most people from the sub-continent would say it is not a word they use, but if they did it would mean a meat, vegetable or fish dish with spicy sauce and rice or bread...

The origin of the word itself is the stuff of legends, but most pundits have settled on the origins being the Tamil word ‘kari’ meaning spiced sauce. In his excellent Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson quotes this as a fact and supports it with reference to the accounts from a Dutch traveler in 1598 referring to a dish called ‘Carriel’. He also refers to a Portuguese cookery book from the seventeenth century called Atre do Cozinha, with chilli-based curry powder called ‘caril’...

The one thing all the experts seem to agree on is that the word originates from India and was adapted and adopted by the British Raj. On closer inspection, however, there is just as much evidence to suggest the word was English all along...

In Richard II’s reign (1377-1399) the first real English cookery book was written. Richard employed 200 cooks and they, plus others including philosophers, produced a work with 196 recipes in 1390 called ‘The Forme of Cury’. ‘Cury’ was the Old English word for cooking derived from the French ‘cuire’ - to cook, boil, grill - hence cuisine...

The development of the curry industry in Britain has been peculiarly Anglo-Asian such that many people brandish ‘authenticity’ as if it were the Holy Grail. According to Camellia Panjabi “Ninety nine per cent of Indians do not have a tandoor and so neither Tandoori Chicken nor Naan are part of India’s middle class cuisine. This is even so in the Punjab, although some villages have communal tandoors where rotis can be baked. Ninety five per cent of Indians don’t know what a vindaloo, jhal farezi or, for that matter, a Madras curry is”.

Another, similar account:

The notion of a curry is what the British during their rule in India referred to when eating spicy food. Indians in India would never have used the word curry to describe all sorts of dishes. They would use individual names reflecting the regional variations of countless curry dishes. The British in India created their own spicy dishes which were diluted versions of original recipes that the cooks were ordered to make to suit European tastes...

Every social event paid special attention to the food and the British Memsahibs ran households that included chefs and cooks. Many of them were highly trained to cater for the western palate...

Also with more and more people from the sub-continent coming to live in the UK, there was a surge in popularity for spicy cuisine. There was an influx of people from the Indian sub-continent coming to live in the UK who were Commonwealth immigrants welcomed into Europe to deal with the labour shortages that were then faced by several industries. Many Asians brought with them the exotic flavours of home. It was during this birth of multiculturalism in Britain that post war curry became a phenomenon. It is now part of the fabric of British tradition and culture and looks like it is here to stay in some form or another, be it formica topped or fine dining...

In sum, at best the word 'curry' derives from a Tamil (ie, south Indian) word referring to a specific or specific set of dishes which was taken up by colonialists and used rather liberally in general reference to any number of specific dishes throughout India, and is now used to refer is such a vague fashion to north Indian hybrid dishes made by immigrants in England. Or, interestingly, it has its origin in Britain or Europe itself.

So, given that I don't consider myself very Indian and am certainly not interested in recuperating (read: reinventing) Indian 'authenticity (read: nationalism) from the diaspora, why does the misuse or at least ignorant use of this word get under my skin so much? Part of it has to do with my annoyance (to say the least) with the failure of people in the west to understand the cultures which they appropriate. In this case it has to do with the inability of people, starting with Dutch and British, to distinguish between the many types of cuisine and the specific dishes in those cuisines. Indeed this was even extended to Thai cuisine, and made even more ridiculous by adding color prefixes ( 'red curry,' 'green curry,' etc.) Maybe I see this 'indifference' analogous to the inability of these same soldiers and traders to distinguish among the people of India (the first state-organized fingerprinting identification systems arose in India for this reason). Maybe this also reminds me, affectivly if not analytically, of the all too frequent confusion of me with almost any other person of Indian descent (I could relate many memorable incidents here, but I'll choose the time when someone in my freshmen dorm to whom I had spoken with many times came up to me one day and for some reason started a conversation about the student government, of which I was not apart. It took about 5 minutes for me to realize he thought he was speaking to a different person).

Even if I have no stake in Indian authenticity, I am still annoyed by the pretension of authenticity. I'm also uncomfortable in assigning this refusal of specificity and pretension of authenticity only to 'westerners,' more frequently known as 'white people,' which would be unfair. On the other hand, there is a colonial history here, and one aspect of these articles I find interesting is the way in which food produced in the colonies and then by colonial immigrants was developed in an imperial history spanning several hundred years. Not an innocent history, mind you, not a simple 'fusion,' but one part of a broader cultural assimilation, and now perhaps a more global assimilation. Food and cuisine is always evolving, but it is also interesting to think of it as stamped with certain power relations (now manifested by the global food industry, Monsanto and the like); this is something I'll have to research more.


ps. and what the hell is "curry-wurst"? sigh...