12 foods from around the world that taste surprisingly like Indian dishes

Indian food has a way of making familiar flavours feel unmistakably its own. But travel far enough and you start finding dishes that trigger a strange sense of déjà vu: a stew that tastes like rajma, a stuffed bread that could pass for a distant cousin of paratha, or a rice dish whose spices seem oddly familiar. These similarities do not necessarily mean the dishes come from the same recipe or share a direct origin. Often, they reflect something much simpler: across cultures, cooks have independently arrived at similar combinations of grains, legumes, spices, vegetables and slow cooking. For an Indian palate, however, the resemblance can be surprisingly striking. Here are 12 such dishes from around the world.