MADRAS was one of the first ports developed by the British East India Company on India's south eastern coast in 1639. It got its name from Madraspatam, a small village a few miles inland.
But renaming Indian cities is part of a trend to rename streets and remove all traces of history to satisfy growing religious and chauvinistic aspirations.
Mr Muthuvel Karunanidhi, chief minister of Tamil Nadu state, said renaming its capital, Madras, was part of the rising demand to promote Tamil culture and language. But Mr Karunanidhi said the area was originally called Chennai, and land for the company headquarters in the coastal fort named after St George, England's patron saint, was donated by the raja or ruler of Chandrigiri. Renaming it was merely "righting" the record.
Madras becomes the second big Indian metropolis to get a new name recently, while scores of other landmarks associated with India's past are fast disappearing. Historians say the impunity with which locals tamper with signs and symbols of the past and the philistinism which underlines this approach confirm the age old adage that India has "only geography but no history".
The Hindu fundamentalist coalition government in the western state of Maharashtra, led by the Shiv Sena party, last year renamed Bombay, the state capital, as Mumbai, after the goddess of that name whose temple still exists in the city.
Mumbai, then a clutch of swampy islands, was given as dowry by the Portuguese to Charles II of England in 1616 after he married Catherine of Braganza. Charles in turn leased it to the East India Company which developed it into a major trading port, renaming it Bombay.
The Shiv Sena are also about to change the name of Aurangabad, a historic city 300 miles south of Bombay. It is named alter Aurangzeb, the last of the great Mughals who ruled India in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The Shiv Sena want to call it Sambhaji Nagar, after the son of a Hindu chieftain from Maharashtra who opposed the Mughal rulers around the same time. The Shiv Sena are anti-Muslim and try to give a Hindu gloss to anything even remotely Islamic.
Ever since independence many streets in major Indian cities have been renamed, in some cases more than once. In Bombay for instance, some major roads have been named after municipal contractors with dubious records. Even the son of a famous classical singer, killed in a road accident in Bombay in an inebriated state, has a road named after him there.
And last year the outgoing federal Congress government arbitrarily renamed the landmark Con naught Circus and Connaught Place, up market shopping areas in the hear of New Delhi, built in memory of the Duke of Connaught in the 1930s. The new names were Indira Circle and Rajiv Chowk (Square) after the prime ministers, Indira Gandhi, and her son, Rajiv.
"By renaming Connaught Place we cannot obliterate the reality that the British ruled us," said Mr K.M. Shrimali, a history professor in Delhi, one of hundreds of public figures opposed to the government's crude methods of denigrating India's past.
