Madras Day 2024: Made of Chennai

Chennai-Madras debate explored through history, emotions, and unique aspects of the city in a nostalgic and insightful manner.

‘Chennai is a City, Madras is an Emotion’ is an expression that someone very creative coined. It made its rounds on social media and even appeared in print before fading away. But it faithfully makes its comeback each year during Madras Week/Day. There is even a visual representation of it – Chennai written in block letters on a pool of water, with the reflection reading Madras.

Madras-Chennai. Except that now it is Madras-Chennai. As the distance between 1996 and the present keeps increasing, Madras recedes further and further into the distance. An entire generation was born under the new name and to them the old one does not matter. Those who were around when the name change happened were not a united lot anyway. There were some who remained stubbornly in favour of Madras. And my mentor S. Muthiah was one. He invariably began his speech by saying that before the British there was no Madras, and there was no Chennai either. I do not disagree with him, though since then, based on inscriptional evidence I have come to believe that Madras, short for Madarasapattinam is the older name and definitely predated the British.

There were others who were firmly for the change. My dear friend AR Venkatachalapathy even brought out a book, a compilation of essays titled Chennai, Not Madras. His view, and of others like him, is that Chennapattinam/Chennai was always the way the city was written about in the vernacular and so the name change reflects the views of the common people. I don’t disagree with this view either. Chennai however, is not a Tamil word. If it was indeed bestowed on the city because Chennappanayaka was the father of Damarla Ayyappa and Venkatadri Nayaks who got the British their toehold on the Coromandel, then it is a Telugu word, for that was the Nayaks’ mother tongue.

And so the debate continues. As Gopalakrishna Gandhi once said in a speech, Madras/Chennai will always have this bipolar identity. And he added in typical vein, that this is buttressed by old number-new number confusion for the properties here. He pondered over how we as a city eventually arrived at an unmandated convention now accepted by all – New Number/Old Number. Who came up with it and how everyone agreed is a mystery, but I somehow don’t think Chennai/Madras will work. And I wonder why Madras has not survived longer than it has, given that road and street names here die a slower death. They are victims of a long-standing pandemic – changing names to an extent where today at least one street has three names – one old and two officially valid even now.

But let us leave those conflicts aside for they are the stuff of dry facts. But what of emotions? Has Chennai moved us brutally into the world of reality, leaving the dreamers to rot in Madras? Hardly. And it is in this that I find the true appeal of the city. I have adapted to Chennai a long while ago and I find the name hardly matters. For the character of the city has not changed. You may call it Chennai, or you may shout Madras from the rooftops but there are some underlying emotions that will never fade. That is the intangible Chennai/Madras. In this I allude to concepts unique to this metropolis and list some of them below.

Take for instance the three rivers of the city, all of which are collectively called the Cooum. Does not everybody have an erroneous impression that boats plied on them in British times, and they are what they are post-Independence? And that someday they will be cleaned and brim with water? What about Chennai Super Kings – a team that probably has no local in it but yet is integral to the city? Is there any other metro that celebrates FDFS like we do? And do audio launches for films become mega events anywhere else? Do we not all watch Hindi films and add a ‘Ji’ when we address others thinking that makes us Hindi speakers and yet agitate anytime we suspect that the language will be imposed on us? Since when did Biriyani become our staple food? And when you ask outsiders as to what they saw in our city don’t they always say it is the Marina Beach? Why is it that to us the LIC building is the definition of a skyscraper though others have come along?

These and some other emotions that make up Madras/Chennai are what we hope to present in the following pages. This is to commemorate Madras Day, which in turn is an emotion. Historically there is no proof that the British established their base here on August 22nd in 1639. Or that they created this city, which probably was an existing village called ……?