From: kannan@lamar.ColoState.EDU (Kannan Subramanian)
Subject: "Southie or Northie?"
Date: Sun, 08 Nov 1992 22:13:23 GMT
Organization: Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO  80523


	                      Southie or Northie?
			      -------------------

As Southies go, I am more or less a Northie. But all Northies shake their
heads and tell me I am a Southie. As the years went by, this identity crisis
only deepened and remains unresolved even today. 

From the time I was seven, till I was about fifteen, I lived on Apte Road 
in Pune, the veritable heartland of cultural Maharashtra. These were perhaps
the impressionable years, whatever that may mean. If you want to get technical
about it, I suppose this is neither in the north nor in the south of India, 
and this further compounded the problem. Many of our neighbors were playwrights
or literateurs or stage artistes of sorts (drama and stage art are 
exceptionally well developed in Maharashtra) and while I can't say I absorbed
culture through every pore, some of it certainly rubbed off on me. 

Here, I learned to speak Marathi like a native, complete with flawless 
accent and swear words. I learned to read and write it, besides of course 
swallowing the usual dose of English and Hindi (and yes, those three years of 
German) at school. I rather enjoyed learning languages but never quite got 
round to doing justice to either Tamil or Malayalam. (In retrospect, this 
was a mistake, a mistake, a mistake.) Nevertheless, everybody assured me that I
was a "Madrasi". I knew this was not correct but I could never prove it. 

All attempts to set the record straight would be defeated by the following
logic. 

"Where does your grandmother live?" a "Northie" friend would ask, in the 
middle of something. We played a lot of marbles in those days or flew kites. 

"Oh, one lives in Madras. The other lives in Palghat." I would reply. 

"Where is Palghat?" would be the next query with a frown.  

"It is in Kerala." 

"Is that near Madras?" 

"Yes. Sort of." 

"Are you a Malayalam?" he would ask unabashedly, not even pronouncing it 
properly. (This sort of ignorance never ceased to jar me. Didn't these 
people know anything?)

"You mean a Malayalee!" I would correct him impatiently, "And no, I speak Tamil 
at home." (I would have difficulty defending this too, among those friends of 
mine at school who were "pure" Tamils or the "real" Tamils and found my Tamil
funny. They would be quick to point out, not unreasonably, that I could not
possibly be a Tamil if my parents were from Kerala. I never quite got round
to inventing a fitting reply to this one. In retrospect, I think I missed
making my mark in these circles by not explaining clearly where my grandmothers
lived.)

"Then you are a Madrasi!" would be the firm verdict of my kite flying partner. 

This was based on the irrefutable evidence that not only did one of my 
grandmothers reside in Madras, but the other (and this was the decisive 
clincher), also lived somewhere within a four hundred mile radius. That the 
domiciles of my two grandmothers had a state border between them had already 
caused me a lifetime of grief before I was twelve. I never quite learned to
deal with it. I liked to get these things right. I like precision. But my 
limited vocabulary and the cultural horizons of my "Northie" friends, such as 
they were, were great stumbling blocks in threshing out the profound matter of 
just who I was, while clearly not being a "Madrasi", if you follow my meaning.

Come summer and we would head south for the holidays. This usually meant
a 30+ hour train journey into a land overflowing with cousins, aunts and 
uncles. I had fifteen aunts and uncles, and every summer, if one wasn't 
getting married then there would always be another. This was something I
always looked forward to - I mean the color and chaos of it all, and all 
that. The tally (of uncles and aunts) grew thusly from from fifteen to thirty 
where it stayed for many years. Obviously, the cousins-tally also soared.
They were all clearly "Madrasis" if you applied the twin-grandmother test. 
I am quite certain their grandmothers never left Palghat in their lives, but
we have already seen how this fact does not prevent them from being "Madrasis".

To all of them, and to the marble players and kite fliers of the neighborhood,
I was a Northie kid. Here too, the evidence was compelling. I lived "up there
in the North", after all, and had no grasp of either "Madras-Tamil", (my version
being "Palghat-speak") or the local rules at marbles. Also, my swear words were
mostly English (a result of reading too many "Biggles" and "Simon Templar"
stories) and the unsaid word among the locals was that I was a strange fellow
who spoke in tongues. Definitely a "Northie". 

Palghat was usually worse. I would understand Malayalam perfectly but have 
no clue on how speech was to be returned. The result was a rather laborious
gurgle that would start in my throat and stay there. I got some mileage 
from gesticulating wildly but my image suffered serious damage as a result. 
We never stayed long enough for me to learn the language, but always long enough
for me to accumulate social embarassment and humiliation that no self-respecting
twelve year old should have to endure. Needless to say, these Freudian scars
haunt me to this day. 

One summer, I was determined to do better and I learned to read the script in
a single day. Of course, speech still eluded me and the gurgles continued. But
it looked like I was making some definite progress. My "Madrasi" grandmother
(the one who has never left Palghat) was astonished at my ferocious zeal
and rewarded me by making "Mysore-paak" that evening, which incidentally is
a "paak" possessing quite incredible properties. If the person making it
knows her business (my grandmother does, but not many do, mind you - and btw
I have never known male chefs to succeed at this endeavor), then upon 
placing this treasure on your tongue while still warm, it melts in tantalizing
fashion causing you to close your eyes and lose control, and utter quite 
lavish if inarticulate praise, while still experiencing its warm glow. 

All said, my education in Malayalam never went very far. I learned to read, 
but constructing coherent sentences needed to establish leadership and hegemony
over the local kids was quite another matter. In spite of my best intentions,
I always ran out of time. Just when I started to get the hang of things, it 
would be time to return to the "North" and resume my "Madrasi" existence.  

Am I a Southie or a Northie? The roots of this problem run deep. The long and 
short of it is that while confusion is still rife on the matter of just who I 
am, I continue to hate the word "Madrasi" with a passion. 

			       -- x -- 
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