This day 25 years ago it was Vanakkam Chennai | Chennai News – Times of India

Twenty-five years ago, on this day, the residents of the city woke up to find they no longer lived in Madras but Chennai. The previous day — September 30, 1996 — then Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu M Karunanidhi had issued a Government Order changing the name of the city.
“In 1969, then chief minister C N Annadurai got the name of the Sstate changed from Madras to Tamil Nadu,” says R Rangaraj, president of Chennai 2000 Plus, which runs programmes on the antiquity of Chennai. “Before 1969, both the capital and the state were known as Madras and that created confusion. Also, in other districts of the State, the capital was always referred to as Chennai or patnam, short for its original name of Chennapatnam.”

Theories abound as to how the names Madras and Chennai came to be, says historian KV Raman in ‘The Early History of The Madras Region’, originally published in 1957. One of them, according to Raman’s book, is that it comes from Madresan, headman of the village of fishermen who persuaded Francis Day to name the settlement after him. In 1637, Day, bought this piece of land for the British East India Company from the Raja of Chandragiri through a local chief named Damarla Venkatappa Nayak.
Raman’s book say the name may have also come from the Church of St Mary Madre de Deus, a third is that it derives from Mahraskuppam, mentioned in a Persian manuscript of the 18th century as the original name of the site granted to the British.
The name Chennapatnam though is not “shrouded in mystery”, says the book. Raman says the Telugu work Ushaparinayam, written by Anka, a brother of Damarla Venkatapa, refers to his brother Ayyappa as having built the town Chennapatnam, named after his father Chennappa.
Subsequently, Chennapatnam was the name given to the new town that grew immediately around Fort St George, says Raman in his thesis, while the older plot, Madraspatnam, lay to the north of it. Later, on account of the expansion of the city, the two became one.
K Sridharan, retired deputy superintendent of the State Archaeology department, says a more than 450-year-old inscription in Krishnagiri district mentions Chennapatnam.
Madras, Chennai, Chennai, Madras, whatever the tales behind the two names, the city survives and thrives.