------------------------------------------------------------------------ * G * O * A * N * E * T **** C * L * A * S * S * I * F * I * E * D * S * ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Enjoy your holiday in Goa. Stay at THE GARCA BRANCA from November to May There is no better, value for money, guest house. Confirm your bookings early or miss-out
Visit http://www.garcabranca.com for details/booking/confirmation. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ --- Radhakrishnan Nair <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Selma, "Madrassis" is a pejorative used by North > > Indians (especially the illiterate types) to > > describe the entire population to the south > > of the Vindhyas. > --- Selma Carvalho wrote: > > Dear RKN, > > I had no idea but what do you call someone from > Chennai? In the Arabian Gulf, we called them > Madrassis, with no pejorative connotation to the > word. > Mario observes: > Selma, RKN's assertion is a gross exaggeration, and in my experience, false. Perhaps RKN and his friends used Madrassis as a pejorative, but I grew up in central India post-Independence and had several educated friends whom we referred to as Madrassis. It was not a pejorative term and was used within the community itself. These were ethnic Tamilians from the state of Tamil Nadu, which was previously known as Madras. It was no different than calling a Sikh a Sadarji, or a Nepalese a Gurkha, or an Afghan a Pathan or a Bengali a Bengali. > Under British rule, most of south India was ruled from the city of Madras [now Chennai] and was known as the Madras Presidency. A few years after India's Independence, in the early to mid-50s, Indian states were formed based on language. The Indian south was split up into the states of Madras, Andhra, Karnataka and Kerala based on their individual distinctive languages. The name of Madras was changed to Tamil Nadu in 1969. > Thus when I was a kid, the state of Tamil Nadu was called Madras, and the capital city of Chennai was also called Madras, and the people of the state were called Madrassis. The name of the city was changed to Chennai more recently. > Also, the soldiers of the Madras Regiment in the British Indian Army were known as Madrassis, and these were one of the storied regiments of the British Indian Army in WW-II, as one can see from the book "The Road Past Mandalay" by Col. John Masters, who was an officer in the Gurkha Regiment. This book is a must read for anyone interested in the exploits of the British Indian Army in the Burmese theater during WW-II. > A review of the book can be seen in http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,895675-2,00.html > Here is an excerpt: > "Masters writes emotionally, sometimes overemotionally. But his style in these reminiscences is several cuts above the more self-conscious manner of his fiction. Masters is at his best writing about the peculiar, intense, masculine love a professional soldier has for the men he leads into battle. There came the day in 1945 when the Indian army British, Sikhs, Gurkhas, Madrassis, Pathans swept to the attack for the last time in its 87-year history. Masters, whose family had lived in India for more than 150 years, watched them go with a sudden surge of choking pride: "All these men knew their commanders, and as the vehicles crashed past, most of the soldiers were on their feet, cheering and yelling. The Gurkhas, of course, went by sitting stiffly to attention, whole truckloads bouncing four feet in the air without change of expression. The romance of war but only a fool would begrudge us the excitement and the sense of glory, for no one on that plain had wanted war, and all of us had known enough terror to last several lifetimes." > _______________________________________________ Goanet mailing list Goanet@lists.goanet.org http://lists.goanet.org/listinfo.cgi/goanet-goanet.org