Curry, colonialism and the problem with ‘cultural appropriation’

The latest casualty in the culture wars is an innocent-sounding word: ‘curry’. Apparently it’s inappropriate to use it, and incorrect to use it to refer to all spicy Indian food. It’s far too broad as to be misleading, doesn’t even have pan-Indian usage, and it remains tainted by its colonial origins. This is the widely reported opinion of Chaheti Bansal, a Californian blogger who posts Indian recipes on Instagram. 

‘There’s a saying the food in India changes every 100km and yet we’re still using this umbrella term popularised by white people who couldn’t be bothered to learn that actual names of our dishes’, she writes, imploring people to ‘unlearn’ the term.

The word was indeed made popular by colonialists: the Portuguese. As the chef-owner of Darjeeling Express, Asma Khan, explained to the Daily Telegraph this week, the word has its origins in Goa, an area of the sub-continent first taken by the Portuguese in the 15th century.