Chennai , India Travel Guide, Hotel, Climate, Map, Attraction

Chennai Hotels and Travel Guide

Chennai, also known as Madras, is the capital of the southern state of Tamil Nadu in India, and is the country's fourth-largest city. It is located on the Coromandel coast of the Bay of Bengal. With an estimated population of 7.45 million (2005), the 367 year old city is the 41st largest metropolitan area in the world.

Madras was one of the first outposts of British East India Company. Colonel William Lambton, superintendent of the great Trigonometrical Survey of India, started his journey of triangulating India from St. Thomas Mount. The city was founded in 1639 when the company was granted land to build a trading settlement by the local Indian administrators. The British built Fort St. George (today the legislative and administrative seat of the state). George Town then developed becoming the modern city of Madras, absorbing several nearby boroughs. Thomas, one of the twelve apostles is associated with Chennai. He is said to have come to India as an evangelist and died in what is now Chennai. Two suburbs, Santhome and St. Thomas Mount, are named in his memory.

In 1996, in an uncharacteristic act of me-tooism, the Tamil nadu government emulated Bombay's example by renaming Madras to Chennai. This name change is somewhat inexplicable. While the foreign origins of "Bombay" or the "corrupted" pronunciation of Calcutta are not in doubt, it is by no means clear that "Madras" is of foreign origin.

The Kapaleeshwarar temple in Mylapore is the oldest temple in Chennai

Madras is derived from Madraspatnam, a name given to the area when the British negotiated settling there. The origin of the name is uncertain. Tradition suggests that a fishing village near to the location of the British settlement was called Madraspatnam. Others think early Portuguese may have called the area Madre de Sois after an early settler, or Madre de Deus after an early church (of St. Mary).

Chennai is derived from Chennapatnam, a name with almost equally uncertain origins. Tradition has it that Chennapatnam was the name of a fishing village near to the location of Madraspatnam. However it is not clear if the village was there beforehand or grew up around the British Madraspatnam settlement. There are some suggestions that the name was given to the developing Indian settlement honor a local Indian administrator.

As the settlements grew, the exact location of both Chennapatnam and Madraspatnam became confused as the two settlements merged into a single town. However, Madras was associated with the British while Chennai has Indian associations.

Under the British, the city of Madras grew to be a major city, It was the capital of the Madras presidency, a province that covered the parts of South India that were not governed by any of the other princely states. After independence, it became the capital of Madras state, and when the states were reorganized on a linguistic basis, it narrowly escaped becoming the capital of Andhra Pradesh and became the capital of Tamil Nadu. Since then, it has had an uneventful history, except that in the 60s, it was the centre of the "Anti-Hindi" agitation against the Central government's attempts to impose Hindi on the state.