The Making of the “Madrasi” trope
– Sri Meghana
Travel a few hundred kilometres in India and you find yourself in an entirely new culture, language and set of customs. In a place so diverse, it is all the more conducive to being misinformed about one another. Stereotypes thrive on this precise ignorance. And oftentimes, cinema becomes the medium through which these misrepresentations are propagated. These could just be merely inaccurate depictions of cultures, but sometimes they feel like a well-planned peddling of personal narratives. Let’s explore that idea through Bollywood’s portrayal of the typical South Indian [male] – the “Madrasi”.
The Madrasi character has always had a pretty sustained persona: a middle aged man with dark skin, a white dhoti, vibhuti/namam, occasionally a sikha. Interestingly, the Madrasi never seems to speak in any South Indian language for that matter. Except “Aiyyooo” every two minutes. Not to mention the heavy accent that comes along with it; which the industry has taken great pains to create. The Madrasi eats idli, dosa, sambhar, rasam, has filter coffee and… that’s about it. Often the Madrasi is a Brahmin with the most common Brahmin surname, Iyer. The best part is that the Madrasi is almost always Tamil. That is not because Bollywood knew that Madras, or Chennai was situated in Tamil Nadu, rather because for a long long time Bollywood never cared to understand the difference between Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada. Hence for many we all collectively became “Madrasis”. In cinema sometimes this stereotype is passable for a poor attempt at comedy, but more frequently it is a full-fledged insult.
The most telling of these stereotypes occurs as far back as 1968 in the Hindi movie Padosan, with Kishore Kumar playing Guru Vidyapathi (a North Indian musician) and Mehmood playing Master Pillai (Bindu’s Carnatic music teacher) – apparently the writers never bothered to give him a first name. Masterji appears on screen with a sikha, dhoti and namam – a typical South Indian (Tamil, although I doubt they can differentiate) Brahmin. Masterji is infatuated with Bindu, and despite her rejecting his advances, he continues his pursuits vehemently. And while Pillai is just ‘Masterji’, Vidyapathi is uplifted to the name and position of ‘Guru’, indicating the difference in the educational and spiritual standards of both. The movie produced a famous song, “Ek Chatur Naar” which is a conversational exchange between the two characters. As the song progresses, Kishore Kumar sings “Jaa re jaa re kaare kaaga…” which translates to “Go away! Go away you black crow!” Another instance is the line “Kala re, jaa re jaa re, khaare naali me jaake tu mu dhoke aa..” meaning “Oh black one, go away! Go away and wash your face in the salt water-sewer!”. I was appalled by the blatant candour of the industry pushing its racism against their own countrymen so crudely. I wonder which is worse – a group of foreign colonial whites addressing us as ‘black dogs’, or our own brethren calling us ‘black crows’. In the song, Masterji objectifies the female body to which the North Indian “saviour” Guru comes with a battle of expertise in a very intense Hindustani vs Carnatic, North vs South, sophistication vs caricature face-off. The ‘creepy’ Madrasi is shown to have gone out of sur thereby losing the face-off.
The stereotype, however, did not end with Padosan. If anything, the template seems remarkably reusable. Other films such as Agneepath (1990), for instance, also follows a similar pattern of a Tamil Brahmin Iyer (played by Mithun Chakraborty) who is either ridiculed by the hero throughout the film, or is ‘naturally’ a comedic character that Hindi audience can laugh at. Even as decades pass, nothing really changes.
In the 2007 film Dhamaal, the Madrasi character comes in with the same dark skinned curly haired middle aged man persona wearing the typical white dhoti and namam. Guess what his opening dialogue is. “Aiyyo!!” When he’s asked his name, the man starts with “Iyer”, and keeps on adding prefixes to it to form an extremely long list of names, which is his first name – Prabhakarana Sripalavardhana Atapattu Jayasurya Lakshmana Sriramakrishna Sivavenkata Rajasekhara Srinivasana Trichipalli Yajna Parampeela Perambudur Chinnaswami Muthuswami Venugopal Iyer. But guess what. This is apparently just his pet name. His actual name is much longer. Then again this might also probably be the maximum amount of research Bollywood might have ever done on a ‘Madrasi’ name. Although Iyer may have exited the film as swiftly as he entered, he left an entire section of people wondering if South Indians also had their own customised and personalised Ashtottara Shatanamavalis.
In the movie Raa One (2011), I was horrified to see Shah Rukh Khan’s character (well-to-do TamBrahm Shekhar Subrahmaniam) mixing noodles and curd with his hands and eating it. I am still at loggerheads about the exact intentions of this scene because even when the character is educated and cosmopolitan, Bollywood still inserts supposedly South Indian behavioural quirks to signal his regional and cultural identity. In all seriousness, is that really how they think we eat?? Interestingly the actors playing these characters are not from the south at all, thus making the reference point highly questionable.
