"Curry: A Tempting Tale Of The Colony Analyzing Culinary Cosmopolitanism through the changes in the recipes of curry in London since the Early 1900s to the Early 2000s"

Curry, an Anglo-Indian word coined by the British, was a product of India’s colonization that went on to become the national dish of Britain in 2001. The thesis investigated this evolution of curry’s culinary cosmopolitanism in London from the early 1900s to the early 2000s. The term culinary cosmopolitanism can simply be understood as the acceptance of the edible other. But this acceptance is not always as simple as it seems. There are other modalities of culinary cosmopolitanism, which function through translations, generalizations and modifications. The case study of curry highlighted this duality of culinary cosmopolitanism that sought to “absorb” and “adapt” the Other, which questioned the stance of its acceptance altogether. By making use of digitized archives, 74 curry recipes collected from an English periodical Daily Mail, were compared with the 103 recipes gathered from an Indian newspaper Times of India. This archival research followed a content and a comparative analysis of the changes in the recipes of curry through the three phases of India’s independence, the colonial era (from the early 1900s to 1946), the independence era (from 1947-1990) and the post-independence era (from 1991 to the early 2000s). A significant number of differences could be noticed between the English and the Indian curries because of two contrasting standpoints on the dish, wherein the English curry was found to be a generalized by-product of colonialism, commercialization and racism. This was a result of the translation it sustained, of being called by an English name owing to colonialism; the oversimplification it endured, of being understood only through a common blend of spices owing to the commercialization of curry powder; and the generalization of being associated primarily as a spicy Indian entity owing to the racism against Muslims.