> Now, there is a word “Kari” in several South Indian languages but it’s used to mean spicy sauce or “kadipoda” which means spice mix, both derived from “black” in reference to the use of black peppercorns.

Is this the same word as "kara", black, in Turkic languages?

Apparently, speculatively, yes: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Japonic/...

Also Japanese "kuro".

Yes Turkish and Sanskrit have a lot of shared words or similar ones due to various cultural sharing

> The only use of the word curry in restaurants is to appeal to British nationals (and anyone they spread their culture to).

So, the Curry Points that dot Hyderabad are artefacts of British colonialism?

> The generalization into “curry” was one of colonial misinterpretation.

Yeah, no. The Telugu kura which is obviously cognate with kari is used to mean, well curry. How about you tone down the misinterpretation and false generalization?

Agreed, and, using a word from one area of India might not be suited for applying to all of it.

That cross pollination of words is something the English language seems to do from time to time.

Every area of the Indian subcontinent was a rich area of its own languages, music, food and more.

For me north, South Indian cuisine and everything in the between is worth getting to know as and where it is.

Telugu Kari doesn’t mean curry in the sense that British people understand it. Please actually look up the history of what kari is.

The use of curry in Indian restaurants in Hyderabad are an artifact of colonialism. Hyderabad in particular caters a lot to foreign nationals due to the proliferation of the tech sector there.

Anyway What curry dishes are they serving there? “Hyderabadi chicken curry”? What is it called natively?

Probably just chicken something. Well said.

I assure you, if you ask for chicken curry in any restaurant in Hyderabad, they'll know exactly what you mean. They might not necessarily serve it though.

Of course they know it. They don’t exist in a vacuum.

That doesn’t mean the dish is “curry”.

Just like how many Indians will call it Butter Chicken Curry colloquially but the dish is Murgh Makhani.

> That doesn’t mean the dish is “curry”.

Is this supposed to be some metaphysical argument? The dish is literally chicken curry i.e. kodi kura.

The point is:

- curry is used in Britain (and any place they colonized) to refer to any and all spiced gravy, not just sauce.

- Kari in Tamil (widely considered to be the root of the word curry) refers to a dark, spiced sauce. It doesn’t mention it’s a gravy and it likely referred to a black peppercorn based sauce. It is simply an element of a dish like a bechamel. It is not a dish by itself.

- kodi kura is a specific preparation of chicken. Kura doesn’t mean curry, its closest English translation would be a stew. And even if it would be classified as a curry in England, it doesn’t change that it’s neither what they call curry or that other dishes that they call curry aren’t a form of kari in India.

Lastly, you take great pains to say that Hyderabad is culturally and politically independent from the British rule. So by that logic it wouldn’t even be a usable argument to say Curry is derived from those words

At the end of the day, the most well known etymology for curry is a mistranslation of the Tamil `Kari` where they mistook a single component of a dish to be the whole dish.

It was further perpetuated in the west as a stereotyped dish. Many Indians accept the word curry today because it was introduced into our zeitgeist but the concept of Curry as it is in the Uk has no foundation in actual Indian cuisine.

> Kura doesn’t mean curry, its closest English translation would be a stew

FFS, no! A dry stir fry is called a podi kura, with podi meaning dry. A stew like curry would be called a pulusu kura.

> Lastly, you take great pains to say that Hyderabad is culturally and politically independent from the British rule. So by that logic it wouldn’t even be a usable argument to say Curry is derived from those words.

Telugu speakers of Hyderabad State used the same word as their colinguists in the British ruled Madras Presidency. This would suggest the term predates the annexation of the Northern Circars by the British who could have then adopted it.

> At the end of the day, the most well known etymology for curry is a mistranslation of the Tamil `Kari` where they mistook a single component of a dish to be the whole dish.

At the end of the day, curry is a perfectly valid coinage and is cognate with kura and used to mean the exact same thing.

> It was further perpetuated in the west as a stereotyped dish. Many Indians accept the word curry today because it was introduced into our zeitgeist but the concept of Curry as it is in the Uk has no foundation in actual Indian cuisine.

Curry is quintessentially Indian. The fact that some Indian languages don't have an equivalent encompassing term doesn't change that.

Going for a curry in the racist 70s and 80s England is worth asking folks who lived through it how much it swept through mainstream society .

