Currying Contempt: The Bitter Legacy Of A Colonial Slur

THERE ARE FEW WORDS as innocuous on the surface — and as loaded beneath — as “curry.” For decades, it has conjured images of comfort, of heat, of aroma. In Britain, it’s shorthand for a Friday night takeaway, a post-pub indulgence, a culinary migration tale in a tin. But buried beneath the saffron and cumin is a bitter truth: the word has long been a site of colonial invention, erasure, and violence.

And when weaponised — as in the slur “curry muncher” — it becomes something else entirely: a linguistic act of contempt. One that reduces a continent’s culinary sophistication to caricature. One that has trailed South Asians across borders and generations.

And yet the venom of the phrase can only be understood in the context of its origins. Because “curry,” too, is not what it seems.

The Invention of “Curry”

There is no singular Indian dish called curry. The term finds no meaningful equivalence in the culinary traditions of the subcontinent. What exists instead is multiplicity: kuzhambu, jhol, salan, ishtoo, kalia, ghontā, thecha. As chef Madhur Jaffrey once wrote, “No Indian ever uses curry powder.” And yet, curry became the term through which a colonising power made sense of — and subdued — an entire cuisine.

The word itself likely emerged from “kari”, a Tamil word for a spiced sauce, adopted and anglicised by Portuguese traders into “caril”, then further simplified by the British. Over time, “curry” became not only a dish but a tool of colonial taxonomy: a way of flattening difference, of classifying the unfamiliar.

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In Victorian England, the act of preparing curry at home — using imported powders and anglicised methods — was more than just culinary nostalgia. It was an act of domestic imperialism. As British women stirred their pots, they domesticated the foreign and neutralised the threatening. Curry became a way of possessing the exotic while remaining comfortably distant from its origins.

Spice as Spectacle, Diaspora as Punchline

In the postcolonial era, as South Asians settled in the UK and beyond, “curry” travelled with them. But it came not as a badge of honour — it arrived freighted with mockery. In schoolyards and job interviews, on buses and high streets, many were greeted not with curiosity but contempt. “Curry muncher” became the taunt of choice, a sneer hurled at brown bodies presumed to reek of turmeric.

Anita Mannur, a scholar of food and race, recalls the psychic toll of the phrase during her childhood. For many in the diaspora, the slur induced a kind of culinary self-loathing — a retreat from one's own food in an effort to assimilate, to deodorise, to be palatable.

At its heart, “curry muncher” is a demand: be less. Less pungent. Less different. Less visible. It ridicules the very food that, in white liberal circles, might be lauded for its “flavour explosion” or “authentic heat.” The line between fetishisation and vilification is perilously thin.

Powdered Control

Central to the story is curry powder — a British invention, codified as early as 1784. Designed for export, for imperial kitchens, for a populace that preferred convenience to complexity, curry powder is a mix of ground spices homogenised to suit the colonial palate. It was, in many ways, the first globalised spice blend.

But in Indian kitchens, such a powder rarely existed. Instead, home cooks prepared masalas tailored to specific dishes — adjusting heat, aroma and bitterness in real time. The idea of a single powder being deployed across an entire cuisine would be laughable if it weren’t so enduring.

To this day, supermarkets in Britain continue to stock “curry paste” and “curry seasoning” as if the continent were a monolith. To be South Asian is to be expected to smile through this ignorance, or worse, to validate it.

The Burden of Expertise

Another cruel irony of the slur lies in its flip side: the assumption of expertise. For those with brown skin, “curry” becomes an identity marker, a performance expectation. One is presumed to know how to cook “Indian food”, to have a “family recipe”, to offer comment on everything from tikka masala to tandoori.

This presumption erases the diaspora’s culinary plurality. It ignores vegetarians from Gujarat, Muslims from Hyderabad, Tamil Christians, Goan Catholics. It denies the fact that food — like identity — is fluid, hybrid, ever-shifting.

It also introduces the trap of authenticity. Migrant cooks are often forced to defend their methods as either “authentic” or “fusion”, as though cuisine were a fixed artefact rather than a living practice. The coloniser’s version is permitted creativity. The colonised must remain true to an invented ideal.

Reclaiming the Pot

In recent years, South Asian chefs and writers have begun to reframe the narrative. Some embrace the word “curry” as a strategic reclaiming, refusing to cede linguistic territory. Others, like Chaheti Bansal, urge a more radical departure: to call dishes by their actual names, to reject the flattening term altogether.

The rise of interest in regional specificity — of dishes like chettinad pepper fry, pakhala bhat, lal maas, machher jhol — signals a shift. Slowly, the public is being asked to do the work: to pronounce, to remember, to respect.

But the work is far from done. In school corridors and online comment threads, “curry muncher” still circulates. It lingers as both insult and inheritance — a reminder of how language can burn long after the flame is out.

The Spice Reckoning

If Britain loves its curry, it must reckon with its past. Not just the theft of spices or the birth of empire, but the violence of words. The ones that stick to the tongue and refuse to wash off. The ones that simmer in silence.

To challenge the slur is not just to defend a food — it is to demand complexity. To insist that our stories, like our recipes, cannot be contained in a single pot.