No, it’s not racist to talk about a ‘curry’…
As a row erupts, chef Asma Khan explains how the food of her homeland became such a burning issue
The first time I ever ate in a British curry house, it was 1991, and I’d just arrived in this country from Calcutta. My husband and I went to a restaurant in Cambridge, taken, I think, by some colleagues of his, intrigued to taste the food of home so many thousands of miles away. What followed was one of the strangest meals I’d ever eaten.
The “royal rice” had clearly been dyed with food colouring, not coloured naturally with turmeric or saffron. The saag paneer was made with cottage cheese and spinach. And there was something called a balti, which really threw me because, in Hindi, balti means bucket.
The whole meal was a puzzle. Things that should have been savoury were oddly sweet, there was no balancing of spices and too much cream. It was all off-kilter. I could hear the people in the kitchen speaking Sylheti, and therefore were from the northeastern region of Bangladesh, so I’d have expected the recipes to be different to the ones I grew up with in West Bengal, or even those my Bangladeshi husband grew up eating (more on the hyper-regionality of Indian cookery later), but the food certainly shouldn’t have been so rich, nor so flavourless.
With that first taste of Indian cuisine in Britain, it was clear that in this country, chefs that looked like me were pandering to a palate that was not their own. They mellowed spices, rounded corners with sugar and dampened authenticity with cream and ghee – rarely used in South Asian cooking because it’s so incredibly hot. And, for some reason, this strange incarnation of the food of my homeland was called “curry”.
Last week, a South Asian food blogger criticised the overuse of the C-word, pointing out that it is rooted in British colonialism. Chaheti Bansal posted an Instagram video calling on people to “cancel the word ‘curry’”.
“There’s a saying that 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 the actual names of our dishes,” she said. “But we can still unlearn.”
Immediately, it became a talking point – the latest in the culture wars that these days seem to drown out nuanced debate, with one side holding up a single word as a pillar of racism, the other professing freedom of speech and hyper-sensitivity. So is it racist to refer to “ordering a curry”? Let’s start with the word itself. Whole books have been written about the historical origins of the term, but briefly, it goes back to the early 1500s when the Portuguese first captured Goa and asked what the people were eating. Supposedly, they replied using a word like “kari”, a Tamal word which refers to the gravy that a particular dish was finished with. “Curry” is the anglicisation of that word. It isn’t Indian, and even if it was, one word couldn’t hope to encompass all the many different dishes the term “curry” attempts to cover in English.
Is the word itself racist? No
– but it is incorrect. It doesn’t really mean anything. It homogenises a cuisine that is infinitely varied. And it does have roots in Britain’s colonial past (a past this country is only really beginning to get to grips with). It also, frankly, doesn’t take such a lot of effort not to use that it should really be all that big a deal. It doesn’t offend me as a word, and it doesn’t constitute a slur. But it’s lazy, and laziness breeds ignorance.
The trouble is, racism tends to simmer under the surface and come out in these kinds of moments, when someone suddenly says you can no longer use a word you have never given much thought to before. It’s uncomfortable to be told “you’ve been saying that wrong for years and it could be offensive to a whole group of people”. But it isn’t the word that is hard to stomach, it’s the ignorance it represents. It isn’t language that matters, it’s people. And if you’re lazy with your choice of language, it sends the message that you don’t care about the people those words represent.
I agree that it tends to be pretty unhelpful to make a word the basis for a conversation about really entrenched cultural associations. The bigger picture is that it is still the case that Indian cooking and culture are still seen as somehow less than others in this country. While French and Italian food are elevated and superior, Asian food is cheap and cheerful – not worthy of a £95 tasting menu. In fact, it’s hugely complex, involves ancient techniques and expert layering of flavours. Arguing over one word does tend to reduce the bigger, more profound conversations we need to have to something trivial. But if it’s a spat about the word curry that gets people talking about how we view South Asian culture, then so be it.
And food, don’t forget, is culture. My food is in my DNA. It isn’t something I just eat, it nourishes my soul, it’s my identity, it reflects my heritage. I think it’s why it was so startling, all those years ago, to eat something professing to be a bit of me but which had so clearly been created to satisfy someone else. I mean no disrespect to the chefs at that Cambridge curry house. In fact, I owe them a huge debt of gratitude.
I stand on the shoulders of the people who opened the first curry houses in 1970s Britain. They came here when someone who was Bangladeshi or Indian couldn’t rent a property. It was a hostile environment and running a restaurant was hard work. I don’t know how they did it day in and day out, but they did, and their resilience and innovation changed the palate of a nation.
I often talk to people in their 50s about their early memories of Indian food and they talk about when Madhur Jaffrey came along and their mother started cooking “exotic” Indian food, usually using curry powder in lieu of the real deal. I’ve talked to enough Brits about this to know that pudding on nights when Jaffrey’s recipes came out tended to be canned pineapple. Quite what it was about a canned pineapple that was deemed a classic Indian dessert, I’m yet to understand.
I don’t begrudge those early incarnations of South Asian cooking in 1970s British kitchens. In fact, there are now restaurants in India serving the anglicised versions of South Asian cuisine, such as chicken tikka masala. Change happens slowly, and relies on diverse voices in the public eye using the correct terminology and those words filtering through via osmosis.
Home cooks today understand spicing far more than they once did and have more respect for traditional recipes. And millennials now have a far better understanding of the regionality of South Asian cooking because they have all eaten street food and have grown up on the internet.
The younger generation of eaters and chefs give me hope. I trust that it won’t be long before a debate about whether or not it is appropriate to refer to a dish as a curry will seem archaic. Until then, use the word if you want to, but while you’re doing so, make an effort to understand what you’re saying.
Educate yourself about Britain’s complicated relationship with South Asia. Read about the origins of this complex, varied, hyper-regional, delicious food that, in 2021, you can enjoy all over the country.
* As told to Eleanor Steafel
Asma Khan is the chef-owner of Darjeeling Express (darjeelingexpress.com)