Chennai is one of those Indian cities that has confused the world by changing its name; for centuries it was known as Madras. It was the oldest center of British power in India; with a presence dating from the 1630s the British presence there was part of the same colonial expansion that settled the eastern seaboard of the United States.
The connections run deep. Not only was Chennai the site of one of the first US diplomatic posts ever (the consulate was first established in George Washington’s administration), but long before the Revolution American colonists were living in the city and trading there. One of the names on the registry book at St. George’s parish church: Eli Yale, who was married in the church while carrying out the trading activities that earned the wealth he would later share with the college that now bears his name.
John Foster Dulles (President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State and perhaps the leading Republican foreign policy intellectual of the middle of the twentieth century) also had ties here; his grandfather worked as a Presbyterian missionary in Chennai, and one of the places where I spoke was the (still) Presbyterian college where he was active.
But Chennai today has its mind on other things. As the capital of Tamil Nadu state, it is the cultural and political center of India’s south: the part of the country where new economic ideas have had the freest play. Bangalore, the center of India’s IT boom, is a short flight away, and it doesn’t take long for even the casual visitor to see that this part of the country is significantly more prosperous than much of the beaten down north.
India like the US is a country of regions, and the different regions have different cultural identities, political priorities and foreign policy orientations. Southeast India, I quickly discovered, is much less interested in many of the obsessions of the north and the west. Pakistan, the presence at the back of almost every foreign policy discussion I had in Mumbai, hardly registers here.
Instead, it’s all about Sri Lanka. The biggest ethnic group in Tamil Nadu is the Tamils, and those are the people who were on the losing side of the long and brutal civil war in the island republic to India’s south. At almost every meeting I had, and especially when students were present, the question of Sri Lanka came up. A recent UN vote resolution expressed some mild concern about the postwar situation; after a lot of hesitation, India supported the US-backed resolution, largely due to pressure from the Tamil south. (The Delhi foreign policy establishment left to itself might well have voted against the resolution on both traditional grounds of non-interference and specifically to avoid offending Sri Lanka’s government and driving it closer to China.)
The sense of Tamil and southern identity is strong; people didn’t want their tax money propping up corrupt state governments farther north, and most of them refuse to learn Hindi, preferring to use English as a national language. (That last is fine by me.)
We had a rest day in Chennai and took a day trip to see the some ancient temples at Mahabalibapuram. These mostly date from the 7th and 8th centuries when a series of powerful kings ruled south India. Most of the temples are carved out of a series of large rocks and mountainsides near the coast south of Chennai. In vivid detail they tell stories from sources like the Mahabharata and thanks to the hard rock out of which they were carved, they remain detailed and lifelike 1200 years or more after their creation. As a UNESCO World Heritage site, they are some of the most impressive sites in South Asia and well worth a visit.
This was a useful as well as a scenic expedition. The monuments themselves, and the obvious pride our host took in them, helped me understand a bit more about just how strong South India’s identity and pride really is. It also helped me grasp how cosmopolitan South India can be and that there is nothing new about its affluence or about its far flung trading links. This part of the country is mentioned in Greek and Roman sources as having traded with the Mediterranean in ancient times, and the Coromandel Coast, as it is known, traded with Arabs, Chinese, Indonesians and many others long before the Europeans arrived.
Seeing these temples and hearing stories bout Chennai’s long, cosmopolitan history helped me understand something else about modern Chennai: its interest in and its concerns about China. Trade with the east has long been a major Chennai fascination, and the reappearance of China as a major power in the Indian Ocean has not escaped the attention of people here. China’s involvement with Sri Lanka helps turn this ancestral predisposition into something more urgent and focused: many of the people I spoke with in Chennai wanted to know what the US will do about China’s growing presence.
It was still Ramadan while I was in Chennai, and the US consulate invited me to its tenth annual Iftar, when leaders of the local Muslim community visit the consul-general’s residence to break fasts, exchange a few (non-alcoholic) toasts and to catch up with each other. It was an unusual event, not because it is rare for US diplomats to hold social events with Muslims (which happens all the time) but because in attendance was the Prince of Arkat, who is not only widely considered the head of the Islamic community in Chennai, but is the only Indian citizen whose title of nobility is recognized by India’s republican government.
