Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors by Lizzie Collingham

This book attempts to trace the evolution of the dish "curry" through different generations. The author attributes the various waves of rulers and colonizers with providing the evolution of the Indian cuisine. This extends from the Mughals, Portugese, Dutch, French and finally the British. She takes pains to quote how the primitive and relatively flavorless pre-Mughal Indian foods were enriched over the centuries thanks to the ingredients and cooking techniques brought in by each wave of rulers. Her sources are excerpts (presented without the original context) from written accounts primarily by Europen travellers over the centuries. I am guessing that given the fact that she has a Phd in history from Camebridge she has primarily sourced her content from the libraries there. Unfortunately history is written by the rulers and we have a euro-centric monologue going on in this book.

She sources westerners who scoff at and denigrate cultures that they do not understand or cannot relate to. It is a part of their colonial propoganda to convince natives of their own superiority. This book reminds me of another nauseating book along the same lines but in a different genre called "Freedom at Midnight" where the story around Indian Independance was narrated to convey the following points
1. That Indian society was uncivilized before the arrival of the British
2. British are responsible for everything good in India
3. The Indian rulers were all self-indulgent and corrupt across the board.
4. The native Indian population has nothing in their culture to feel good about

What is incredible is that the source for the books is from Lord Mountbatten's personal library. The book rants on about the sexual excesses of the Indian rulers while portraying Lord Mountbatten as a morally upright citizen. Nothing could be farther from the truth as can be commonly read on his wiki page.

Anyways, back to the curry book, here are my takeaways.

The following hurts the credibility of the book:
1. The sources are primarily European. There are no parallel accounts from Indian scholars around the same period.
2. The author takes pains to quote a lot of negative things about the native Indian lifestyle, food and mannerisms.
3. The author barely mentions the encylopedic expanse (gujarati cuisine, south indian cuisine, Bengali sweets) of Indian cuisines and is fixated on the "curry", probably because it helps further the colonizers propaganda to shame the native population into submission.

Some interesting things in the book
1. How curry reached Japan and how it has morphed into "curry raisu".
2. How curry dishes are spreading throughout the world.

In short, this book does not provide a wholesome view of India through the ages. It is skewed to what message it wants to send. This curry smells foul.