When Marks & Spencer introduced Indian ready meals to British supermarkets in 1981, few might have predicted that the pioneers of mass-market tikka masala would one day be called out for creating dishes “bastardised to the point that they are unrecognisable”. Yet the Indian food writer Mallika Basu, author of Indian Cooking for Modern Living, says M&S’s curry kits are “at best upsetting, and at worst, offensive and callous”.