How East India Company Picked Madras As A Base

How the East India Company picked Madras as a base. It all starts with a love story:
Author Nirmala Lakshman ( 19 January, 2025 12:07 pm IST) crafts a rich and expansive exploration of Tamil history, society, and culture.

Francis Day was in love. As he sailed down the Coromandel coast from Machilipatnam looking for a place to set up a factory and perhaps a future settlement for the East India Company, Day was clear that among the factors that would impact his decision was the proximity to his secret love, a half-Indian woman with European blood who lived in the port of San Thome where the Portuguese already had a flourishing settlement.
Being an impecunious agent of the East India Company, his trajectory to success in love lay in delivering to his superiors a piece of land for which he would be well rewarded and from which they could all obtain profits.
He found a small strip of beach by the sea, near the village of Madrasapatnam, positioned at a discreet distance from San Thome, and proceeded with the help of the dubash (an interpreter or translator) Beri Thimmappa to acquire it from the Nayak, Venkatadri Damarla, the local ruler who held it.
It was not really the most viable piece of land, it had no natural harbour, but his superior, Andrew Cogan, approved, and in August 1639 the deed was done.
The grant was intended to expand trade in the hinterland that offered ‘excellent long cloath and better cheap by twenty per cent than anywhere else’. The ‘firman’ that was granted to Day allowed the construction of a fort and settlement.
Although the beach site on the Bay of Bengal was not the most ideal, the Company was banking on the new settlement with a warehouse and fort becoming the foundation of their success in the future.
It would protect and grow their trade in cotton and other goods. Machilipatnam was becoming challenging, and the Dutch at Pulicat were already in competition, and the British needed this spot.
Little did they realize that this settlement, and the ancient villages that surrounded it, would become an iconic city, the city of Chennai, once known as Madras, and currently the capital city of Tamil Nadu.
There have been diverse theories about the origin of the name Madras, none really satisfactory, but they range from the idea that it was named after the nearby village of Madrasapatnam or after Madrasena, a Portuguese fisherman who had land nearby.
Others source it to Madra, a wealthy Portuguese family in the region.
Venkatachalapathy, however, says in the early references to the city (even in the eighteenth century) the name Chennapatna, or the town of Chennai, was in use.
The British called Fort St. George and the settlement around it Madras, or White Town. This was where they lived and worked.
Madrasapatnam and Black Town was where the Indians who supported the colonial enterprise lived.
V. Sriram, the historian, says of Chennapatnam that it was ‘named after the father of the local chieftain, it was either an existing settlement or one that came up in the area surrounding the place where the British built their enclosure which they grandiosely called Fort St. George.’ He adds that old Chennappa was Telugu and so the name that the Tamil Nadu government chose to confer on the city in 1996 ‘was not Tamil at all’.
Pushpa Arabindo, professor of Urban Studies at University College, London, points out,
the co-existence of colonial and local names indicated the initial dichotomy of the colonial settlement pattern where a foreign enclave existed, segregated from the indigenous population who associated with the foreigners only through trade.
In the course of indigenization some of the characteristics of the colonial city were adopted as “modern” … as this grew outwards, it became unclear as to what constituted Madras.
So in 1798 an arbitrary line was drawn to define the limits of Madras…including suburban villages and agrarian settlements. Chennai was circumscribed by the larger area of Madras.
The renaming controversy met with some level of resistance, but the name Chennai was locked in and with the passing of time, Madras is more a nostalgic memory and modern Chennai has come to stay.

JAYASALA42