Consumption Markets & Culture

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Curry

Rohit Varman

To cite this article: Rohit Varman (2016): Curry, Consumption Markets & Culture, DOI:
10.1080/10253866.2016.1185814

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 CONSUMPTION MARKETS & CULTURE, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2016.1185814

Curry
Rohit Varman
Department of Marketing, Faculty of Business and Law, Deakin University, Burwood, Victoria, Australia

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Marketplace icons are often markers of transnational transactions Curry; food; colonialism;
engendered by commercialization and dominance of the West. Curry as India; marketplace icon;
a marketplace icon helps to identify these constituents of iconicity. This hegemony
article briefly examines the historical roots of curry or spicy Indian food
and its implication in the project of colonialism. Curry as a signifier of
Indian food was invented in British colonial narratives and shaped by
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commercial interests and racial prejudices. Because of the way forces of

colonization and commercialization create international circulation of
goods and ideas through globalization, curry as a marketplace icon
signifies hegemony and global hierarchies that shape ideas of
consumption and markets.

Curry is a popular name given to spicy Indian1 foods across the world. Some researchers consider it
as a sign of globalization that allows goods and ideas from different parts of the world to seamlessly
circulate without privileging a particular location. For example, Sen (2009, 7) notes, “if any dish
deserves to be called global, it is curry. From Newfoundland to the Antarctic, from Beijing to War-
saw, there is scarcely a piece where curries are not enjoyed.” In this essay, I offer a critical reading of
the iconicity of curry in the context of its British appropriation and entanglements in the webs of
colonization and commercialization. Despite its iconic status, curry is a signifier of domination
and global hierarchy. Instead of interpreting globalization that creates marketplace icons as a set
of flows, curry helps to see it as unequal and asymmetrical pathways of transnational transactions
(Gupta 2012).

The origin of curry and Indian culinary traditions

The word curry is problematic both etymologically and in its culinary origins (Leong-Salobir 2011).
Narratives created by British officials and commercial cookbooks shaped the idea of curry. Banerji
(2007, 47) describes curry as a “slippery eel of a word, bent and stretched to cover almost anything
with spicy sauce, a king of misnomers.” Indians referred to their foods with different names but Brit-
ish lumped them together under the name of curry (Collingham 2006). British learnt the term from
the Portuguese as “caril” for broths that Indians made with butter, spices, onion, and ginger (Burton
1993). Hobson-Jobson, a popular dictionary of the nineteenth-century British-Indian English for-
malized the usage of curry by including the term in its lexicon (Sen 2009).
In several Indian languages, there are words similar to curry for specific dishes, spices, or herbs.
For example, in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu kari means sauce, and in many other parts of
the country, karee describes leaves for seasoning. In parts of North and West India, karhi is a dish

CONTACT Rohit Varman rohit.varman@deakin.edu.au

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 2 R. VARMAN

prepared with yogurt and gram flour. Europeans transformed these Indian words into curry and
used it as a generic descriptor for Indian food. Such a use of curry was considered a gross simplifica-
tion, if not a downright degradation, of the variety of spices that Indians added to their foods. Burton
(1993, 73) observes, “nowadays the very mention of the name (curry) is calculated to raise the ire of
nationalistic Indian cook, and it is indeed true that curry powder has badly misrepresented Indian
cooking.” Moreover, Jaffrey (1987, 2), a famous food writer explains:
Our spice shelves often contain more than thirty seasonings. The Indian genius lies not only in squeezing sev-
eral flavours out of the same spice by roasting it, grinding it, or popping it whole into hot oil (a technique known
as baghar), but in combining seasonings … it is this total mastery over seasonings that makes Indian food quite
unique.

