Butter Chicken, Curry, and the Global Kitchen: Authenticity, Adaptation, and Power in Indian Cuisine
Bhaswi Singh
Link to Annotated Bilbiography
Introduction
Food is one of the most visible ways culture moves across borders. In the United States, Indian cuisine has become widely recognizable through dishes such as butter chicken, curry, naan, and mango lassi. These foods appear on menus across American cities and often shape what consumers think of when they imagine “Indian food.” Yet that visibility raises difficult questions. When a cuisine spreads globally, does it remain culturally intact, or does it become simplified to fit the expectations of new audiences?
Debates over authenticity have shaped food discourse for decades. Some critics treat adapted dishes as diluted versions of a “real” tradition, while others argue that change is a normal part of culinary history. My research enters that conversation by examining how Indian food circulates in the United States through highly recognizable dishes such as butter chicken and curry. Those dishes have become powerful symbols of Indian cuisine in America, but their popularity also reveals a tension: the more visible a cuisine becomes, the easier it can be to flatten into a handful of marketable, familiar forms.
This project argues that globalization both spreads and simplifies Indian culture through food. Indian cuisine is clearly influencing American tastes, restaurant culture, and ideas of prestige dining. At the same time, it is often compressed into a limited set of recognizable dishes that stand in for a much broader culinary tradition. By studying how butter chicken and curry function in American food culture, this project examines how globalization reshapes cultural identity through adaptation, branding, and public perception.
Historical and Critical Context
To understand how Indian cuisine functions in the United States today, it is necessary to begin with the question of authenticity. Philosopher Lisa Heldke argues that the modern obsession with “authentic” food often reflects a colonial mindset, one in which people treat other cultures as objects to be consumed, judged, and mastered. She challenges the assumption that authentic cuisine must remain unchanged over time, emphasizing instead that cuisines are dynamic and constantly evolving. That argument is especially useful for understanding Indian food in America, where diners and critics frequently debate whether restaurant dishes are “real” or merely “Americanized.”
Krishnendu Ray extends this conversation by showing how immigrant cuisines are categorized in American cities. Rather than emerging naturally, “ethnic food” categories are built over time through negotiations among restaurant owners, customers, critics, advertisers, and institutions. Through that process, cuisines become reduced to familiar labels that consumers can quickly recognize and purchase. In the case of Indian cuisine, those labels often include curry, butter chicken, and naan, dishes that come to represent a much larger and more regionally diverse culinary tradition.
Navreet Kaur Rana complicates authenticity debates further by showing that Indian cuisine itself has never been static. She points out that ingredients now treated as traditional, including tomatoes, chilies, and potatoes, entered South Asia through colonial trade routes. That history undermines the idea that Indian food can be measured against a fixed, timeless standard of authenticity. Instead, Indian cuisine has long been shaped by exchange, migration, empire, and adaptation.
Journalistic sources add an important public-facing dimension to these scholarly arguments. Mayukh Sen’s work on J. Ranji Smile demonstrates that Indian food entered the American imagination partly through spectacle and exoticism in the early twentieth century. More recent reporting on restaurants such as Dishoom in New York suggests that Indian cuisine now occupies a different position: not simply as novelty, but increasingly as a marker of cosmopolitan taste and culinary prestige. Together, these sources show that Indian food in the United States is shaped not only by taste, but by performance, marketing, and cultural negotiation.
Taken together, these perspectives suggest that Indian cuisine’s popularity in the United States is not simply a story of cultural diffusion. It is also a story about representation, classification, and power. Indian food becomes widely visible in American life, but that visibility often depends on narrowing a complex cuisine into a smaller set of recognizable and profitable forms.
Research Questions
This project is guided by three related questions:
- Does globalization change Indian culture more than Indian culture changes globalization?
- Is the spread of dishes such as butter chicken and curry in the United States best understood as cultural exchange, adaptation, or homogenization?
- At what point does culinary adaptation become appropriation or simplification?
Together, these questions frame food as a site where cultural identity, globalization, and power intersect.
Methodology
This research draws on both scholarly and non-scholarly sources to analyze how Indian cuisine is represented and interpreted in the United States. I began with academic database research to locate peer-reviewed scholarship on authenticity, food culture, colonial exchange, and immigrant restaurants. Works by Lisa Heldke, Krishnendu Ray, and Navreet Kaur Rana provide the theoretical foundation for the project by helping define authenticity, cultural exchange, and the social construction of cuisine.
I also incorporated journalistic and cultural sources in order to examine how Indian food appears in public discourse. These sources provide contemporary and historical case studies, including restaurant openings, origin disputes, and media narratives about Indian cuisine.
Bringing scholarly and non-scholarly material together makes it possible to connect academic theories of authenticity and globalization with real-world examples from American dining culture.
This mixed-source approach has clear advantages. It allows the project to move between theory and practice, connecting larger academic conversations to concrete cultural examples. At the same time, non-scholarly sources sometimes lack the depth or methodological rigor of peer-reviewed research. To address that limitation, I use journalistic sources primarily as evidence of public discourse and contemporary cultural trends, while relying on scholarly sources for interpretive and analytical grounding.
For the final photo essay, I plan to analyze visual representations of Indian food culture in American restaurants and media. These images will help demonstrate how certain dishes come to symbolize an entire cuisine and how visual presentation shapes public assumptions about authenticity, desirability, and cultural legitimacy.
Timeline Week 1–2
- Refine topic and research question
- Gather scholarly and non-scholarly sources
- Complete annotated bibliography
Week 3
- Identify central argument and analytical lens
- Draft research proposal
Week 4
- Revise proposal based on feedback
- Collect visual materials for photo essay
Week 5
- Develop visual analysis in conversation with research
- Draft photo essay
Week 6
- Revise and finalize photo essay for submission
Conclusion
This project matters because food is never just food. The global spread of dishes such as butter chicken and curry reveals how globalization can make a culture more visible while also making it easier to simplify. Debates over authenticity in Indian cuisine are often debates over power: who gets to define what counts as “real,” which dishes come to stand in for an entire culture, and how those representations circulate through markets, media, and public taste.
Indian cuisine is undeniably shaping American food culture, from casual takeout spaces to high-end restaurants in cities such as New York. At the same time, the complexity of Indian culinary traditions is often reduced to a limited set of recognizable dishes that fit American expectations. That tension reflects a broader logic of globalization, one in which visibility increases while nuance can decrease.
By examining how Indian cuisine is represented in the United States, this project contributes to a larger conversation about cultural exchange, adaptation, and representation. Globalization does not distribute cultures evenly or neutrally. Instead, it elevates certain elements, markets them, and allows them to stand in for much larger cultural systems. In the United States, Indian cuisine gains power as a brand while losing complexity as a culture. That contradiction lies at the center of this project.
Biographical Information
My name is Bhaswi Singh, and I am a freshman at American University majoring in Legal Studies and Justice, Law, and Criminology. My academic interests include law, politics, culture, and the ways identity and power shape public narratives. Those interests influence my research by encouraging me to examine everyday cultural practices through a broader social and political lens.
As someone of Indian background, I am personally interested in how Indian culture is represented in the United States. Food is one of the most visible ways cultures are shared, interpreted, and sometimes misunderstood, which makes it an especially meaningful subject for research. My personal connection to Indian culture, combined with academic research on globalization and authenticity, allows me to approach this project with both curiosity and critical perspective.
Through this project, I hope to better understand how food reflects larger conversations about identity, globalization, and cultural representation.