Originally Posted by
Christopher
"Chennai" instead of "Madras" is a different type of change, since "Beijing", "Mumbai" and "Kolkata" are just different ways of transliterating "Peking", "Bombay" and "Calcutta" into the Latin alphabet, whereas "Chennai" and "Madras" are different words. In fact, I believe that they are part of the names of two towns that were subsumed into the urban metropolis that came to be called first "Madras" but now "Chennai"; "Madras" was considered to be possibly Portuguese.
I believe the original name of the ancient city in the area was "Chennapatnam" in the pre-christian era. A fishing village transliterated by the dutch as "Madraspatnam" was on the coast, and the british wanted to establish a port and trading post there, and when they did, they called it Madras. Eventually the chennai area and the madras area grew outwards and converged.
In the modern era, the state government wanted to rename the city, in the same fashion at Mumbai and Kolkata- but "Chennapatnam" derives from a telugu name.. Some indian history for you, madras has always had significant telugu and tamil populations, and when the country was being drawn up, telugus wanted Madras to be capital of andhra pradesh (a telugu speaking state), tamilians wanted it to be capital of tamil nadu. A compromise was drawn up and a holy city for hindus (tirupati and the adjoining mountain tirumala) were ceded to andhra in exchange for madras's inclusion in tamil nadu. The TN government is very pro-tamil and administration of the state and city government is overwhelmingly tamilian (then again, the state is overwhelmingly tamilian, so this representation is not surprising).
So in light of all this, and politics being what it is, it was seen as politically undesireable to give the capital of tamil nadu a telugu name; so they gave it the "shorthand" version, Chennai (which had been used for centuries to refer to the area, anyway.)
More than you wanted to know, I'm sure!