presidencies in British India: Bombay, Madras, and Bengal

presidencies in British India: Bombay, Madras, and Bengal, in British India, provinces under the direct control and supervision of, early on, the East India Company and, after 1857, the British government. The three key presidencies in India were the Madras Presidency, the Bengal Presidency, and the Bombay Presidency.

Those provinces were centered on the cities of Madras (now Chennai), Calcutta (now Kolkata), and Bombay (now Mumbai), respectively, and each city played a key role in the spread of British trade and commerce in India. Set up to consolidate English rule in those economically critical cities, the presidencies eventually evolved into larger provinces under British control.

The Madras Presidency

Madras was the first of the three major presidencies to be set up. At its peak, it included most of what is now Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu and parts of Kerala, Karnataka, Odisha, and Telangana.

In 1640 the East India Company opened a trading post at the fishing village of Madraspatnam (later Madras, now Chennai) with the permission of the local ruler. Fort Saint George was built there and became the English headquarters on the Coromandel Coast. Madras was set up as a presidency in 1652 but was downgraded in 1655 before being given the status of a presidency again in 1684. For almost a hundred years after it first became a presidency, Madras continued as a trading post with little political involvement. It came under French occupation from 1746 to 1749 before it was restored to the British at the end of the First Carnatic War. As French influence in India declined, the Madras Presidency became more politically active.

The presidency expanded in territory through alliances, such as with the nizam of Hyderabad, who ceded some of his territories in return for acknowledgment of his princely state, as well as through wars. The Mysore Wars, won by the British, helped expand the Madras Presidency in the second half of the 18th century.

After Indian independence in 1947, the Madras Presidency became Madras state. The state’s Telugu-speaking areas were separated to form part of the new state of Andhra Pradesh in 1953. Three years later Madras was divided further, some areas going to the new state of Kerala and other areas becoming part of Mysore (now Karnataka) state. What remained of Madras state was renamed Tamil Nadu in 1969, with the city of Madras as its capital.

The Bombay Presidency

The Bombay Presidency began in 1661, when the islands of Bombay came under English control as part of the marriage settlement between King Charles II and Catherine of Braganza, sister of the king of Portugal. The English crown ceded the presidency to the East India Company in 1668. For many years Bombay served merely as a trading post on the west coast of India and was constantly at risk of attack from the Mughals, Marathas, and other local princes. Bombay was originally subordinated to the trading port of Surat, but it gradually expanded, and by 1703 it was serving as the English seat of power in western India.

With the decline of the Mughal Empire and the end of Maratha power in the 18th century, trade and communications with the mainland were established, existing connections with Europe were extended, and the Bombay Presidency began to prosper. At its greatest extent, it included the western coast of India from the Konkan to Karachi and Sindh, and it even stretched to Aden (in what is now Yemen). Aden and Sindh were separated from the Bombay Presidency in the 1930s.

Upon India’s independence, the Bombay Presidency was renamed Bombay state. In 1956, following the passage of India’s States Reorganization Act, Bombay state was dissolved, and its territory was absorbed into the new states of Gujarat and Maharashtra. The city of Bombay was named the capital of Maharashtra.

The Bengal Presidency

The city of Calcutta was founded in 1690 with a factory (that is, trading post) in a then swampy region after the East India Company was forced to exit Chittagong to escape Mughal control. A fort was established around the factory in 1696 after a local rebellion, and in 1700 this fort, now named Fort William, became the seat of a presidency in Bengal. The last of the three major presidencies, it soon turned out to be the most lucrative.

Fort William was completed in 1716, and in 1717 the East India Company was granted free trade in Bengal by the Mughal emperor Farrukhsiyar. Over the next few years Mughal influence in the region declined, and Bengal came under the control of the hereditary nawabs. In 1755 Sirāj al-Dawlah (also known as Siraj-ud-Daulah) became nawab of Bengal and adopted a pro-French policy. He was unhappy over the British fort’s expansion without his permission as well as British interference in political affairs. Sirāj al-Dawlah captured Fort William and infamously confined 146 British prisoners in a small dungeon, where 123 of them died of suffocation and dehydration in the crush. The incident, its site known as the “Black Hole of Calcutta,” was used by the British as a justification for revenge. Lieut. Col. Robert Clive, through a combination of tactics and treachery, defeated Sirāj al-Dawlah in the Battle of Plassey in 1757.

The East India Company appointed Clive governor of Bengal, and in 1765 he secured the right to collect taxes and revenues for Bengal from the Mughal emperor Shah ʿĀlam II. The taxes collected by the British allowed them to buy Indian goods for export abroad, effectively financing further trade and conquest. The Battle of Plassey thus also marked a transition for the British in India from a trading power to a full-blown imperial power. Over the next few decades, Bengal served as the launchpad for further territorial expansion. The Bengal Presidency, at its greatest extent, stretched up to Punjab in the northwest, Assam in the northeast, and parts of Burma (now Myanmar) and the Strait of Malacca in the southeast. Over the second half of the 19th century the large province was split into several parts, and by the end of the 19th century the Bengal Presidency had come to include only what are now the states of Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, and Odisha.

In 1905, in a bid to drive a wedge between the Hindu and Muslim communities of Bengal, the Bengal Presidency was divided into East Bengal and West Bengal along communal lines. Following protests, the partition was annulled in 1911, and West and East Bengal were formally reunited early the following year. However, the provinces of Bihar, Assam, and Odisha were excluded from the newly reunified Bengal Presidency.

The reunified presidency continued as a part of the British raj but with diminished importance, as the capital of British India had moved to Delhi in 1911. In 1946 the Bengal Presidency was again split into West Bengal and East Bengal in preparation for the partition of India. Upon India’s independence, West Bengal became a state of India with its capital at Calcutta and subsumed the princely state of Cooch Behar. East Bengal became a region of Pakistan and acquired independence in 1971 to become the country of Bangladesh.