Who ruled Chennai?

Chennai, known until 1996 as Madras, stretches along a flat, sandy stretch of the Coromandel Coast on the Bay of Bengal, in south-eastern India. There is no natural harbour here, only an open surf beach, yet in 1639 the English East India Company chose the site for a trading post because cotton cloth was cheap and the local ruler offered good terms. The fort it built became the seed of a colonial capital that absorbed far older temple towns around it, and today the city is the capital of Tamil Nadu and the heart of Tamil political and cultural life.

Long before the English arrived, the area was dotted with villages and shrine centres such as Mylapore, Triplicane and Thiruvanmiyur, praised in Tamil devotional poetry of the 7th to 9th centuries. The Pallava kings, whose great port lay to the south at Mamallapuram, ruled the region in the second half of the first millennium CE, followed by the Chola dynasty and later the Vijayanagara Empire. A strong tradition, cherished by the region's Christians, holds that the apostle Thomas was killed and buried at Mylapore. The Portuguese built a settlement and church there, São Tomé, from the 1520s, and the Dutch set up a base to the north at Pulicat in 1612.

In August 1639 Francis Day and Andrew Cogan of the East India Company obtained a strip of coast from Damarla Venkatadri Nayaka, a local governor under the declining Vijayanagara kings. Fort St George was completed by 1644, and a walled "White Town" for Europeans grew beside a much larger "Black Town" where Indian weavers, merchants and labourers lived. The surrounding country soon passed to the sultans of Golconda and then, after 1687, to the Mughal Empire and its governors, the nawabs of Arcot, but the town itself stayed in English hands, so the map's coarse dates understate how early it became a British enclave.

Madras became one of the Company's chief settlements in India. Elihu Yale, after whom Yale University was later named in thanks for his gifts, served as its governor. Anglo-French rivalry brought war to its walls: a French force captured Madras in 1746, returned it under the peace treaty of 1748, and besieged it again without success in 1758 to 1759. The city was the capital of the Madras Presidency, which by the early 1800s covered most of southern India, one of the three great provinces of what became the British Raj. The University of Madras opened in 1857 and the High Court in 1862. During the First World War the German cruiser Emden shelled the city's oil tanks in September 1914.

The non-Brahmin and Dravidian movements that reshaped Tamil politics were born in Madras in the early 20th century. With India's independence in 1947 it was made capital of Madras State, renamed Tamil Nadu in 1969, and the city itself officially took the Tamil name Chennai in 1996. It grew into a major centre of car manufacturing, information technology, healthcare and Tamil-language cinema. The Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 struck its long beaches, and floods in 2015 caused severe damage. The metropolitan area now has more than ten million people.