Which is the authentic Indian curry?

The name of a recent true-crime documentary, Curry and Cyanide: The Jolly Joseph Case, brought to my mind a debate, centred around this question of authenticity, food and language, which raged online a few years ago. It broke out over the use of the word “curry”, the first objection to which was that it was used, mostly in the West, as a catch-all term for Indian food. To reduce an entire civilisation’s multitude of cuisines to one word is, indeed, a problem. More than that, in the global hierarchy of cuisines, it sends a strong signal about the place that a “cuisine” that is thus reduced, occupies (Hint: not very high).

Not so straightforward, however, are the implications of the second objection which is that for Indians, the word “curry” is meaningless as it is a description imposed on Indian food by the British. The last part is, to an extent, true: While Lizzie Collingham, historian and author of Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, has traced the first European use of the word to the 15th-century encounters of the Portuguese with Indian food, its use proliferated on the back of the Anglo-Indian style of food that came up in the kitchens of the English memsahibs of colonial India. The word made its way westward in the 20th century as the British left India and Indians began leaving the motherland and setting up “curry houses” in the UK and, later, in Europe, Australia and the US.

But “curry” is also used within India to describe very specific elements of a dish, usually a gravy or sauce — the meen “curry” of Kerala, for example, comes to mind. Is this an instance of an “authentic” Indian usage of a term to describe a dish? Or is it an instance of the corruption of an “authentic” Indian concept — fish in a spicy gravy — smuggling itself into an Indian language? To be sure, many sources, including K T Achaya, have acknowledged that the word “curry” as encountered by Europeans in India probably comes from the Tamil “kari” (most likely used for a very particular kind of preparation) — which is likely how it found its way into other languages, including Malayalam. Yet, the Malayalam use of the word encompasses not one specific type of dish, but a whole range of dishes which share a certain characteristic (pretty much anything that has a gravy/sauce, like kadala curry or moru curry). One can easily imagine, in fact, how the word “curry” travelled from southern India into the European and British colonial lexicon to the wider world —- Japan’s popular “kare raisu” has roots in the British “curry-rice” that arrived there in the 19th century — and finally back to India. Along the way, its meaning evolved, expanded and gained recognition as a legitimate culinary term in cultures (including many parts of India) where it hadn’t previously been used.

What the journey of curry — the word, the concept and indeed the food — illustrates is the sheer inadequacy of the lens of “authenticity” in this particular context. That does not mean it is without its uses. After all, when one talks about authentic food, especially that which emerges from a marginalised culture, one is also talking about who gets to make it, talk about it and benefit from it. In 2019, Gordon Ramsay — one of the most powerful figures in a field dominated by other White, male chefs like him — was rightly criticised for his “authentic Asian” restaurant, Lucky Cat, which employed no Asian chefs and made little distinction between the vastly different cuisines of Japan, China and other East Asian and South East Asian cultures. To flag “authenticity” as an issue in such cases is to throw light on acts of cultural appropriation and open up discussion on power, politics and food. To flag it all the time is to fail to recognise that when it comes to food — and the way we talk about it —- the only constant is change.