The Colonial History of Curry Powder

There is no dish called curry in India, and there never was. I said as much on Instagram recently and watched the post detonate, because most people have spent their entire lives using a tin of curry powder into pots without ever suspecting that the tin, the word, and the whole idea behind them are not Indian at all. They are British, and the true story of how that happened is older, stranger and far more political than anything the label on the jar will admit.

There Is No Such Thing as “Curry” in India

It is an English word invention, most likely a mangling of the Tamil word kari, which refers to a sauce or a relish for rice, and in some older usages to black pepper itself. Portuguese traders who reached the southern coast in the sixteenth century adapted it into caril, and the British who followed flattened the whole thing into curry. British East India Company documents were using the word as early as 1658, long before anyone in India would have recognised it as the name of their cooking.

What the British were actually looking at was masala, the freshly ground blend of spices that sits at the heart of cooking across the subcontinent, mixed differently in every region, every town, often every household, and adjusted per dish. There is a saying that the food changes every hundred kilometres, and it is close to literally true. A Bengali jhol, a Rajasthani gatte ki sabzi, a Goan vindaloo, a South Indian sambar and a Kashmiri rogan josh have almost nothing in common beyond the presence of spice. The British had neither the patience nor the interest to learn those distinctions, so they reached for one word and dropped it over an entire subcontinent like a sheet over furniture. This is a failure of curiosity, formalised by the Britishers.

How the British Invented Curry PowderHow the British Invented Curry Powder

Curry the word was a shortcut, curry powder the product was the shortcut monetised by them. The first recorded British curry recipe appears in Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy in 1747, a dish she called, with real confidence and no accuracy, a “currey the India way.” By 1784 you could walk into shops in Britain and buy ready-made curry powder off the shelf, a fixed and standardised blend that let a British cook approximate the flavours of India without any of the knowledge, the labour, or the people who actually held that knowledge.

In India, the spice blend is alive, because it changes with the cook, the season, the dish, the mood. The commercial curry powder froze one crude version of that living practice into a single yellow formula, heavy on turmeric for colour, and sold it as the whole of a civilisation’s cooking. Anglo-Indian cooks in colonial households had already been sanding down the food to suit British palates, toning down the heat, adding cream and butter, settling on fixed ingredient lists that ignored regional variety. The tin simply completed the job, also it is worth adding that even the chili so many people assume is ancient to Indian food arrived only after Columbus, carried from the Americas by the Portuguese. The spice rack we think of as timeless is itself a product of empire and exchange.

Curry Powder Was Built to Remove the Cook

Curry powder was designed to remove the cook. The entire appeal of the product, then and now, is that it lets you skip the person who knows what they are doing. That is the colonial logic in miniature, because empire was always about extracting the valuable thing while discarding the people it belonged to. Take the flavours, take the spices, take the fortunes built on the spice trade, and leave the actual human beings and their knowledge out of the transaction entirely.

The cruellest illustration of this is the story of Sake Dean Mahomed. Born in Patna in 1759, a former captain in the East India Company’s Bengal Army, he opened the Hindoostane Coffee House at 34 George Street in London in 1810, the first Indian restaurant in Britain. He advertised himself in The Morning Post as the “manufacturer of the real currie powder,” offering the gentry genuine Hindoostanee dinners and even home delivery, more than two centuries before that was a business model. The venture failed within a couple of years and he was bankrupt by 1812. The first Indian restaurateur in Britain, a Bengali man selling his own food in the heart of the empire, could not make it survive, while the anonymous, mass-produced British curry powder went on to conquer the country. The product outlived the person.

Curry Went Everywhere the Empire Went: The Diaspora Story

When Britain abolished slavery across its empire in the 1830s, it did not abolish its hunger for cheap labour. It replaced enslaved people with indentured Indians, hundreds of thousands of them, shipped out from 1838 onwards under contracts that were often barely distinguishable from bondage. They went to Trinidad, Guyana, Jamaica, Mauritius, Fiji, South Africa, Malaysia and beyond, to cut sugar on the same plantations, and they carried with them their spices, their knowledge, and yes, the anglicised curry powder.

