Studies in the Geography of Ancient and Medieval India c10.33

c10.33

The chief points of interest in this problem are two. Firstly, there is not a single reference to this City of Bengala, so famous to the Portuguese, in the whole range of medieval Bengali literature, not even in the Bengali history of the Tripurā royal family which often mentions Chittagong. The Bengalis therefore did not know any place of that name, or knew it by a different name, i.e. a name of their own. Secondly, while some European writers like Rennell could not trace the city or its site, others denied the very existence of the city called Bengala. In 1689, Ovington. remarked, “A late French geographer (Baudrand) has put Bengala into his Catalogue of imaginary cities, and such as have no real existence in the world.” It therefore seems quite clear that even Europeans other than the Portuguese sometimes considered the name of the City of Bengala as a misnomer and had no memory of it after the collapse of the Portuguese power in Bengal. The City of Bengala thus appears to be a name given by the Portuguese to a city which was usually known to others by its Bengali name. As however there is absolutely no proof (in the Bengali literature and Bengal records of any period) of the existence of any city called Vaṅgāla in the south-eastern part of Bengal, the Portuguese name *City of Bengala* seems to have originally indicated the city *par excellence* (i.e. the chief city) of the country of Vaṅgāla, i.e. East Bengal. Names like Andhra-pura, Magadhapura or Māgadhapura, etc., are known to have been alternative names of the chief cities derived from the names of countries, and we have seen that the south-eastern, north-western and south-western provinces of Bengal were also known to the Muslim writers as Sonārgāon (Vaṅgāla), Lakhnautī (Gauḍa) and Sātgāon (Rāḍha) respectively after the chief cities of those provinces. As the chief city of East Bengal lay not far from the Meghnā estuary,² it might have been called the City of Bengala by the Portuguese. But apparently that name was used by foreigners (chiefly Portuguese), and the Bengalis continued to use the local or Bengali name. That is why the name could not be traced after the Portuguese collapse in Bengal.¹