Dear Madras: A Love Letter to a City on her Birthday
Dear
Madras,
Every August we do something slightly ridiculous. We wish a city happy birthday. This is not a history lesson — it's a love letter with some dates in it.
The receipt for a city
Here is the part that never stops being funny: Madras began as a property deal.
On 22 August 1639, two agents of the English East India Company — Francis Day and his superior Andrew Cogan — secured a grant of land from Damarla Venkatadri Nayak, a viceroy serving the last of the Vijayanagara line. What they got was not a kingdom. It was a strip of sand, roughly three miles long and a mile inland, pinned between the Cooum and the sea, with a fishing settlement called Madraspatnam on it and the village of Chennapatnam just beside.
Historians still argue about the paperwork — the dates on the grant, when exactly Day arrived, whose signature came first. Which is entirely appropriate. Madras has been arguing about the details ever since.
By St George's Day, 23 April 1640, the Company had put up a fort and named it Fort St George. It was the first English fortress in India, and almost everything the British later did on this subcontinent started from behind those walls.
The fort is still there. The Chief Minister now works in the building the Company put up to guard its cloth.
A short account of 387 years
- 1639The grant. A strip of sand changes hands.
- 1640Fort St George rises. St Mary's — the oldest Anglican church east of Suez — follows in 1680.
- 1688The Madras Corporation is chartered: the oldest municipal body in India.
- 1746The French take Madras and hold it three years. A young clerk named Robert Clive escapes in disguise.
- 1844Higginbothams opens on Mount Road. It is still open.
- 1851The Government Museum opens at Egmore.
- 1857The University of Madras — one of India's first three modern universities.
- 1873Madras Central station opens its doors.
- 1913The Ripon Building, white as a wedding cake, becomes the seat of the Corporation.
- 1969Madras State becomes Tamil Nadu.
- 1996Madras becomes Chennai. Nobody entirely complies.
- 2004Three men invent a birthday.
Madras Day is younger than most people celebrating it
In 2004, two Chennai journalists — Vincent D'Souza and Sashi Nair — took an idea to the historian S. Muthiah, the man who spent decades writing the city down before it could forget itself. The idea was small: pick the founding date, put on a few events, get people to look at their own streets properly for once.
They managed five events that first year.
By 2008 there were sixty. Within a decade, more than a hundred and twenty — and the single day had spilled into Madras Week, and then unofficially into Madras Month. Heritage walks at six in the morning. Quizzes. Photo exhibitions. Food trails. Schoolchildren marched through the Fort. Muthiah died in 2019. The walks did not stop.
Cities don't usually get remembered on purpose. Somebody has to decide to do it.
The best of Madras, incomplete and highly biased
- Filter kaapi in a davara-tumbler. Not coffee. காபி. Decoction dripped slowly through a steel filter, scalded milk, sugar — and then the pour, that arc between tumbler and davara that cools it and froths it and, done properly, is a small piece of theatre. You do not touch the rim. You are not a barbarian.
- The Marina at six in the evening. India's longest urban beach, and easily its loudest. Molaga bajji in newspaper cones. Balloon-shooting stalls. Families sitting in perfect rows facing the Bay of Bengal like an audience waiting for something to start. It never starts. That's the point.
- The Kapaleeshwarar tank at dusk. The gopuram going gold, the tank going black, and all of Mylapore running on a clock older than the fort by centuries. Mylapore was a port when Madras was still sand.
- Santhome Basilica. One of only three churches on earth built over the tomb of an apostle. The other two are in Rome and Santiago de Compostela. Chennai does not brag about this nearly enough.
- Higginbothams on Mount Road. Founded 1844. India's oldest surviving bookshop, still on Anna Salai with that red façade, still smelling exactly the way a bookshop is supposed to smell.
- The Margazhi music season. A thousand-odd concerts across the sabhas every December and January. And — this is not a joke — people choose which sabha to attend based on the canteen. Somebody's chutney has decided somebody's Carnatic education.
- Chennai Central. MGR Central now, officially. Terracotta-red, clock tower, 1873, and the particular feeling of arriving there at five in the morning off an overnight train into air that is already warm.
- The summer. அக்னி நட்சத்திரம் — four weeks in May when the city becomes a physical opponent. Everyone complains. Nobody leaves. Then one October afternoon the sky goes the colour of wet slate and the whole city stands in its balconies to watch the first rain like a returning relative.
- Kodambakkam. An entire film industry grew in a few square kilometres, and the city's speech, humour and swagger are half-borrowed from it.
- The Madras check. A cotton plaid, vegetable-dyed, made to bleed in the wash — so associated with this place that Americans in the 1960s wore the city's name without knowing what it referred to. The only textile I know of that is supposed to fade. Very Madras: the beauty is in the fading.
- Mess sambar, at a place with plastic chairs and no name worth remembering. Argue about which one. That argument is also on the list.
- The way people here say "Madras." Softly, mid-sentence, without making a point of it. Thirty years after the renaming, the old name survives not as protest but as intimacy.
On calling it Madras
In 1996 the state renamed the city Chennai, and the reasoning was sound: Madras carried the fort and the Company and a few centuries of somebody else's ledgers, while Chennai, from Chennapatnam, was ours to begin with.
Both names are used daily and neither has won. That isn't confusion — it's honesty. This place was a fishing coast, then a fort, then a Presidency, then a capital, then somewhere people move to for work and never fully leave. It has been overwritten so many times that the earlier drafts still show through. The two names are just the top layer.
So when someone says Madras Day rather than Chennai Day, they are not refusing the new name. They're pointing at a particular stretch of the palimpsest — the fort, the checks, the kaapi, the Marina, the specific 387-year-old accident that made all of it possible.
Madras, on film
Twelve things worth an evening — three of them playable right here.
A quick walk around Fort St George — History Times with V. Sriram
Old Madras, 1800–1960
Inside Mylapore's Kapaleeswarar temple
Photographs I couldn't take
Everything above is drawn rather than photographed — a city this photogenic deserves better than my straight lines. If you want to see the real thing, these archives are open, free to browse, and free to reuse with credit.
Dear Madras,
You are, objectively, too hot. Your traffic is a moral failing. You flood in a way that suggests active malice. Your best restaurants have the worst chairs.
And still: nowhere else does the sea turn up at the end of a road like an afterthought. Nowhere else do a temple tank, a basilica, a bookshop and a beach fit inside one evening's walk. Nowhere else does an entire city agree, without being asked, to be sentimental on the same Saturday in August.
387 years from a strip of sand.
Many happy returns. Save me a tumbler.
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