The story, basically, is this. When the British arrived in India, they found it a teeming mix of kingdoms, empires, independent city states, feudal holdings and other complex arrangements. The weakening Mughal Empire, centered in Delhi, still nominally controlled much of what we think of today as India, but there were independent powers aplenty across the subcontinent. Rather than overthrowing all these dynasties and waging one war after the other across India, the British often preferred to make treaties with local potentates who accepted British overlordship while maintaining control (within certain limits) over their ancestral holdings. Maharajahs, Niwabs and other powers kept their titles and their revenues even if they gave up some of their autonomy.
The ruling house of Madras is descended from Umar ibn Al-Khattab, the Second Caliph of Islam and was established in South India at the time of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb. They sided with the British in the wars with the French in South India and while they lost some of their territory to the British East India Company, the family held onto much of its land and prestige, and were recognized as ruling nawabs by the British in the 18th and 19th centuries.
However, the British often looked for ways to bring the princely states of India under direct rule, and in 1855 they had their chance with the Carnatic. The 13th Nawab died without a direct male descendant, and the British applied what they called “the doctrine of lapse” to the district. Since there was no heir, the throne was vacant, and so the state fell into British hands and would be directly ruled.
It was a blessing in disguise for the dynasty. As compensation, the British awarded the nearest male relative of the last ruling nawab the title “Prince of Arcot” along with certain honors, lands and a pension. When independence came, the Indian government recognized all the ancient titles of the surviving ruling houses and granted them pensions, but in 1971 the Indian government at the behest of Indira Gandhi suppressed the lot.
But the Prince of Arcot found a loophole. The new family title — and pension — came as a result of a special British agreement and therefore did not come under the terms of the 1971 law. So while all the other Indian princely houses have lost their revenues and their government honors including a precedence ranking equal to that of state cabinet ministers, the Prince of Arcot survives, the only officially recognized noble in a land of more than 1.2 billion people. (See the family website here.)
The Prince spoke movingly about the suffering of Muslims in Myanmar and about his concerns about the possibility of sectarian violence, but his Islam is genuinely a religion of peace. The Iftar was a warm and friendly event, with frank discussion, good food and a lot of give and take.Notably, the Hindus, Muslims and Christians I spoke to in and around Chennai hailed what they called a very good pattern in communal relations, with many Hindus pointing out that in Chennai, Islam had come more by trade and intermarriage rather than through wars of conquest, and that perhaps as a result inter-communal relations were not as polarized here as elsewhere.
At the Iftar and in other places around Chennai, I learned another reason for the prosperity that is so visible here: factories. In general, India’s economic boom in the last twenty years was more fueled by high tech and IT than by conventional metal-bashing or even textile factories. Despite the large number of desperate people willing to work for very little and the existence of a strong, English-fluent management class, India has not been able to do what so many East Asian nations have done, and harness the power of export-oriented manufacturing to boost its development.
There are many reasons for this, ranging from poor infrastructure, perceived government corruption, problems with land tenure to labor laws and Maoist insurgencies. But in Chennai the right factors came together and a number of automobile manufacturers from around the world (including the US) have set up shop there. By comparison with many north Indian cities, Chennai is a model of middle class, shared prosperity. You can see it on the streets: more motorbikes, fewer animal-drawn carts, no hordes of beggars and homeless people, no children sleeping on the street.
Chennai shows what India looks like when it works. The communal tensions were in the background, the rich cultural heritage of the past informs without constraining the present, prosperity is rising and is at least somewhat shared. The city looks outward and believes that more success will come from deeper integration. Its leading citizens are thinking about the wider world and about their place in it; it is both proud of its regional identity and committed to the idea of India.
All in all, a great place to visit and a sign of hope in a troubled world. The world needs more rising cities like this one.