What Does It Mean To Be Madrasi?

Thomas Friedman conceptualized his paean to globalization in ‘The World is Flat’, after playing golf in Bangalore to the backdrop of a booming outsourcing industry. The city’s varied and globalized experiences convinced him that identities no longer exist in silos. He left India, convinced that borders mattered little in today’s age.

A Bangalorean, traveling northwards, would soon have found to the contrary. They would have been met with the common refrain – “You are a Madrasi, ah?”.

Madrasi, meaning ‘from Madras’, is a blanket term for South Indians that has a few historical roots. A few centuries ago, the Madras Courier would have been printed on a different set of lines in the sand. The city of Madras (now Chennai), was the winter capital of the administrative region named the Madras Presidency by the British Raj. It comprised parts of the Southern states of modern day Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala. Aside from the kingdoms of Mysore, Hyderabad, and Travancore, the Madras Presidency represented South India and its affairs.

When India became independent, she inherited the Presidency as the Madras State. With the Reorganization of States Act of 1956, this was split up into the states we know today (with the exception of Telangana, which emerged from a bifurcated Andhra Pradesh in 2014). The states, divided into linguistic lines, charted their own histories and rivalries over the years. Yet to many in the north, they would retain only the colonial identity that was thrust upon them – that of the Madrasi. The term has since become an archetype of South Indian culture in general – an archetype that ceased to apply, and perhaps never did.

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