South Asian food bloggers are calling for the word “curry” to be cancelled over claims it has links to British colonialism.
Californian food blogger Chaheti Bansal, 27, has spoken out about the term in an Instagram video, where she claimed the word has been long misused by foreigners to describe any dish made on the Asian subcontinent.
“Curry shouldn’t be all that you think about when you think about South Asian food,” Bansal said in the video.
“There’s a saying that the food in India changes every 100km and yet we’re still using this umbrella term popularised by white people who couldn’t be bothered to learn the actual names of our dishes,” she said.
In the clip, which has been viewed more than 3.6 million times, she added that people can still “unlearn. Her account has since been made private.
Speaking to NBC News, she added: “Curry shouldn’t be all that you think about when you think about South Asian food.
Fellow food blogger Nisha Vedi Pawar also spoke about people telling her, “Your food must be really spicy. It must be stinky. It’s curry.’ Her response, ‘What the hell is curry?’
But according to Ilyse Morgenstein Furest, an associate religious studies professor at the University of Vermont, the word ‘curry’ doesn’t actually exist in any South Asian language.
Professor Fuerst told the broadcaster that the term curry could likely be attributed to the “British bad ear” during colonial rule in India.
The professor thought it was a way for the British to avoid learning the names of extremely regional dishes.
“South Asians can turn around and say, ‘OK, if these British officers want curry, and I stand to profit, whether that’s socially, politically, financially, then I set up a curry house,’” she told NBC News.
