Question

• Find out more about the beginnings of the three cities.
• Find out also more about the story of the names they were called by leading to the very recent changes from Bombay to Mumbai, Madras to Chennai, Calcutta to Kolkata, Bangalore to Bengaluru.
• Find out about the growth of other colonial urban centres.

Answer 1

The three major presidency cities of Mumbai, Chennai, and Kolkata began as strategic colonial trading posts established by the British East India Company during the seventeenth century. Madras was founded first in 1639 around Fort St. George as a textile trading hub along the southeastern coast. Bombay was acquired by the British Crown in 1661 as part of a royal dowry from Portugal, quickly developing into a major deep-water port and shipbuilding center. Calcutta was established later in 1690 by combining three local villages, fortified around Fort William to secure the lucrative trade of the Bengal region. These settlements grew rapidly, transforming from fortified mercantile factories into sprawling administrative capitals that fundamentally restructured India’s urban landscape.

The recent renaming of these prominent metropolitan cities reflects a powerful post-colonial push to reclaim indigenous cultural heritage and shed British linguistic legacies. Bombay officially became Mumbai in 1995, restoring the local Marathi name derived from Mumbadevi, the patron deity of the native Koli fisherfolk. Madras was renamed Chennai in 1996, tracing its roots back to Chennapatnam, the historic settlement that existed before colonial fortification. Calcutta transitioned to Kolkata in 2001 to align the official English spelling with the authentic Bengali pronunciation of the original village, Kalikata. Similarly, Bangalore officially became Bengaluru in 2014, returning to its ninth-century Kannada name found in ancient stone inscriptions.

Beyond these three massive coastal capitals, British colonial rule drove the growth of several other specialized urban centers across the subcontinent. The British developed unique hill stations like Shimla, Ooty, and Darjeeling to serve as cool, high-altitude summer capitals and sanatoriums for European officials. They also established expansive military cantonments and railway towns like Secunderabad, Jabalpur, and Kanpur, which grew rapidly into major industrial hubs. This colonial urbanization heavily disrupted traditional Indian trade networks, leading to the rapid decline of older inland commercial centers like Surat, Masulipatnam, and Dhaka as economic power shifted completely to the new colonial hubs.