Thus, at the heart of good Indian food was the notion of properly blended and cooked spices. The
techniques of blending and cooking vary widely across the country, and it is hard to find one com-
mon way of defining Indian food or finding a national cuisine (Appadurai 1988). It is ironic that
despite her reservations about the use of curry, reflecting the imperatives produced by commercia-
lization and colonization, Jaffrey’s recipe books were titled Curry Nation and Curry Easy.
India’s food culture has a lengthy history that the commercialized and globalized idea of curry
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neglects. In ancient times, the usage of spices such as pepper, cardamom, turmeric, fenugreek, ginger,
and garlic was common (Achaya 1994). The more contemporary international usage of curry is also
oblivious about certain assumptions that constituted this ancient food culture. The idea of food in
India was closely tied to social hierarchies with moral and medical implications (Appadurai 1988). Sev-
eral Hindu texts and specifically Vedas provide directions on consumption of food (Achaya 1994). For
example, Rigveda, the earliest Vedic text dating back to around 1500–1200 BCE provides a strong con-
nection between consumption of spices and maintenance of good health. Consumption was also pre-
mised upon the categorization of food as hot or cold that was considered central to healing and
recovery in Ayurveda, an Indian system of medicine. The proponents of this system of medicine empha-
sized that the right food was necessary to keep a human body in equilibrium with its environment (Col-
lingham 2006). Charaka Samhita and Sushrutha Samhita, 900–400 BCE texts on Ayurveda contain
recipes of different vegetarian and meat preparations to help in healing processes (Achaya 1994).
In later India, with a deepening of caste-based divisions, consumption of food signified discrimi-
natory practices, as it got associated with norms of pollution and purity. Low castes could receive
cooked food or water from upper castes, but the reverse was not acceptable (Achaya 1994; Jaffrey
1987). According to Collingham (2006, 24), for upper caste Hindus,
eating was more a medico-moral activity than an enjoyable bodily pleasure. The food was an integral part of
man’s relationship with the gods … when he ate and who he ate with was thus a significant statement of a Hin-
du’s position in the natural, moral, familial, and social order.

Religious institutions such as temples were important sources of dissemination of not only what was to
be consumed by people but also influenced food preparations. Temple kitchens offered food to people
and also kept records of recipes used by cooks (Collingham 2006). Several Hindu religious texts further
elaborated on different categories of foods and their codes of consumption. For example, the Bhagwad
Gita categorizes beef, pork, and strong brews as “tamasic foods [that] are cold, stale, and highly spiced
rendering the eater dull and slothful” (Achaya 1994, 77, emphasis in original). On the other hand, milk,
honey, fruits, chicken, eggs, and wine are “sattvika foods [that] are savoury, nutritive and agreeable,
conducive to serenity and spirituality” (Achaya 1994, 77, emphasis in original). Accordingly, consump-
tion of sattvika food created a sattvika or tranquil and detached nature, while tamasic food produced a
tamasic or coarse, cold, and brutal temperament (Parry 1985).
The monolithic idea of curry created in the colonial encounter also ignores various external pol-
itical influences that shaped the Indian food culture. In the ancient period, the Aryan influence
brought in emphasis on dairy products such milk, butter, and ghee. In the later periods, there was
a Turko-Afghan influence on North Indian food (Appadurai 1988). After the eighth CE, there
 CONSUMPTION MARKETS & CULTURE 3

were regular trade links between West Asia and India that influenced Indian food (Chapman 2007).
For example, Indians adopted Kafta as kofta or meatballs and halwa, an Arabic dessert. From the
sixteenth CE, there are extensive court accounts of the West/Central Asian influence on Indian
food with the onset of the Mughal Empire. This was a period of synthesis and reduction in
Hindu medico-religious influence when the delicately flavored Persian pulao merged with the
spicy rice dishes of India to create the classic Mughlai dish biriyani (Collingham 2006).
European colonialism with its commercial imperatives also influenced Indian food. For example,
the Portuguese colonial settlement in Goa introduced bread, cashew nuts, chili pepper, potatoes, and
tomatoes, and contributed to a change in dietary patterns to include greater consumption of beef
and pork (Banerji 2007). This also led to food being shaped by multivalent definitions of modernity
and identity, which had locus points both in native practices and colonial influences (Jhala 2012). In
this period, food became an important marker of colonial domination and control. Gupta (2012, 42)
insightfully notes that:
during the infamous Inquisition which began in Goa in 1540 and lasted for about 200 years, one of the ways in
which the Portuguese authorities discovered whether someone had genuinely converted or was merely pretend-
ing to have done so was by checking if they still followed the Hindu custom of cooking rice without salt.
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It is this connection between curry and colonial domination that I further examine in the next
section.

