Entry-Twelve
Three hundred years before my unwilling and extended visit, Madras, under the name of ‘Madraspatnam’, was a tiny rural village on the Coromandel Coast adjacent to other rural villages such as Egmore, Vepery, and Triplicane. These downtrodden equivalents of the English “Hamlet”, you will be unsurprised to learn given the growth of trade and enterprise seldom found lacking whenever the British Empire visits itself upon a – most times unwilling, it must be said – land, are now crowded districts of the Madras in which I find myself today. Back then, of course, European influence such as had existed at the time had been mostly Portuguese but, with the formation of the East India Company and the advent of the English, that influence had grown and the city along with it to become on
