கறி

In Tamil, kaṟi (கறி) means 'sauce' or 'gravy for rice'—a general term for spiced preparations eaten with rice or bread. It described a category of cooking, not a specific dish. There was no single 'curry' in Indian cuisine any more than there's a single 'salad' in Western cooking.

Portuguese traders in India encountered the word in the 1500s and borrowed it as caril or carree. When the British colonized India, they adopted curry as a catch-all term for any Indian spiced dish—collapsing hundreds of distinct regional preparations (korma, vindaloo, dal, sambar, rogan josh) into one convenient English word.

The British then invented 'curry powder'—a premixed spice blend that no Indian kitchen would recognize. Real Indian cooking uses whole spices ground fresh for each dish in specific combinations. The standardized yellow powder was a British convenience, an attempt to reduce a complex cuisine to a single product.

Curry houses became a British institution in the 20th century. Chicken tikka masala—a dish arguably invented in Glasgow—was declared 'a true British national dish' by Foreign Secretary Robin Cook in 2001. The Tamil word for sauce had been transformed into a British culinary identity.