The colonial appropriation of curry

Curry and spices were deeply implicated in the project of British colonialism. In 1600, a group of
London merchants formed the East India Company to, among other things, control the spice
trade (Burton 1993). Edward Terry, a chaplain to Thomas Roe, who was the ambassador of King
James I from 1615 to 1619 to the Mughal court, returned to Britain with one of the earliest written
accounts of Indian food (Collingham 2006). Terry was impressed by the food he had in Mughal India
and carried back with him accounts of food cooked with spices, onions, and other herbs. However,
this does not mean that spices were not in use in Britain before this period, and there are accounts of
several recipes using spicy preparations (Chapman 2007; Grove and Grove 2005).
The British colonial outreach expanded the scope of Indian food and from the eighteenth CE
curry started finding regular mentions in commercial cookbooks. In 1747, Hannah Glasse’s cook-
book The Art of Cookery published recipes of Indian pulao (Burton 1993). Several enterprising mer-
chants began manufacturing curry powder and paste, and in “1784 Sorlie’s Perfumery Warehouse
advertised that curry renders the stomach active in Digestion – the blood naturally flows in circula-
tion – the mind vigorous – contributes most of any food to an increase in the Human race” (Sen
2009, 39). On 27 March 1811, an advertisement appeared in The Times that announced to the retired
East India Company officials that they would be able to enjoy curry in the newly opened Hindostanee
Coffee House (Collingham 2006). Although the Hindostanee Coffee House started by Dean Moha-
mad filed for bankruptcy within two years, by the 1830s there were several Indian cookbooks and
curry powder brands in circulation in Britain (Basu 2011).
Zlotnick (1996, 59) notes,
by mid-century (19th CE) it had become a staple in the domestic cookery of the urban bourgeoisie. If memsa-
hibs returning to England integrated curry and rice into the dinners they served family and friends, middle-class
women like Eliza Acton and Isabella Beeton introduced curry to an even wider audience through the medium of
their bestselling domestic cookery books.

These commercial cookbooks belonged to what Appadurai (1988, 18) has noted, the genre of “nos-
talgia and loss,” carrying memories of the time spent in the colony. For example, Sen (2009) notes
that two of the popular curry recipe books were written by Dr Robert Flower Riddell, the superin-
tendent army surgeon at the court of Nizam of Hyderabad, and Colonel Arthur Robert
 4 R. VARMAN

Kenney-Herbert, a British army officer who served in India. It is further noted by several scholars
that curry recipes became particularly well accepted in the late nineteenth CE because cookbooks
portrayed spicy food as healthy and helped middle classes to cook with scraps of meat and leftover
meals that created a sense of thrift, which was an important middle-class value in Britain (Chaudhuri
1992; Leong-Salobir 2011).
Some have argued that as with the role of sugar in furthering slavery (Mintz 1986), curry
advanced colonial interests. For example, Zlotnick (1996, 52) observes,
when utilitarians like Macaulay and James Mill were busily trying to assimilate India into the British Empire
and Anglicizing it through educational and legal reforms, British women undertook an analogous task. They
incorporated Indian food, which functioned metonymically for India, into the national diet and made it cultu-
rally British.

