History of Chennai

 History of Chennai 

Formerly known as Madras, the city of Chennai serves as the capital of Tamil Nadu a southern state of India. The history of this metropolitan city dates back to 1st century when it was a small fishing village. But the area around the village had been economic, military and administrative importance since the first century. The area saw the rules of many kingdoms like Pallava, Chera, the Chola, Pandya and Vijayangar. Portuguese who came there in 1522 built a port named Sao Tome. In 1612 they established themselves well at Pulicat, just north of Chennai.

Francis Day of British East India Company purchased a small piece of land on the Coromandel Coast in 1639. The region was under the rule of Chennapa Nayak of Vandavasi who gave the British permission to set up a factory and warehouse for their trading reasons. After a year the British built the fort called as Fort St.George which further served as the main centre of the growing colonial rule in India. (Fort St.George is the same building which housed Assembly of Tamil Nadu state till 2010 when a new secretariat was built for the Assembly house.) Fort St. George was meantime one captured by the French only to lose it back to the British who thereafter take an extra care by fortifying the wall of fortress and by taking other pre measures to withstand the further attacks from French and other possible threats of Hyder Ali and Sultan of Mysore.

By the end of eighteenth century the British already had captured a large area around Tamil Nadu and some parts of present states of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh and established the Madras Presidency with Madras serving as the capital. The city witnessed large scale of development during the British rule and grew in a major naval base. With the arrival of railway this thriving city was linked to other major cities like Bombay (now Mumbai), Calcutta (Kolkata) etc. Madras (Chennai) became the only Indian city to be attacked by the Central powers during the First World War. The attack by the German light cruiser caused the destruction to shipping.

After the independence of India in Aug-1947, Madras became the capital city of Madras State which was renamed as the state of Tamil Nadu in 1969. The city also saw the violent agitation against the central government’s decision of making Hindi as the national language. It was in 1996 that the name of Madras was changed to Chennai. The city witnessed the natural disaster in 2006 when Indian Ocean Tsunami caused major destruction on the shores of Chennai killing many people.