Chennai

Mylapore was a port and temple town long before Madras existed, trading with Rome in the early centuries AD and mentioned by Ptolemy. San Thome grew beside it under the Portuguese in the 16th century. The modern city dates from 22 August 1639, when the English East India Company obtained a strip of coast from the Nayak rulers of the area and built Fort St George on it. The settlement of Madraspatnam grew around the fort, with the Company's servants in the White Town inside the walls and weavers, merchants and dubashes in the Black Town, later George Town, outside.

Madras became the Company's chief southern base, survived a French occupation in 1746 and a French siege in 1759, and was the seat of the Madras Presidency, which at its height stretched across most of the south. Railways from the 1850s, the artificial harbour completed early in the 20th century and a chain of colleges, hospitals and newspapers made it an administrative and intellectual capital. The Indian National Congress met here, and in September 1914 the German cruiser Emden shelled the oil tanks on the seafront.

After 1947 Madras became capital of Madras State, renamed Tamil Nadu in 1969, and the Dravidian movement transformed its politics. Car plants, textile firms and, later, software and hospitals reshaped the economy, and the population spread far inland along the highways. The city was renamed Chennai in 1996. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami struck its fishing settlements, the 2015 floods inundated large areas after exceptional rain, and water scarcity has repeatedly forced the city to bring supplies in by train and tanker.

Chennai regards itself as the guardian of Tamil culture. The December music season is the clearest expression of it: for several weeks hundreds of Carnatic concerts and Bharatanatyam recitals run in sabha halls across the city, with canteens attached that are as famous as the performances. Kalakshetra, founded in 1936, trained much of the modern dance world, and the city's temples remain working centres of music and ritual as well as of worship.

It is also the home of Tamil cinema, produced in the studios of Kodambakkam and followed with an intensity that has repeatedly put film stars into the chief minister's office. Posters, fan clubs and first-day crowds are part of street life. Literature, journalism and a strong tradition of public debate sit alongside; the city has been a publishing centre since the 19th century.

Religious life is plural and visible. Hindu temple festivals fill the streets with chariots and drums; San Thome and a long Christian presence, the Wallajah Mosque and a large Muslim population in Triplicane and the north, and Jain and Marwari communities in Sowcarpet all have their quarters. Manners are formal and fairly conservative: modest dress, shoes off indoors, and a reluctance to be loud in public. Kolam, the rice-flour patterns drawn on thresholds at dawn, is still an everyday practice.

About 6.7 million people live in the Greater Chennai Corporation area and some nine million in the wider metropolitan region, making it one of India's largest urban areas. The economy rests on car and component manufacturing in the industrial belts north and south of the city — which has earned it the nickname of India's Detroit — along with software services, the port, a very large healthcare sector that draws patients from across India and abroad, and finance and insurance.

Days begin early, with temple bells, kolam on the doorstep and filter coffee before the heat builds; office and school hours start earlier than in much of India for the same reason. Suburban trains and the metro carry commuters from Tambaram, Avadi and the Old Mahabalipuram Road corridor, where much of the software industry sits. Evening belongs to the beach: the Marina fills after sunset with families, cricket games, balloon sellers and sundal carts.

Water is the city's central problem. Reservoirs run low in dry years and groundwater is depleted, while the same flat terrain floods badly in the northeast monsoon, most severely in 2015 and again in 2023. Housing costs, the spread of the city over former marshland and the state of the Cooum and Adyar rivers are long-running civic arguments, and fishing communities along the coast press for recognition as the shoreline is built up.

Chennai eats rice, and it eats it early. Breakfast is idli, soft steamed cakes of fermented rice and lentil; dosa, the thin crisp version of the same batter; pongal, rice and moong lentils cooked with ghee, pepper and cumin; and vada, savoury lentil doughnuts — all with sambar and coconut chutney. Lunch is the meals, a plate or banana leaf of rice with sambar, rasam, curd and several vegetable dishes, refilled until the diner stops. Filter coffee, or kaapi, is made with chicory-blended decoction and poured between tumbler and dabara to cool and froth it.

Non-vegetarian Chennai is just as distinctive. Chettinad cooking, from the banking towns south-west of the city, is peppery and rich with star anise and stone flower, and appears in restaurants across town. Biryani in the local style owes more to Ambur and Dindigul than to Hyderabad, made with seeraga samba rice. Chicken 65, fried and coated in chilli, was created at Hotel Buhari on Anna Salai. Kothu parotta — flatbread chopped on a griddle with egg, meat and masala to a loud rhythm — and mutton kola urundai are night-time food in Muslim eating houses in Triplicane and the north.

Snacks and sweets fill the gaps: sundal sold in paper cones on the Marina, murukku and thattai, Sowcarpet's chaat and jalebi, and the Burmese noodle salad atho sold near Burma Bazaar by families who came from Yangon. Mango, jackfruit and tender coconut carts appear in the hot months, and buttermilk spiced with ginger and curry leaf is drunk against the heat.