"Recommended Background Reading" Top 5 Page for this destination Chennai (Madras) Favorite Tip by tayloretc

Favorite thing: A brief annotated bibliography of the basic guides...

Culture Shock! India - I think the author is a northerner, but the content is dead on. "Someone once said that whatever you say about India, the opposite is also true." So true. Highly recommended.

Rough Guide Chronicle: India - brief history and timeline, 30,000 BC - 2002 AD; very interesting, if you don't have time to read more in depth. Recommended.

Madras (Re-)Discovered - a historical guide to the city of Chennai/Madras, beginning about when the British arrived. (I've heard that many well-educated natives of Madras learned Indian history starting at the time of British occupation.) Good pre-British info, great old photos.

Lonely Plant: South India
Rough Guide: South India
Footprint: South India
These are all on the budget-travel end, and all are reasonably good at picking out interesting things. None of the phone numbers seem to be up-to-date, though. I doubt that's the publishers' fault.

Ponniyan Selvan (by Kalki) - fictional retelling of the flowering of Chozha history. Very telling, probably hard to find outside of India.

At Home in Madras: A Guide to Chennai - From the Overseas Women's Club, this is a practical guide to settling a family in Madras. Most of the details change fast. (The club is open to foreign women living here [foreign = not from Madras].)

If you want to learn Tamil script to read signs, try by learning to write it. Damned if I can tell you what it's called, but there's a workbook ISBN 81-277-0002-9 that shows how to write all 246 characters? figures? letter combinations?. You'll need to find someone to tell you what the corresponding sounds are. But it's good.

Fondest memory: Dravidian history and culture is at least 5500 years old, one of the oldest recorded on the planet. It's well worth learning something about it before you come. Note that the south is radically different from the north in tradition, language, and culture, so if you've studied Hindi and related history/culture/philosophy/religion/social studies it will mean nothing in the south.