Madras Day, and the piece I did not post
Were we celebrating 1639, or a coast that was already many places?
Madras Day is observed on 22 August. I made a panorama of the coast for it, Madraspatnam to Chennapatnam to Fort St George to Chennai, and did not post it. Something was off, and I could not say what.
The question that stuck was simple. Were we celebrating a city that began in 1639, or a British foothold on a coast that was already a set of older places? That sent me into H. D. Love's Vestiges of Old Madras, the Greater Chennai Corporation pages, and the Acts and orders that fixed names and units.
Ten things surprised me, and they became the notes on this site. Madraspatnam was already there. The only dated copy of the grant says 22 July, not 22 August. For a while there were two places. The rivers are not today's rivers. The fort on the postcards is not the founding fort.
The panorama was wrong in ways I could now name: the wrong rivers, a harbour that did not exist, a fort that was the later one. Getting it right would need geography I could check, not a better prompt.
