Studies in the Geography of Ancient and Medieval India c10.1

c10.1

European (mainly Portuguese) writers of the 16th and 17th centuries place a certain City of Bengala near the Meghnā estuary, *i.e.* the joint mouth of the Padmā and the Meghnā. This estuary extends over the wide area between the Districts of Buckergunge and Chittagong in East Pakistan. As Bengala (like the modern name *Bengal*) is a foreign corruption of *Vaṅgāla*, a celebrated historian has suggested¹ that this late medieval City of Bengala (which he locates near modern Chittagong) was the capital of the ancient Vaṅgāla-deśa and ‘gave its name to the kingdom, or vice versa, and, in either case, the old kingdom of Vaṅgāla must be located in the region round the city’.² He also suggests that the celebrated Pāla and Candra dynasties of Bengal originally ruled in the Chittagong region.³