Chennai

"[Damarla] Venkatapathy sought access to British trade partners, and so granted to the company’s representatives a fishing village, Madraspatnam and surrounding territory. The Fort, built south of Madraspatnam, came to be known to Indians as Chennapatnam, after Venkatapathy’s father, either in deference to the wishes of Damarla Venkatapathy or the site originally bore that name. Chennai Corporation accounts for the use of the name “Madras” over the prior 350 years as the product of “confusion” asserting that the original place names were inexplicably reversed, with Chennai taken to refer to the fishing village and Madras to the fort and environs and that, as a result, historians drew the erroneous conclusion that Madras was the more accurate name."

"Partisan of both “Madras” and “Chennai” used those names to assert that the city was, from its inception, a volatile borderland, a point of contact, mixing, hybridity. For its part “Chennai” suggests the frontier of pre-modern empire, whereas “Madras” is a frontier of modern imperial expansion. Both names, however, assert that the city is a “glocality” – a global entrepot in which diverse population, exchange media, languages, and ideas were brought into intimate and enduring relationships, and, more recently, a product of and staging ground for globalizing capitalism."

"”Chennai” or variants also appear in descriptive essays and literary works as names for the city that the English know as Madras. The Vishvagunadrasa Campu (composed between 1650 and 1700) and Anandarangavijaya Campu, composed in 1752 refer to the settlement as Chenna Kesava Pura and to “Chenna Patna”, and the Sarva-deva-vilasa uses the term “Cennapuri” or “Cennapuram” as the place name."

"Critics of the name change favoured the retention of “Madras” and took the incoherence of its spatial form and built environment as their point of departure. Instead of treating these qualities as sins of lack, however, they celebrated them as artifacts of the city’s origins as a colonial port and its status as the ground zero of Indian modernity."

"There is little doubt that [all of India’s major cities], owe much to the beginnings of modern progress that Madras gave the rest of the subcontinent... Madras, till the 1760s, lay the foundation on which modern India has grown."

"What emerged [over the eighteenth century]... was not merely a collection of separate quarters, but two or even three distinct societies with their own characteristic ways of organizing space ...the outstanding feature of Madras was that these cultural units – colonial European, indigenous urban and rural societies – in many cases shared the same territory without actually merging together or losing their distinctive characteristic."

"A fortuitous collection of villages, separated from the surrounding country by an arbitrary boundary line rather than a town in the usual sense of the word."

"Sir Josiah Child, one of the directors of the East India Company was responsible for the formation of the Corporation of Chennai, on the model of Dutch Government in the East Indies. On 29th September 1688, the corporation was inaugurated with power to decide petty cases, levy rates upon the inhabitants for building of schools, a town hall and a jail. Nathaniel Higginson was nominated as First mayor with 12 aldermen and 60 burgesses."