> 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...