Curry is a four letter word

And it’s spelled “Kari”

I too remember a couple years ago when I would smugly claim that there is no such thing as, “curry.” And then I remembered I’m Tamil. 

Curry aka “Kari, or Kare” is Tamilian in origin.

“Curry” is  the bastardization of “Kari” a Tamilian word for sauce, or thick gravy usually served with rice. It became, for foreign invaders somewhere in the late 1600’s, a catch-all for Indian spiced sauces and stews. Some centuries later, it helped market Desi immigrant ingenuity in other countries when needing to explain away the complexities of our cuisine, you could simply add “curry” to the end of the dish and give it a selling chance. 

Generation of Indians,  after these initial surges of immigration see this word used as cheap take out, a derogatory insult on a playground or something that didn’t exist prior to colonization. This is simply not true. But like many things that exist in India, colonization and an existing culture are at the root of it’s misinformation. 

The word “curry” became a great unifier within circles of oppressed people. The word colonizers jumbled up becomes less important in origin and more important to present identity. Indentured servants from India traveled all over the world starting in the late 1600’s, settling into different Western colonies, and hoping to work off their debt in 4-7 years hoping to return, a lot of them,  to no avail. 

Food, the ultimate culture creator, helps tell a bigger story, a larger story of indentured servitude, of people banding together, creating new dishes for new identities. 

Today curries are in Japan, Thailand, the Caribbean to name a few places. Many Sri Lankans dishes reflect the original pronunciation , “Kari.” And yet, there are Indians immigrants to this day, many in places of authority, that feel as though the word is still ours to control. 

I understand the sentiment, you want to feel like you are taking back culture. But this isn’t changing Bombay to Mumbai. The word isn’t just Indian in sentiment anymore. It hasn’t been for centuries. It’s a word that helps describe the many different kinds of people displaced from their own home working in a strange land making a new food culture. 

And in turn, it helps people within India, (a land of countless languages and cultures), understand a dish, the weight of it, the physicality of it, the warmth of it. It is not a sign of belonging to reject the word “curry”, but it is a word, a dish, and a real thing beyond our precious idea of what is “authentic” and what isn’t.