Although Leong-Salobir (2011) believes that there was a genuine appreciation for Indian food among
Britons who served in India, Zlotnick (1996) contends that colonial masters never adopted Indian
food. Instead, they invented their curry powder that helped to ingest India into their system. More-
over, Chaudhuri (1992) reports that in the nineteenth CE British officials in India to protect their
status as rulers and to maintain racial exclusiveness rejected Indian dishes in public meals. Such
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rejection of Indian food gained particular momentum in light of the mutiny in 1857 after which Brit-
ish emphasized greater cultural and bodily differences from the natives (Sengupta 2012). Another
factor that contributed to the shift was the constitution of Imperial (later Indian) Civil Service in
1886 that allowed wives of British officers to travel to India, which resulted in a reduction in officials
having Indian wives and mistresses, who encouraged consumption of Indian cuisines (Sen 2009).
British wives along with their husbands were keen to distance themselves from those they governed.
Some recipe books published in this period further contributed to the separation by rejecting Indian
food as unsuitable for European taste (Sen 2009). As a result, colonial India witnessed, ostentatious
eating habits as markers of a masculine, physically superior British Raj and at the same time English
cookbooks described native kitchens as “filthy, dirty, and uncouth” (Sengupta 2012, 76).
The rejection of the local food did not mean that at a distance from Indian subjects, curry was not
being incorporated in British diets. British women displayed an “antipodal view toward Indian
material and gastronomic cultures outside the colonial environment,” in which there was a greater
keenness to adopt Indian food as it got reflected in their private accounts, letters, and consumption
back home in Britain (Chaudhuri 1992, 232). Narayan (1995) further observes that the colonial cre-
ation of curry and its consumption in Britain was similar to the construction of India as a unified pol-
itical entity that was to be civilized by colonial masters. Therefore, Narayan (1995, 66) notes, “eating
curry was in a sense eating India … the imaginary India whose allure was necessary to provoke an
imperial interest in incorporating this jewel into the British crown.” On the one hand, this allowed
the tropes of plurality, openness, and hybridity to prevail to justify cultural exchanges that marked
colonialism. On the other hand, domesticating Indian food through curry helped to incorporate the
colonized as a natural part of the colonizer (Chaudhuri 1992). To borrow from Zlotnick (1996, 52),
like all signs, curry “could be deployed in a variety of mutually constructing and conflicting ways to
preserve and protect the always fragile, always fictional imperial state, and its even more vulnerable
imperial subject.”
In 1896, the Governor of Bombay gave an official seal of approval to a locally produced curry
powder. Henrietta Hervey in a cookbook Anglo-Indian Cookery at Home provided the recipe of
this curry powder (Burton 1993). She also went on to write about the recipes of some other regional
variants in the names of Bengal and Madras curry powders. This is also a period when several British
producers started exporting curry powder to India. As noted by Zlotnick (1996, 64), in an advertise-
ment of J. Edmunds’ brand of curry powder,
figures ranging from the former Viceroy of India’s chef to natives of India are called on to bear witness and offer
thanks to J. Edmunds for the excellencies of his curry. Thus, the Maharajah of Kuch Behar testifies that he pre-
fers Mr. Edmunds’s curry powder to any other he had tried.
 CONSUMPTION MARKETS & CULTURE 5

Accordingly, the ideological function of curry under colonialism was to serve as a sign that was dom-
esticated by Britons, commodified, and returned to India as a gift of its civilizer. These colonial experi-
ences continue to influence the circulation of curry in Britain after India’s independence in 1947.

The postcolonial popularity of curry

There are nearly 9000 curry restaurants and 6500 pubs that serve curry food in Britain (Chapman
2007). There are so many restaurants selling curry food that some consider London as the new
curry capital of the world (Basu 2011). In addition, there are nearly 200 restaurants in and around
Birmingham selling the highly popular balti chicken and nan (Basu 2011). Bangladeshis, Pakistanis,
and Indians own most of these restaurants. Curry is not only admired as food served in restaurants
and pubs but also as food cooked in British homes. Packaged curry sauces, spice mixes, and pickles
contribute to this popularity. One of the biggest brand names of packaged curry ingredients in the
UK, US, Canada, and Australia is Pataks. Lakhubai and Meena Pathak started this business in the
1950s in London (Basu 2011). The scale of Patak’s operations and success of curry can be assessed
from the volume of ingredients that the firm imports from India and other countries. Patak imports
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to Britain every year nearly 500 tons of coriander powder, 350 tons of cumin seeds, 250 tons of tur-
meric, 500 tons of chilies, 500 tons of mango pieces, and 400 tons of limes to produce curry ingre-
dients in four factories that employ more than 500 people (Basu 2011).
As a result, some of the curry preparations have achieved iconic status in Britain. For example,
vindaloo has become such an integral part of offerings in restaurants that Collingham (2006, 68)
observes,
British men (until the advent of even hotter phal) would choose to eat a vindaloo after a few lagers in the pub to
prove their machismo; and British 1998 World Cup football fans included vindaloo (alongside cups of tea, knit-
ting and cheddar) in their chants as a symbol of Englishness.

