Chennai history

Chennai   hitherto known as the city of Madras is the capital of Tamil Nadu and the fourth largest city of India. It is the chief port of Tamil Nadu and the gateway to the south. Francis Day and Andrew Cogan, the then East India company officials who obtained a grant from the local chief Iyappa Nayak on August 1639 to build a factory were the founding fathers of the city. Various records showed the origin of the name and definitely the name Madras existed even before the Englishmen landed there. It was then called ‘Madras patnam’. A fort was built by the Englishmen and called Fort St.George as portions of it were completed on April 23, 1640 St. George’s Day, the patron-saint of England. It owes its present shape to the remodeling work, which was undertaken in 1749. After the fort was built, Iyappa Nayak insisted that the new settlement be named chennappatnam after his father Chennappa Nayak. Thus the name chennappatnam came into being.

       

   In due course, Madras became the English name and Chennai the native name. Chennai lies on the 13. 8N. Latitude and 80 19E. Longitude on a19km. Stretch of the Coromandel Coast and is virtually trisected by Adyar and Cooum river and the Buckingham canal. The present population is over 43 lakhs. Though its beginning were a humble hamlet, it has now grown into a cosmopolitan metropolis by taking up the adjoining villages like Thiruvallikeni, Mylapore, Thiruvanmiyur etc. which are thousands of years older than the recent city of just 360 years. Thus, a tiny hamlet hardly a sq .km. area has now become a 174 sq .km.It is still an expanding city and one cannot rule out its scope of further extension in north, south and west as the Bay of Bengal grudges its expansion to the east.