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Why do all the non-South Indians believe that all South Indians drink only coffee or kapi. So if a Keralite asked for a cup of tea,they would be shocked by his choice.

“Arrey, but you’re from the South,” he would be told, almost making him feel guilty for not having coffee. And thanks to the movies, the world only knew so much about the Madrasi - that he is a vegetarian who only eats thair-saadam (curd-rice) and squirms at the sight of chicken vindaloo.

Of course, a Madrasi menu was believed to comprise only of idli, vada and sambar -until the Udipi invasion in the 70s, when that belief became a conviction.

Today, of course, the food business - thanks to specialty restaurants and random food festivals - has made everybody more knowledgeable about what each state in India eats. So a Malayali, who doesn’t enjoy fish curry, will be looked at with suspicion and told, “But you are from Kerala and everybody there eats fish!”

For years the word Madrasi haunted every South Indian. And it didn’t really matter whether he lived miles away from Madras or actually belonged to Thiruvananthapuram, Hyderabad or Mysore. It also didn’t matter that the term Madrasi became redundant the day they renamed Madras as Chennai.

For the South Indian was geographically generic to the rest of the country. Thus anybody from the southern region of the subcontinent was quite simply a Madrasi who spoke a convoluted undoo gundoo language, punctuated with a liberal dose of aiyyo and lived off idli, sambar and kapi.

And Hindi films never really helped clear this identity crisis that plagued a Malayali, who is different from a Tamilian, who is different from a Kannadiga, who is different from an Andhraite…

For years, the Madrasi who spoke Hindi like a mediocre classical singer was the comic relief in Bollywood blockbusters. The late Mehmood almost built a career out of playing over-the-top South Indian characters. So there he was as the hyper, mundu-clad, Tamil Brahmin music teacher in ‘Padosan’. And then again, as the lungi-clad Keralite in ‘Ek Phool Do Maali’, singing something as incomprehensible as “mutthookoodi kavadi hada”.

It’s only recently that Bollywood has discovered the rewards of knowing the Non-Resident Punjabis for the sake of overseas box office collection. Otherwise, as far as Bollywood was concerned, there were only two kinds of Madrasis - one who came from Madras in a mundu and the other who came from Kerala in a lungi.

But despite the better awareness now about what differentiates a Malayali from a Tamilian, or a Kannadiga from an Andhraite, the silly South Indian is still around - tightening his lungi’s knot, drinking kapi and biting into a Kanjeevaram idli…
To end with a PJ: What would Bruce Lee’s son be called in Kerala? Malaya Lee!
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