Yet it is a useful term - as someone else has mentioned - to refer to meat/veg in spicy gravy sauce associated with certain countries. Just because it's a word developed outside of India doesn't mean it isn't meaningful.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japanese-curry-history
NB Jared Diamond's book Upheaval mentions how Japan reacted to a crisis in the 19th century by going out and seeking the best sources to copy - for naval matters that happened to be the Royal Navy and curry came with that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upheaval:_How_Nations_Cope_wit...
That would be the Meiji Restoration, where the Japanese decided they were tired of being kicked around and were going to reform and westernize on their terms.
They chose to model their Navy off of the British, and their Army off of the Prussians (though in both cases they ended up with advisors from all over the place, like the US and Italy).
No evidence that they copied the British tradition for Pussers and regular rum rations.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_Restoration and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rum_ration
The more relevant criticism of the word boils down to the facts that it doesn’t really mean anything to Indians, and that it’s meaning is so poorly defined that it barely means anything at all. The word can be used to refer to pretty much any Indian food, which is simply a poor categorization, and that use would wind up a lot of Indian people. The other use case is pretty much anything that has a spiced gravy. But a ragu uses spiced gravy as much as a butter chicken does, and most people wouldn’t call a ragu a curry. So it must be a spiced gravey with Asian ingredients, but a Japanese curry has more ingredients in common with a ragu than it does a saag paneer, also a lamb tagine dish uses a spiced gravy with Asian ingredients, and people wouldn’t call that a curry either.
Basically it’s a word that has no definition that would describe all of its different use cases.
A group of British outsiders who were in India because of the British Empire?
> To say using language to describe new things is colonial is frankly ridiculous.
They took a wide range of food, with very different characteristics, representing huge geographical and cultural spread, and reduced all of that to an anglicised word "curry".
There are a lot of words borrowed from India still in use to this day squaddie for example being derived from 'swaddy' a type on Indian soldier
Dumplings range from pierogies to xiaolongbao, sandwiches include monte cristos and cheesesteaks and fluffernutters, soup includes vichyssoise and miso and samgyetang.
Why do those words work, if they do?
Stepping sideways a bit... in New Delhi, menu names shift in a subtle way with the prominence of vegetarianism. In the UK or US, you might order a dish like "chicken with seasonal vegetables." In Delhi it's often reversed, they'll specify the exact meatless dish, Malai Kofta or Palak Paneer, but just say the side dish is "non-veg" without specifying whatever meat. That slight shift in emphasis really underscores the endless variety of things you can eat beyond meat, it makes plain how the generic Western conception of a meal through classic French courses can be incredibly narrow. However we ultimately come down on "curry," emphasizing meatless dishes seems like an example of food language that probably should have been heavily exported and hungrily adopted by the rest of the world. Even if you're not a vegetarian, treating meatless dishes as first-class citizens seems to add enormous diversity to any cuisine, and a ton more satisfaction in the eating.
"Curry is an anglicised form of the Tamil word kaṟi meaning 'sauce' or 'relish for rice' that uses the leaves of the curry tree (Murraya koenigii)."
This is a sort of definition that's intuitive to Indians.
The problem Indians have with foreign usages of "curry" are, I think, with them not respecting this definition, and using the word to refer to pretty much all Indian food. "Going to get some curry" sounds like you don't care about even the basic differences in the cuisine you're eating. That all said, I understand that I'm undermining my own argument. It's rather subtle to tell a curry apart from another Indian dish.
Indian people eat plenty of things aside from rice/roti + curries. You have kebabs, biryanis (rice baked with meats), sandwiches (from Vada Pav street food to everything else), noodles (Indo-Chinese cuisine), a million buttery, saccharine sweets, unique breakfast foods like dosas and idlis, and so so much more. How can you have a country the size of India with at least 20 major cuisines and languages, in a country with influences from East Africa, Central Asia, Tibet, South East Asia, and Western Europe, without tremendous culinary diversity?