A curry preparation Chicken Tikka Masala is so well accepted that it prompted UK’s Foreign Sec-
retary Robin Cook in 2001 to proclaim that, “Chicken Tikka Masala is now a true British national
dish” (quoted in Jahangir 2009). A Gallup poll in 1997 revealed that curry was Britain’s favorite food
with a quarter of Britons eating it once a week (Basu 2011).
The contemporary popularity of curry is, however, not far removed from memories of colonial-
ism. A.H. Mahmood Ali, a former Bangladeshi ambassador to the UK, displayed a postcolonial urge
to displace the old master when he playfully quipped, “you (the British) conquered us with gunpow-
der, now we have conquered you with curry powder” (quoted by Grove and Grove 2005, 33). It is
ironic that the postcolonial urge to displace the master is still framed within the discursive bound-
aries created by the colonizer and Ali refers to spices from the Indian subcontinent as curry (Mignolo
2000; Nandy 1983). The postcolonial acceptance of curry in Britain can also be read as, what Srinivas
(2006, 193) calls a “gastro nostalgia.” The widespread consumption of curry serves as a reminder of
Britain’s position as a master nation and the transnational territorial control that produced its cos-
mopolitan consuming subjects, who seamlessly shift from one colonial offering to another. More-
over, the contemporary popularity of curry in Britain masks long periods of racial prejudices and
negative perceptions that stemmed from colonialism (Buettner 2012). Until the 1970s, most
White British consumers dismissed curry restaurants as filthy and down-market. Racial stereotypes
of South Asians played a significant role in these consumer perceptions. As a result of being lam-
pooned and critiqued in popular narratives, curry restaurants were slow to be accepted.
A wider acceptance of curry restaurants was facilitated by two factors. First, due to an economic
downturn in the early 1970s, students and working-class Whites looking for affordable food started
frequenting curry restaurants (Buettner 2012). Second, in the 1980s, several upmarket restaurants
opened in and around London that explicitly used the upscale imagery of the Raj from colonial
days and auto-oriental references to India’s traditions to appeal to elite British clientele (Basu
2011). These restaurants helped curry to reduce the stigma of its origins in the upper-class
 6 R. VARMAN

imagination and to gain wider acceptance. Indeed, such popularity and approval that have contrib-
uted to curry’s iconic status were gained by situating the sign within the confines of colonial narra-
tives. As Buettner (2012, 172) appropriately notes, “once marginalized within British culture, curry
became a primary vehicle for denying, masking, and articulating racism, demonstrating the mutually
constitutive nature of intolerance and multicultural celebration.”

Conclusion
In conclusion, India’s food culture has a long and varied history. The food was a marker of piety,
health, social discriminations, and hierarchies as it was shaped by medico-religious discourses.
India’s food culture is impelled by several political influences that have added to its diversity. The
idea of curry was a British imposition shaped by colonial and commercial interests. The colonial
intervention made Indian food internationally famous and led to the creation of a marketplace
icon. Perhaps to become a marketplace icon for a product from the Global South exaptations arising
from colonization and commercialization are necessary pre-conditions, but such iconicity is
achieved at the cost of creating a hegemonic signifier.
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Note
1. Indian food is used as a broad descriptor for food cultures from the Indian subcontinent. I acknowledge the
discursive violence and dangers of neocolonialism in imposing “Indian” on such varied cultures and political
entities.

Acknowledgments
I wish to acknowledge the helpful comments I have received from Devi Vijay and reviewers on the earlier drafts of this
paper.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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