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Story
In August 1639 a Company factor named Francis Day concluded a bargain that his employers in London would initially condemn as extravagant folly. From Damarla Venkatadri Nayak, a local chieftain holding authority under the fading Vijayanagara empire, Day obtained the grant of a narrow strip of sandy shore on the Coromandel coast, about five kilometres long, between the fishing village of Madraspatnam and the older settlement of Mylapore with its Portuguese enclave of San Thome. On this unpromising beach, where the surf ran so heavy that ships had to anchor far out and land their goods through the breakers in local boats, the English built the first territory they ever ruled in India.
The move to the Coromandel coast was driven by cloth. The painted and woven cottons of the southeast, the chintzes and calicoes of weaving towns inland, were the most sought after textiles in the eastern trade, and the Company’s existing factory at Masulipatnam, further north, suffered from the exactions of officials of the Golconda sultanate. Day, reputedly encouraged also by an attachment to a lady of San Thome, argued that a settlement further south, held on favourable terms, would give the Company cheaper cloth and a free hand. The grant he secured allowed the English to fortify, to govern the settlement, and to enjoy a share of the customs, in exchange for splitting revenues with the Nayak and his overlords.
The fort that rose on the beach was named Fort St George, its first modest walls completed around 1644 after years in which the London directors grumbled at every invoice. Around the fort a town assembled itself with the speed that opportunity creates. Weavers, dyers and washers were deliberately invited from the hinterland and settled in streets north of the walls, in what became known, in the blunt vocabulary of the age, as Black Town, while the English and other Europeans lived within the fort in White Town. Portuguese from San Thome, Armenian merchants, Jewish traders and, above all, Telugu and Tamil merchants and brokers made the place a Babel within a generation. The dubashes, the interpreter middlemen who stood between English factors and Indian commerce, became a class of power and fortune whose descendants shaped the city for centuries.
Madras grew because it stood at the meeting point of two systems. To the interior it reached into the great weaving economy of the south, advancing money through brokers to thousands of looms. To the sea it joined the Company’s network running to Bantam, to Persia and to London. It survived the collapse of Vijayanagara, passed formally under the protection of Golconda and then of the Mughals when Aurangzeb’s armies swallowed the south, paying rent and diplomacy to whoever held the hinterland. In 1653 it was raised to a presidency, answering directly to London, and by the century’s end it counted a population running into the hundreds of thousands, the first great city of British India.
Institutions followed trade. A mint struck the pagodas of the coast. A corporation and mayor’s court, established in 1688, gave Madras the first municipal government on the English model in India. St Mary’s church, consecrated in 1680 within the fort, still stands as the oldest Anglican church east of Suez, its registers recording the marriage of Elihu Yale, a governor of Madras whose fortune, made in ways the Company itself investigated, later endowed a college in Connecticut that bears his name.
The deeper significance of 1639 lay in a change of legal character that few noticed at the time. At Surat the English were tenants in a Mughal city, merchants under another’s law. At Madras they were landlords and governors, collecting revenue, keeping courts, commanding a fort and flying their flag over subjects who were not English. It was sovereignty in miniature, held under Indian overlords and hedged with rents and homage, but sovereignty nonetheless, and it accustomed the Company to the taste. The road from a strip of sand on the Coromandel coast to the mastery of India was long and unplanned, but it was at Madras that the Company first learned to rule.
