Inventing an Empire: The Role of Migration in the Fabrication of Curry in Colonial India and Legacies of Food Colonization

Abstract

With an emphasis on the role of women migrants, this paper examined the impact of colonialism and racial hierarchy in shaping food from the Indian subcontinent during its exportation to Great Britain. Through an investigation of contemporary cookbooks, each section of this paper focused on a different wave of migration between India and the United Kingdom. Each section examines how different groups of migrants transformed Indian food, starting with the British East India Company officers’ homogenization, then the officer's wives' Anglicization, and finally Indian women immigrants' reauthentication. An examination of these three waves of migration revealed that the accompanying transformations to Indian food resulted from colonialism and a combination of the colonizer's notions of cultural superiority and the colonized resistance to those beliefs. Today, Indian food in the UK is an amalgamation of the homogenized northwestern and anglicized version created by the British colonizers, and the authentic version Indian women immigrants re-introduced in the post-colonial era.