Chennai
South India's coastal hub on the Bay of Bengal
Chennai is the cultural and industrial anchor of southern India, a coastal city of around twelve million strung along the Bay of Bengal where Tamil tradition meets heavy industry. Often called the Detroit of India for its automobile plants, it is equally a guardian of classical Carnatic music, Bharatanatyam dance, and Tamil cinema. Long, sandy Marina Beach, one of the longest urban beaches in the world, draws crowds at dawn and dusk along the warm Coromandel coast.
The city occupies a flat coastal plain on the Coromandel Coast, just above sea level, threaded by the Cooum and Adyar rivers and the Buckingham Canal running parallel to the shore. Hot and humid for much of the year, it depends heavily on the northeast monsoon that arrives from October, leaving it caught between recurrent droughts and devastating floods. The shallow, surf-pounded coast has no natural harbor, so its port was built behind artificial breakwaters.
The English East India Company founded Fort St. George here in 1639 on a strip of coast granted by a local ruler, and the trading post grew into Madras, the first major British stronghold in India and the seed of the colonial enterprise. Renamed Chennai in 1996, the city became the capital of Tamil Nadu and a powerhouse of automobile and electronics manufacturing, software services, and healthcare, while remaining the proud cultural capital of the Tamil-speaking world.