What started as Madras is today the 34th largest city in the world.
Chennai turns 369 today. What started as Madras, based on a grant to establish a trading post spread over three sq km of beach sand given by the rulers of the Vijayanagar empire to two Britons — Francis Day and Andrew Cogan, has today become the 34th largest city in the world.
Historian, journalist and author of several books on Chennai S Muthiah, who continues to fondly call it Madras, believes Chennai is the first modern port city and is, in fact, the first city of modern India. Until 1780 or thereabouts, Chennai was an important trading post for the British empire.
The English started their commercial sojourn in India from Surat in Gujarat. For want of more business, they moved down to Machilipatnam in Andhra Pradesh where again they did not find enough business to hold them for long. Finally, they landed in Chennai to settle and start their long commercial and imperial journey in India.
The first signs of industrial activity started with the formation of Parry & Co that later went into manufacture of finished leather goods supplied mainly to the British and American soldiers. Cotton textile was, however, the oldest manufactured good from this part of the world to be sold all over Europe.
Independent British agents and those representing East India Company channelled cotton textiles to Europe from Chennai. Their Indian counterparts ie, the Indian merchants like Thambu Chetty and Lingi Chetty, are still remembered with streets and roads named after them in the George Town area in Chennai.
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Information technology outsourcing is only the modern form of exports from India. Starting with spices, cotton textiles and plantation goods way back in the 17th Century, this grew into supplies of automobiles in the 1940s to support the war efforts of the Allied forces against Japan during World War II. Muthiah recollects companies like Simpson & Co and Addison in Chennai were active in importing vehicle chassis during the World War II period to convert them into ambulances and armoured vehicles for the British and American forces.
Manufacturing took a more advanced and sophisticated spin with the establishment of Ashok Leyland (then Ashok Motors) in 1948 in Chennai to assemble Austin cars.
The company in 1955 went into truck manufacturing. Major component suppliers like the Rane Group and the TVS Group learned their ropes in the business by starting as suppliers for Ashok Leyland.
“In that sense, Ashok Leyland is the mother and father of automobile industry in the south,” says Muthiah. Today, the Indian automobile industry churns out over 10 million vehicles a year ranging from two-wheelers and cars to heavy trucks and tractors and is fast emerging as a hub for small cars in the world.
Successive Dravidian governments in their industrial and IT policies stressed the need for economic growth and have managed to make Chennai an important IT and automotive hub in the country. Power and infrastructure issues continue to bog down growth ambitions. Despite the challenges ahead for the next decades if not centuries Chennai is likely to become an even more important part of the modern India.
R Gopalakrishnan, executive director with the Tata Group, on his return from the Gulf in the mid-90s after establishing Hindustan Lever operations there, remarked how much even a small city like Chennai had changed within a few years of economic liberalisation in India.
It will be interesting to know what Francis Day and Andrew Cogan would think about the small trading post they had established 369 years ago as Madras that is today a vibrant and modern Chennai.