How Madras Was Born: Francis Day and Fort St. George

There is a precise moment when Chennai, as a single city, begins — and it begins with a bargain over sand. In 1639 an English East India Company agent named Francis Day sailed down the Coromandel Coast looking for a place to build a trading post, and came away with a narrow strip of beach that no European power had yet claimed. On it he raised a fort. The city grew outward from its walls, and it has never really stopped.

The Company wanted cotton cloth, and the weavers of this coast were among the finest in the world. What Day needed was a defensible foothold close to them — somewhere to store goods, house factors, and shelter from rivals. The sandy stretch he chose, between two rivers south of the Dutch post at Pulicat, would become the seed of Madras.

The bargain of 1639

The land was not empty and not simply seized. It was granted. The Coromandel coast here was under the ruler of Chandragiri, exercised through a regional chief, or Nayak, named Damarla Venkatappa Nayak. From him Day secured the right to the strip of coast — an area recorded under names such as Chennirayarpattinam and Channapatnam — and it is from those older Telugu and Tamil place-names, not from any English word, that 'Chennai' ultimately descends. In February 1640, Day and Andrew Cogan arrived with a small garrison of European soldiers and a handful of factors and writers, and set to work.

The fort rose slowly on the open beach. A first structure was usable within a couple of years, but the fort as a completed work is dated to 23 April 1644 — the feast of St. George, England's patron saint, which gave the fort its name. Behind six-metre walls, the East India Company had, for the first time on this coast, a fortified town of its own.

White Town, Black Town, and one city

What grew around the fort was two towns in one. Inside and immediately around the walls lay the European settlement the records call White Town. Beyond it spread the far larger Indian town — historically called Black Town, later George Town — where the weavers, merchants, dyers and labourers who actually made the Company's trade possible lived and worked. The wealth flowed from that second town; the guns sat in the first. Over the following decades the fort, the two towns, and the surrounding fishing villages knitted together into the single city of Madras, the Chennai of today.

One building inside the walls still carries the whole story in miniature. St. Mary's Church, consecrated in 1680, is the oldest Anglican church in India and the oldest British building in the country still standing. Robert Clive was married in it in 1753; its graveyard holds some of the earliest English tombstones in India. To walk through it is to stand at the exact point where a trading post became an empire's first Indian city.