Indian cooking has established itself in many countries, and the version found in each is shaped less by local taste than by how and why Indian people arrived there.
Trade produced adaptation, not transplant
Where the connection was commercial, cooking travelled through merchants and sailors who cooked for themselves in port cities over long periods.
The food that resulted borrowed local ingredients heavily while keeping Indian technique, since the cooks knew the methods but could not source the same materials.
Coastal southeast Asian cooking shows this pattern clearly, with spice combinations that are recognisably related while the base ingredients are entirely local.
Indenture carried household cooking
Labour migration to the Caribbean, Fiji, Mauritius and parts of Africa moved whole communities rather than individuals, and household cooking travelled with them intact.
Because families cooked daily for themselves, the techniques survived closely even as ingredients were substituted for what grew locally.
The cuisines that developed are therefore structurally Indian while tasting distinctly of their new region, and they have continued evolving independently for generations.
East Africa developed a two-way exchange
Indian communities in East Africa were established long enough to influence local cooking substantially and to absorb a great deal in return.
Snacks, breads and spice usage moved in both directions, and several dishes are now claimed by both traditions with reasonable justification on each side.
When those communities later moved onward to Britain and North America, they brought this combined repertoire rather than a purely Indian one.
Britain built a commercial cuisine
The British case is unusual because the food was shaped primarily by restaurants serving a non-Indian clientele rather than by households cooking for themselves.
That produced dishes with no Indian original, standardised to be produced quickly and to suit diners unfamiliar with the underlying regional traditions.
It is a genuine cuisine with its own history, and it is best understood as such rather than as a distorted version of something else.
North America is following a different sequence
Migration to the United States and Canada has been more recent, more varied in regional origin and more concentrated in professional households.
The result is a restaurant scene where regional specificity arrived relatively early, alongside home cooking that never fully passed through a commercial simplification.
That is why the food available there often maps more directly onto identifiable Indian regions than the older established traditions elsewhere do.