Meaning of Madrasi | Babel Free

Definitions

1. A native or resident of Chennai in India.
   dated
2. A native of South India; a person of South Indian extraction (exonym; often considered offensive).
   broadly
3. A fairy chess rule where a piece that is attacked by a piece of the same type is paralyzed, rendering it unable to move.

Examples

“Runga Charlu was subjected to grave accusations in Mysore as he had the misfortune to be a Madrasi.”

“When the hardships of a Madrassi are complained of, we are told that a Panjabi is well off: that the taxation “on an average” is only so-and-so, Northern India being more lightly taxed than Southern.”

“‘Oh, hell! I’d snivel psalms to oblige the padre, but I can’t stick the way these damned native Christians come shoving into our church. A pack of Madrassi servants and Karen school-teachers. […]’”

“The midwife, an old, thin, inscrutable Madrassi, came to the hall and sat on her haunches in a corner, smoking, silent, her eyes bright.”

“Moses Nagamootoo explores the creation of a landscape and a heritage in Guyana by the Madrassi in his novel Hendree’s Cure […]”

“Coming from a South Indian Tamil family that had settled in the western India, “Madrasi” was my family’s nickname in the neighbourhood and so was mine at school. The name in itself was obnoxious, not to mention the stereotyping it brought along with it. For North Indians, anyone from the South was a Madrasi, irrespective of where they came from.”

“Hindi cinema has been guilty of stereotyping the “Madrasi” since the days of Mehmood. […] The “Madrasi” usage probably stems from the days of the British Raj when the Madras Province covered Tamil Nadu, parts of Kerala (excluding Travancore) and Andhra Pradesh and even Karnataka (excluding Mysore) and thus anyone from the South was automatically presumed to be from the Madras Presidency…a Madrasi.”

CEFR level