Modern Madras is a world away from the fortified trading post established by the British East India Company in 1639 on a small but strategic strip of coastline.

Like other industrial cities enjoying India’s economic boom, its colonial heritage has been swamped by new monuments to power and commerce: gleaming IT parks, huge car factories, sprawling special economic zones and five-star hotels packed with cash-burdened investors.

Yet in another sense, India’s fourth-largest city cannot escape its past. In 1996, a quest for a postindependence identity led to the Government changing its name to Chennai, but that move has been resisted by most English-speaking locals, who still call it Madras.

The younger generation of residents, as they drive to their engineering jobs or buy electronic gadgets in vast shopping centres, could not care less about the British legacy of education, governance and jurisprudence.

Those with a longer perspective say that they cannot ignore the influence, for better or worse, of the British traders who used India as a resource to fuel the industrial revolution back home.

“Madras was the first city of modern India,” S. Muthiah, an historian and authority on the city, said. “It was the chief settlement; everything was established here first and there is a long business tradition. Whether we like it or not, Madras has had a solid foundation based on what the British left behind.”

The idiosyncrasies of Madras’s split personality are everywhere to be seen: from the civil servants bustling around the old military stronghold of Fort St George, now home to the Tamil nationalist state government’s offices, to the Indian executives desperate to become members of the Madras Club, a 175-year-old elitist playground that did not admit nonwhites until 1964.

However, it managed to get where it is today – a city rediscovering itself as a magnet for international manufacturing and a less stressful alternative for an IT industry bursting at the seams of its hub in Bangalore.

BMW, Nokia, Flextronics, Renault, Nissan, Ford, Motorola, Caparo Group, Dell, Accenture and Hyundai are among the foreign companies that have made substantial investments.

Tata Consultancy Services, India’s largest software services provider, employs more people – 22,000 – in Madras than anywhere else. The World Bank’s biggest office outside its Washington headquarters is here.

The “Gateway to the South” is not a one-trick pony, like some Indian cities. Bangalore was a leafy haven for retired army officers that exploded suddenly into India’s Silicon Valley.

Madras has grown more steadily on a long industrial history rooted in textiles, agriculture and leather.

A power surplus, good connectivity – the global submarine fibre-optic cable network lands in Madras from Singapore – and an export platform via India’s second-largest port have heralded a lucrative diversification in the past decade or so to software, hardware, healthcare, carmaking and business process outsourcing.

The state of Tamil Nadu, of which Madras is the capital, accounts for 35 per cent of India’s car component production, earning the city the tag the “Detroit of India”. Unlike most places in bureaucracy-heavy India, private enterprise is thriving, despite the interchange of the two Tamil nationalist parties every five years.

“Whichever party is in, their economic policies are the same, so there is a high degree of consistency,” Pradipta Mohapatra, southern chairman of the Confederation of Indian Industry, said. “You can actually do business here without having to have anything to do with the Government.”

Manpower and education are the other main selling points. The state’s 250 engineering colleges produce more than 70,000 graduates a year.

“The focus is on education, knowledge, execution and delivery,” said Sreeram Iyer, chief executive of Scope International, the captive outsourcing unit of Standard Chartered Bank, which employs 6,000 people in the city. “It fits a financial services business like ours, which requires intellectual skills.”

Madras has its issues: it shares the infrastructure inadequacies of every expanding Indian city, travails under an oppressively humid climate, faces a potential water supply crisis and is looked down on by the Hindi-speaking powerbrokers of Delhi.

Then again, throughout its history, Madras has always managed to make a mark disproportionate to its size and location.

— Other airline carriers from the UK: Air India, Jet Airways, Emirates, Air France, KLM, Virgin Atlantic, Gulf Air, Qatar Airways, Sri Lankan Airlines, United Airlines, Lufthansa British Airways operates once-daily flights to Madras, departing from London Heathrow. Passengers can book flights via www.ba.com. Club World fares from Heathrow to Chennai start from £4,123.10 fully flexible return including taxes, fees and charges.

Madras/Chennai

Origin of names: Madraspatnam was the white settlement at Fort St George under British rule; Chennapatnam was the name of the Tamil village beyond the fort

Area: 174 sq km

Population: 4.2 million

Density: 24,418 people/km

GDP (Tamil Nadu state): 20,750,283 rupees

Exchange rate: 81.5 rupees = £1

Cost of living: loaf of bread, 20 rupees

Visa rules: British passport-holders require a tourist visa

Timezone: GMT +4hr 30min

Website: tamilnadutourism.org

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