I’m not sure how you got that from what I said but sounds good.

> Telugu Kari doesn’t mean curry in the sense that British people understand it.

As a native Telugu speaker, I use kura in the same sense as the English curry to refer to a diverse class of dishes.

> look up the history

Here's some history: Hyderabad was never colonized by the British. My grandparents who grew up in Hyderabad State and didn't speak any English used kura in the same sense that I do.

> Hyderabad in particular caters a lot to foreign nationals due to the proliferation of the tech sector there.

You don't have the faintest idea of what you're talking about. The Curry Points I mentioned are little hole-in-the-wall takeaway places that you see in every other street corner. They are almost exclusively patronised by Telugus. Forget foreigners, even migrants from other states usually find the spice levels too high.

> Anyway What curry dishes are they serving there? “Hyderabadi chicken curry”? What is it called natively?

I haven't heard of a distinctive Hyderabadi variant but they obviously serve chiken curry which in Telugu would be called kodi kura. Google Maps is your friend: https://www.google.com/maps/search/curry+point/@17.5057149,7...

India was colonized. Whether they specifically colonized an area or not is irrelevant. Indian regions don’t exist in isolation.

Kari in telugu is not the same as curry. The colloquial use of it as such is an artifact of British rule. You dont exist in a bubble.

Kura is not the same as a generic curry. Not all things that are considered a “curry” are Kura or Kari

> Indian regions don’t exist in isolation.

Hyderabad existed as a politically and culturally separate entity. The ramifications of these historical distinctions play out in politics to this day. See Telangana statehood for an example.

> Kari in telugu

You keep bringing it up but to the best of my knowledge there's no kari in Telugu.

> The colloquial use of it as such is an artifact of British rule.

Do you have a source that isn't your ass?

> Kura is not the same as a generic curry.

Oh knowledgeable one, please tell me more.

> Hyderabad existed as a politically and culturally separate entity

The only culturally separate population I know of on earth anymore are the Sentinelese on the Andaman and Nicobar islands.

Hyderabad's name itself is Arabic+Persian, and compared to India overall, far more people speak English there. It was a regional capital of South Asia. Cosmopolitan places like that are always cultural crossroads. Practically everyone/everyplace is a mutt, culturally and biologically, the world over, except perhaps the Sentinelese.

Sorry I meant Tamil Not Telugu. But the point remains the same. Curry in the British sense is not curry in any Indian sense. Kari doesnt imply a specific gravy dish, it implies a spiced sauce component. Saying you want a curry dish is like saying you want a cream dish when you order murgh makhani. It’s incongruent and a conflation of modern colloquial use vs the actual dish. Just like not ever meat dish is a ragu in Italy.

And Hyderabad may have been politically separate. It’s not culturally separate. Unless you purposefully deny any migration.

Hyderabad is not some unique snowflake among the Indian diaspora.

> Kari doesnt imply a specific gravy dish, it implies a spiced sauce component

So a bit like how us Brits use "curry" then...

No because there’s no dish that’s a curry. It’s a component of a dish. Furthermore it’s a very specific component historically pepper based.

This is the problem. You borrowed a word that you don’t understand the depth of and are now arguing that it should be used in your way when people raise what it actually means. It’s a co-opting of a cultures word and cuisines.

There is no dish that’s “curry”. The British generalized it to be all spiced thick stews.

Would you call an eggs Benedict “a hollandaise”? Or roast potato’s as “chips”? No because there’s specifics to a dish that you afford it because you’re familiar with it. Calling them curries and expecting that to be the actual term is ignorance.

I'm not arguing it should be used in a particular way. On the contrary, I am specifically not insisting that the Telugu speaker and his grandparents' less specific use of kura is incorrect simply because it resembles the mostly more recent (and seldom pejorative, FWIW) use of its British English cognate.

"Chips" is an interesting example to bring up, because the word means completely different preparations of potatoes in different parts of the Anglosphere...

Kodi kura was the exact example that popped into my mind. Kura is a cognate/derivative from some Dravidian root similar to Kari/Curry (I believe Malayalam and Tamil use the kari form)

“Curry” isn’t a British generalization.

“tarkari” literally means a cooked vegetable dish in several north and eastern Indian languages.