History of Chennai

While most of the original city of Madras was built and settled by Europeans, the surrounding area which was later incorporated included the native temples of Thiruvanmiyur, Thiruvotriyur, Thiruvallikeni (Triplicane), and Thirumayilai (Mylapore) which have existed for more than 2000 years.

[4][3] However, it is widely recorded that while the official center of the present settlement was designated Fort St. George, the British applied the name Madras to a new large city which had grown up around the Fort including the "White Town" consisting principally of British settlers, and "Black Town" consisting of principally Catholic Europeans and allied Indian minorities.

In 1522, the Portuguese arrived and constructed a port, which they named São Tomé in honor of Saint Thomas, believed to have preached in the region between 52 and 70 AD.

Francis Day, one of the officers of the company, who was then a Member of the Masulipatam Council and the Chief of the Armagon Factory, made a voyage of exploration in 1637 down the coast as far as Pondicherry with a view to choosing a site for a new settlement.

Damarla Venkatadri Naick, the local governor of the Vijayanagar Empire and Nayaka of Wandiwash (Vandavasi), ruled the coastal part of the region, from Pulicat to the Portuguese settlement of San Thome.

[5] Ayyappa Naick persuaded his brother to lease the sandy strip to Francis Day and promised him trade benefits, army protection, and Persian horses in return.

On 22 August 1639, Francis Day secured the Grant by the Damarla Venkatadri Nayakadu, Nayaka of Wandiwash, giving over to the East India Company a three-mile-long strip of land, a fishing village called Madraspatnam, copies of which were endorsed by Andrew Cogan, the Chief of the Masulipatam Factory, and are even now preserved.

However, other national groups, chiefly FrenchPortuguese, and other Catholic merchants had separate agreements with the Nayak which allowed them in turn to establish trading posts, factories, and warehouses.

As a result, owing to the frequency of outbursts of racial and national violence against the Europeans and especially the English, Fort St George with its impressive fortifications became the nucleus around which the city grew and rebuilt itself.

Nonetheless, the Fort and its surrounding walls remained under British control who slowly rebuilt their colony with additional colonists despite another mass murder of Europeans in Black Town by anti-colonialists agitated by Golkonda and plague in the 1670s.

Subsequently, firmans were issued by the Mughal Emperor granting the rights of the English East India company in Madras and formally ending the official capacity of local rulers to attack the British.

As a result, during the Governorship of Elihu Yale (1687–92), the large number of British and European settlers led to the most important political event which was the formation of the institution of a mayor and the Corporation for the city of Madras.

In 1693, a perwanna was received from the local Nawab granting the towns of Tondiarpet, Purasawalkam and Egmore to the company which continued to rule from Fort St. George.

Because of its importance to the East India Company, the French plundered and destroyed the village of Chepauk and Blacktown, the locality across from the port where all the dockyard labourers used to live.

They then strengthened and expanded Fort St George over the next thirty years to bear subsequent attacks, the strongest of which came from the French (1759, under Thomas Arthur, Comte de Lally), and later Hyder Ali, the Sultan of Mysore in 1767 during the First Anglo-Mysore War.

The British fought with various European powers, notably the French at Vandavasi (Wandiwash) in 1760, where de Lally was defeated by Sir Eyre Coote, and the Danish at Tharangambadi (Tranquebar).

The British also fought four wars with the Kingdom of Mysore under Hyder Ali and later his son Tipu Sultan, which led to their eventual domination of India's south.

Although the British had lost most of their well-populated, industrious, and wealthy North American colonies, after a decade's feud with the French, they were securely in control of Madras and most of the Indian trade.

Consequently, they expanded the Chartered control of the company by encompassing the neighbouring villages of Triplicane, Egmore, Purasawalkam and Chetput to form the city of Chennapatnam, as it was called by locals then.

This new area saw a proliferation of English merchant and planter families who, allied with their wealthy Indian counterparts, jointly controlled Chennapatnam under the supervision of White Town.

During World War I, Madras (Chennai) was shelled by the German light cruiser SMS Emden, causing 5 civilian deaths and 26 wounded.

[10] The dispute arose as over the preceding hundred years the early British, European workers and small cottage capitalists had been replaced in large part by both Tamil- and Telugu-speaking people.

In fact, as the greater concentration of capital wrecked what remained of the old East Indian middle class, the city principally became a large housing development for huge numbers of workers.

Most of these were recruited as cheap labor from the relatively poor Telugu speakers, which enraged the Tamil nationals who were originally the working- and middle-class settlers of Madras in the late 18th century.

Earlier, Panagal Raja, Chief Minister of Madras Presidency in the early 1920s had suggested that the Cooum River be the boundary between the Tamil and Telugu administrative areas.

The city's status as a vital administrative and commercial hub has attracted people from various corners of India, such as Bengalis, Punjabis, Gujaratis, Marwaris, as well as residents from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, all of whom have enriched its cosmopolitan fabric.

Chennai also has a growing expatriate population, particularly from the United States, Europe, and East Asia, who find employment opportunities in the city's burgeoning industries and IT sectors.

Madras witnessed further political violence due to the civil war in Sri Lanka, with 33 people killed by a bomb planted by the Tamil Eelam Army at the airport in 1984, and assassination of thirteen members of the EPRLF and two Indian civilians by the rival LTTE in 1991.

In the same year, former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in Sriperumbudur, a small town close to Chennai, whilst campaigning in Tamil Nadu, by Thenmuli Rajaratnam A.K.A.

Instead, being the gateway of trade and the centre of the economy of the region, the English settlement and their fort of 1639–40, which was the basis for the presently named city of Chennai, was likely called Madras as well by the rest of India.