[eadmund]

And then you get into differing meanings of 'gravy.' When I was on the Subcontinent, it meant what we in America would call a sauce; we use 'gravy' to mean a particular kind of sauce made from meat drippings.

Very weird at first for a Westerner to see vegetarian food described as having a gravy!

[vram22]

Ha ha, good one. And it emphasizes the point in my last paragraph, about the meaning of words. Yes, though curries are basically dishes in some sort of sauce, the word gravy is used here for that instead of sauce. It's probably only in a few high-end restaurants that they will call it a dish in a sauce (of some kind), on the menu, and when explaining it to customers. But another difference between Western sauces and gravy in India (the kind I said, used in curries), is that (as I understand it - not familiar with the details of Western cooking) the Western sauce is poured on the dish, or used from a saucer on the side, but in curries, the dish is cooked in the gravy - so the gravy is an integral part of the dish, not an add-on or pour-on.