Viral Video- Madrasis, Hindustanis, Indians and other creatures

Recently, a video made by a talented group has gone ‘viral’. It humorously presents the different peoples of ‘South of India’ and their distinct cultures and other attributes. ‘There’s no Madrasi, we are all padosi (neighbours)” – was the message.

‘Madrasi’ is a word that I grew up with in Bengal. Actually, in Bangla, we say ‘Madraji’. The word has been used in popular literature, long before the first Hindi language film. It isn’t a derogatory term in Bengal. ‘Madraji’ is a Bangla word that’s used internally to signal a concept that we commonly understand. It’s a catch-all term for peoples of the Dravidian linguistic nationalities of the subcontinent. The actually existing differences between peoples of the Dravidian linguistic nationalities were of marginal importance. 

The stereotypical ‘Madraji’ in Bengali eyes is a being whose shape is determined by the specific encounter of the Dravidian linguistic nationalities with Bengal, largely during the colonial period. Large parts of peninsular South Asia, spanning over multiple Dravidian homelands, were part of the Madras Presidency. Concepts like ‘Madras’ (to mean a geography and its peoples) developed during this time, primarily due to colonial administrative nomenclature. ‘India’ was another concept that gained similar currency during this time. ‘Madras’ has now almost disappeared, with the reorganisation of states on linguistic basis and renaming of the name-giving city. ‘India’ has variously fragmented into a sacrosanct concept (in the Indian Union), a conspiring powerful enemy (in Pakistan), a domineering ‘friend’ (in Bangladesh), an important neighbour (in Myanmar).

Circulation of professionals and labourers to newer colonial urban centres created the ‘Madrasi’ and the ‘Indian’. Given the unequal emphasis that the Indian Union gives to its different constituent nationalities (its ‘soul’ is clearly not located south of Vindhyas even if its revenue producers are), it always falls to certain people to do the job of explaining themselves to others. Event after event in Indian Union’s ‘dil’ called Delhi shows that not all stereotypes are harmless. What’s more humiliating than negative stereotypes is to beg understanding from those who came up with them. Nothing shows existing power differences within the Indian Union more than the predictable list of peoples doing self-explaining – Nagas, Mizos, Tamils, etc. The audience is common – urban people from the ‘soul’ country. ‘Soul’ people can carry on without having to explain themselves. That’s a privilege non-soul people of the subcontinent don’t have. They have to carry name-tags like diverse exotic plants.

‘Soul’ people are ‘mainstream’-- the obvious ‘Indians’. Knowledge of their nuance is expected from non-soul people, with Bollywood helping along. For many of the subcontinent’ rural poor, there’s no ‘Madrasi’ or ‘Bengali’ either. They may be from ‘soul’ country but are not ‘soul’ people because their sense of selfhood often does not depend on encounters with distant aliens. They have not been fully incorporated into the language of public political correctness and ‘India’ literacy.

In Bengal, we have another term called ‘Hindustani’ and it’s clearly ‘not us’. In today’s atmosphere, it is increasingly hard to equate Hindustani with ‘not us’, given how ‘Hindustan’ is increasingly conflated with ‘India’ in extremely powerful circles that shape public discourse and imagination. When someone says, we are all ‘Hindustanis’, there’s a smothering of diverse identities for unholier motives, quite different from the ‘Madrasi’ stereotyping. Many made-up identities are those that are handed down from the point of view of outsiders. Many of from outside the subcontinent also operate with a conception of a creature called ‘Indian’. If I say to them, ‘ there’s no Indian, we are all padosi’, am I completely wrong? What makes ‘Madrasi’ particularly wrong? 

The author is a commentator on politics and culture @gargac