What those communities did next is one of the great acts of culinary defiance, in my opinion, as cut off from home, working brutal conditions, they took what they had and built entirely new cuisines that were unmistakably theirs. Trinidadian curry goat and doubles and buss up shut roti. Jamaican curry goat rebuilt with Scotch bonnet and allspice. South African bunny chow, a hollowed loaf filled with curry, born in the Indian communities of Durban. Malaysian and Singaporean curries braided together with Chinese and Malay flavours into laksa and fish head curry. This is the extraordinary inversion at the centre of the whole story. The word curry was imposed as an act of flattening, and the diaspora took that flattening and grew a thousand distinct, living things out of it. The map of where curry travelled is the map of empire and forced migration, however the food that resulted is a monument to the people who refused to be erased by it.

How Curry Reached Japan, and Why It Tastes British

My favourite thread in all of this leads to Japan, a country I love deeply, and it is the clearest proof that curry is a colonial invention rather than an Indian one. Japanese curry, karē raisu, did not come from India, but from the British Royal Navy. During the Meiji era, when Japan was rapidly modernising and modelling its new navy on Britain’s, Japanese officers encountered the curry that British sailors ate at sea, a thick, flour-thickened stew of the anglicised curry powder that travelled well and masked the taste of preserved rations. The Japanese navy adopted it, partly because the wheat flour helped ward off beriberi, the vitamin deficiency then devastating sailors raised on polished white rice.

The first karē raisu recipe was printed in a Japanese cookbook in 1872, and a Tokyo restaurant put it on the menu by 1877. It is officially classed in Japan as yōshoku, meaning Western food, which tells you everything. Today it is close to a national dish, eaten constantly, sold in boxed roux blocks in every supermarket. So the flavours of India were flattened by Britain into a powder, carried by the British navy across the world, handed to Japan as Western cuisine, and beloved there ever since as something entirely their own. India to Britain to Japan, each step erasing a little more of the origin, until the katsu curry you order in Tokyo is a British naval ration wearing a Japanese coat. Isn’t it a colonial game?

So Should We Cancel the Word “Curry”?

In 2021 the food creator Chaheti Bansal, who posts as @rootedinspice, put up a video calling on people to cancel the word curry, and it exploded online, racking up millions of views after BuzzFeed’s Tasty reposted it. Her argument was the one I have made above: an umbrella term popularised by people who could not be bothered to learn the real names of the dishes. The backlash was immediate as some called it trivial, a distraction from more serious South Asian issues. Others pointed out something more painful, that many in the diaspora grew up hearing curry hurled at them as a slur, alongside jibes about smelly food, so the word carries a wound as well as a history.

Here is where I actually land, I do not think the answer is a performative cancellation. Bansal herself clarified that the word is not always wrong, that Tamil, Malayali and Sri Lankan communities use it with real specificity and always have, paired with precise traditional names. The problem was never the word existing, but the word being used to erase, to lump hundreds of distinct cultures into one lazy category so nobody has to learn the difference between a korma and a kosha mangsho.

My ask is not that you throw away your spice tin in a fit of guilt, it is that you learn the names. Call the dish what it actually is, and understand that when you reach for curry powder, you are holding a piece of colonial history, and that the living, magnificent food it was extracted from is still out there, waiting for you to meet it on its own terms.

Sources

On the etymology of “curry” from Tamil kari via Portuguese caril, and East India Company usage from 1658: South China Morning Post, Gulf News (interview with food historian Ashish Chopra), and historian Dr Lizzie Collingham’s account of curry as a British catch-all term. On Hannah Glasse’s 1747 “currey the India way” and ready-made curry powder sold in Britain by 1784: Amazing Food & Drink, and standard British food histories. On Sake Dean Mahomed and the Hindoostane Coffee House (1810, 34 George Street), Britain’s first Indian restaurant, and his self-description as “manufacturer of the real currie powder”: National Portrait Gallery, Muslim Museum UK, Londonist and Wikipedia. On the indentured labour diaspora from 1838 and the curries of Trinidad, Jamaica, Guyana, Mauritius, Fiji, South Africa, Malaysia and Singapore: contemporary food histories including Amazing Food & Drink and Uncultured Palate. On Japanese curry (karē raisu), its arrival via the British Royal Navy during the Meiji era, the beriberi connection, the 1872 recipe and 1877 restaurant, and its status as yōshoku: Atlas Obscura, NPR’s The Salt (“From India to North Korea, Via Japan”), Metropolis Japan, and anthropologist Dr Merry White. On the modern debate: Chaheti Bansal (@rootedinspice) and her 2021 “cancel the word curry” video, reported by NBC News, The Print and South China Morning Post, including her later clarification on legitimate regional use.