Bardhaman

Bardhaman (Pron: ˈbɑ:dəˌmən) is a city of West Bengal state in eastern India. It is the headquarters of Bardhaman district.

Bardhaman became a district capital of British India. Burdwan is an alternative name for the city, which remains in use since the British period.

The history of Burdwan is known from about 5000 BC and belonging to the Mesolithic or Late Stone Age. The origin of this name dates back to the 6th century BCE and is ascribed to Vardhaman Swami or Mahavira (599-527 BCE), the 24th Tirthankara of Jainism, who spent some time in Astikagrama, according to the Jain scripture of Kalpasutra. This place was renamed as Vardhamana in his honour.

Geography

The region has an average elevation of 40 metres (131 ft). The city is situated 1100 km from New Delhi and a little less than 100 km north-west of Kolkata on the Grand Trunk Road (NH-2) and Eastern Railway. The chief rivers are the Damodar and the Banka.

The origin of this name dates back to 600 BCE and is ascribed to Vardhamanswami or Mahavira, the 24th Tirthankara in Jainism, who spent some time in Astikagrama, according to the Jain scripture of Kalpasutra. This place was renamed as Vardhamana in his honour.

Burdwan (Lok Sabha constituency)

Burdwan (Lok Sabha constituency) is one of the 543 parliamentary constituencies in India. The constituency centres on Burdwan in West Bengal.

Overview

As per order of the Delimitation Commission in 2006 in respect of the delimitation of constituencies in the West Bengal, this parliamentary constituency ceased to exist and assembly segments were part of either of the two new constituencies: Bardhaman Purba (Lok Sabha constituency) or Bardhaman-Durgapur (Lok Sabha constituency). Only Khandaghosh assembly segment will be part of Bishnupur (Lok Sabha constituency).

Assembly segments

Prior to delimitation, Burdwan Lok Sabha constituency was composed of the following assembly segments in 2004:

Bardhaman Raj

The Bardhaman Raj (also known as Burdwan Raj) was a zamindari estate that flourished from about 1657 to 1956, first under the Mughals and then under the British in the province of Bengal in India. At the peak of its prosperity in the eighteenth century, the estate extended to around 5,000 square miles (13,000 km²) of territory and even up to the early twentieth century paid an annual revenue to the government in excess of ₹33 lakh (US$49,000).

The estate was established and owned continuously by the Kapoor family, which had its origins in the Punjab. Its earliest known ancestor, Sangam Rai, is said to have migrated to Bengal and settled at Bardhaman in the sixteenth century. Bardhaman was never an independent territory since the chiefs of the family held it basically as the revenue collectors or zamindars of the Mughal governors of Bengal. Later, in British times after Lord Cornwallis's Permanent Settlement of 1793, the zamindars changed their status from revenue collectors to owners of the land they collected revenue from. Although its owners were both rich and powerful, with the chiefs of the family holding the title of Maharaja, the Bardhaman estate was not defined as a "Princely State," with freedom to decide its future course of action at the time of Indian independence in 1947. (Cooch Behar was the only princely state in Bengal and Tripura was another on its border. There were several princely states in neighbouring Orissa, especially Mayurbhanj that had a presence in Kolkata.)