History and Geography

The same (place) name is used to refer to geographical areas whose size and location changes over time as a result of wars, treaties and internal restructuring. All this can lead to immense confusion and misunderstanding because your association with those place names today may be totally different from the areas that were referred to by the same name decades back!

Consider how North Indians often refer to all South Indians as Madrasis. How dumb, we fume. Do these people really think all South Indians come from Madras? Turns out that the term Madrasi may have been coined when Madrasi meant someone from the British era Madras Presidency, not modern day Madras city! Let Salil Misra explain the geography of that age:

“Madras Presidency (consisting of most of present-day South India minus the princely states of Hyderabad and Mysore) had a large number of Telugu, Oriya, Malayalam and Kannada speakers.”

Or if you are a visual person, perhaps a map would help see how Madras Presidency covers almost all of modern day South India:

Suddenly the origin of the term Madrasi makes sense!

If we have trouble within our own country with such changes, imagine how much tougher it is for us to understand a place like Europe? Maps of before-and-after can help understand why certain countries might feel cheated, hold grudges and consider a future day annexation as simply taking what is rightfully their’s. Or how a country absorbed into another might always want to break free again. Take this before-and-after World War I map:

Notice how pre-war Germany meant an area covering post-war Germany + Poland? Or how countries like Latvia, Estonia, Belarus and Ukraine came out of erstwhile Russia? Or how countries like Montenegro and Serbia got combined into Yugoslavia? Or how Austria-Hungary got fragmented with other picking up bits and pieces of it?

If the same name in geography can refer to such vastly different areas over time, it makes history a whole lot harder to understand. No wonder we never learn from history!