Chennai

est. 1639 — the long account

Long before there was a Madras there was Mylapore, a Pallava-era port and temple town where the seventh-century saint-poets sang of the Kapaleeshwarar shrine, and where, by tradition, the apostle Thomas was martyred. The Portuguese built their Luz church here in the sixteenth century, but the city's founding date is usually given as 1639, when the English East India Company leased a narrow strip of coast from a Nayak chief and raised Fort St George — the first English fortress in India, and the seed from which the Company's whole empire grew.

Madras became the model Company town: a white town inside the fort walls and a black town — George Town — of Tamil and Telugu merchants outside, its grid of caste and trade streets still legible today. The French captured it in 1746 and held it until 1749; when Lally besieged it again in 1758–59, it held out. As the capital of the Madras Presidency it governed half of southern India, built Indo-Saracenic landmarks like the High Court and Senate House, and nurtured the first Indian nationalist movement — the Congress was founded here in spirit, and held some of its earliest sessions in the city.

Twentieth-century Madras made culture its politics: the Justice Party, the Self-Respect Movement and later the Dravidian parties all rose from its presses and sabhas, while the Music Academy season and the film studios of Kodambakkam made it a capital of classical and popular art alike. Renamed Chennai in 1996, the city still runs on the double exposure of its founding — kolams drawn at dawn under gopurams on one street, a 350-year-old British garrison church on the next.

Chennai · Marina