Our family traces its lineage to a non-descript village called Kadayam in Tirunelveli district in Tamil Nadu. However, my parents, who were living in Tuticorin, or Thoothukudi today, where my father was a fledgling lawyer, moved to Rajasthan, after he was selected to the Indian Administrative Service.
My brother and I were born in Calcutta and raised by our grandparents, as my father could not manage our upkeep given his low salary and frequent transfers.
My grandfather, who was serving in the Eastern Railway, was transferred every three to four years to places in West Bengal and Bihar. We had to move with him, and that brought new challenges of learning local languages. Incidentally, we still continue to converse in a hodgepodge of Hindi, Bengali and English, besides our pidgin Tamil.
However, what we noticed during our schooling, college and later while working in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Delhi, was that we could not get rid of the tag “Madrasis”, a demonym used for people hailing from the South. Although the word did not have any real pejorative connotation, it saddened us that in spite of integrating into the society, and speaking fluently in Hindi and other local dialects, we were always considered outliers by local society.
One explanation my grandfather gave was that in British India much of what are today the southern states were part of the Madras Presidency, and it is for this reason people hailing from Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Kerala came to be known as Madrasis. It is difficult to buy this argument, as people belonging to different States in North India still retain their identity. No one from Haryana or for that matter Himachal Pradesh is called a ‘Punjabi.’
One can’t take umbrage at the term Madrasi. But lampooning people from the south in Bollywood films, where South Indians are often depicted as ‘lungi-clad’ nincompoops and ridiculed for their pronunciation in both Hindi and English, has caught the imagination of the people in the north.
However, whenever we changed schools we were subjected to the rigmarole of spelling out the word ‘mummy’ in class. One could sense great anticipation in the class that we would soon fall for the neat trap laid by our teacher. However, to the disappointment to our teacher, we would spell out the word correctly. We later learnt that many people from the south, especially Tamilians, would invariably spell out ‘mummy’ as yum, yum, you, y, to the utter merriment of all the other students as well as the teacher.
Why ridicule only those hailing from the south? Ask any Punjabi to pronounce ‘measure’: it would always end up as meayer, or for that matter ‘pleasure’. Even our Cambridge-educated former Prime Minister would seem to pronounce measure as meayer. Most of the Bengalis pronounce water as bhater. They struggle with certain consonants such as W or V. Vishwanath is always pronounced Bishwanath. People from Haryana pronounce university unibersity. The list is endless.
The lack of knowledge of people from the south has led to some funny episodes. In one incident in Ranchi, where we were living, one Malayalee engineer had slapped a local during a petty fight. The next day the locals beat up all the people from the south who were lodged in a hostel provided by a leading public sector company. No amount of remonstration to the perpetrators that they were not from Kerala helped. They were told that as one of the Madrasis had the audacity to beat up a local, they all had to bear the brunt.
We have failed to shrug off the Madrasi tag even after living in the north for over six decades. My maid, a Gujarati, one day came sobbing, saying one of our neighbours had threatened to remove her from her job and also ensure that the next-door Madrasis would sack her.
Not sure how this sobriquet can be removed from the North Indian lexicon. Perhaps one has to be ingenious to find ways to give a fitting response to the North Indians living in the south. One option would be to call them bhaiyyas (brothers), a term often used for milkmen or a watchmen hailing from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. No offence meant!
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