Years have passed by and decades have changed, but the character remained exactly the same. Why is the picture of a South Indian almost always a Tamil and a Brahmin? Considering that these roles are majorly side characters with bizarre habits meant to be the butt of the joke, it is all the more important to question its prejudicial nature. More than being intended as a joke, it feels like a repeated and persistent attempt to mock and malign a certain community in the name of humour.
Then comes the accent. Only God knows how they managed to build an entirely novel accent to the Hindi language assuming it could pass off as ‘the South Indian Accent’. This is reinforced with Deepika Padukone’s heavily accented Hindi in Chennai Express (2012). For a long time and probably even till date, a lot of people believe this to be how Tamilians actually look and speak. It is indeed a sad state of affairs when an actress who is from and grew up in the South contributes so impeccably to the stereotype. The accent has been heavily internalised to the point that almost every non-South Indian I have crossed paths with has, at some point, used this accent to describe what they think about us. To my absolute horror, a lot of them living in the South would switch to this accent whenever they have to talk to auto drivers or shopkeepers.
A little while back, a Tamil gaana song “Dosa Idli Sambar Chutney Chutney” credited to the artist and folk composer Appu (Dolak Appu) became viral. Naturally, it was quickly picked up by content creators and common folk up North, who rendered the South Indian breakfast staples a joke, assuming these dishes as the only food eaten down South. I have only ever heard them sing the first line. None of them know the rest of the song; for obvious reasons – because to pronounce any of the South Indian languages well would be a herculean task they would rather not undertake. Mockery, on the other hand, does not require any skill. Albeit it is quite entertaining when they try to twist their mouths in odd angles to try and get the ‘fake’ Madrasi accent that they themselves have created.
The attack on Southern culture is especially horrific in the 2026 movie Chand Mera Dil, where Ananya Pandey’s character, a college freshie in Hyderabad performs an atrocious Bharatanatyam fusion for Freshers. Her costume is a revamp of the traditional Bharatanatyam sari – unlike the original costume that typically covers the body entirely, Bollywood seems to have designed it so that the heroine’s cleavage and stomach are amply visible- which is a dire necessity for all female protagonists. She then proceeds to outrightly abuse centuries worth of knowledge and expertise of the art form. The hero and his friends are initially seen to be apprehensive of this ‘sanskritik karyakram’. However upon witnessing the absolute splendour of the flagrant mockery made out of one of the most difficult dance forms of the country, everyone claps. I keep wondering, had this been another culture/community, would it be received the same? Probably not.
More recently, the film Param Sundari (2025) opened the minds of viewers to the state of Kerala with its depictions of picturesque locations, and towering coconut trees. Surprisingly, Keralite women know how to climb these trees just by virtue of belonging to the state. The stereotype has surely become prettier and more exotic. Certainly more flattering than the conventional Madrasi. Well done Bollywood.
I remember sitting with a friend from up North who pointed at a random guy walking on the street and said to me “Oh look! That guy must be from your region!” I asked “Why?” to which they replied, “Dark skin, curly hair…” I was appalled at the fact that this might actually be how almost everyone from that side of the country thinks of us. When I asked if they knew all the states down South, I ended up getting “Telangana is the capital of Andhra Pradesh”, and “Bengaluru is in Madras”. Funny as these answers may sound, they point to the same problem: an enormous and internally diverse region reduced to one vague geographical and cultural category. Nobody knows the difference. The problem is not the lack of knowledge, rather the sheer unwillingness to project a well rounded image. Viewers have been shown the same caricature repeatedly, so much so that they are mistaken for reality. These familiar representations masquerade as knowledge. A joke told once may remain a joke; a caricature repeated for decades can become an assumption. The responsibility does not lie with filmmakers alone. Audiences too need to question the images they consume and the typecasts they have been taught to recognise. And perhaps filmmakers could occasionally remember that representing a culture does not mean reducing it to an accent, a plate of dosa, a dhoti and an “Aiyyooo”.
The Southern part of the country is not one culture, and the ‘Madrasi’ is certainly not a real person. Tamil is not Telugu, Telugu is not Kannada, and Kannada is not Malayalam. And even among us there is a myriad of differences. We may share a geographical space, but that does not make us swappable characters. A major change however seems farfetched for now, although the ‘Madrasi’ can keep undergoing minor character developments as time progresses. A slight respite has been provided with the global recognition of the Telugu film industry (Tollywood) with the massive success of S S Rajamouli’s movies like Bahubali (2015) and RRR (2022).
As a South Indian myself, it is intriguing that even today I have to see more of this outrageous (or mildly irritable) South Indian content that Bollywood spews. Or hopefully, I finally get to see a South Indian just respectfully existing in a Hindi movie without being made a joke.
Edited by: Esha Ann Mariya | Design by: Vasuki
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