Vadodara means banyan belly on Gujarat's Vishwamitri
Vadodara—also Baroda—stands on Gujarat's Vishwamitri River and names itself for abundant banyan (vad) trees. Gaekwad Maratha rulers left Laxmi Vilas Palace and Maharaja Sayajirao University. Earlier labels include Chandanavati and Virakshetra; Sanskrit vatodara lore means in the belly of the banyan.
The oldest traces lie in Akota, now a suburb, where hunters and fishers left dense scatters of tiny stone blades, and they were there by 1000 BCE at the latest. Early in the common era the same spot, then called Aṅkoṭṭaka, was a trading town of burnt-brick houses, where diggers found re-struck Western Satrap coins, a Gupta coin and objects that may be Greco-Roman. Under the Maitraka dynasty it prospered despite repeated floods, and a huge cache of Jain bronzes, including tirthankara figures and an elephant-shaped incense burner, shows it was a Jain centre.
The name Vadodara first surfaces in a copper-plate grant of 812, when a Rashtrakuta ruler gave the village of Vaḍapadraka to a Brahmin from Valabhi. By the 11th century, under the Chaulukyas, the settlement was called a pura, a city, and Jain worship shifted there from Akota; manuscripts copied locally date to 1123, 1128, 1156 and 1168. Under the Delhi Sultanate a band of Afghan nobles, each leading 100 horsemen, rose in revolt in 1344 and briefly held much of Gujarat before Muhammad bin Tughluq crushed them the following year.
Malwa troops sacked the town in 1451, and Mahmud Begada rebuilt it nearby as Daulatabad; the Muslim name faded but the new site became the modern city. Akbar handed it to a nawab after conquering Gujarat in 1573, and a Koli raid in 1705 plundered it for two days. English merchants of the 15th century wrote the name as Baroda, which remained official until 1974.
The 2011 census counted about 1.67 million people in the municipal area, with literacy above 90%. Refineries, fertiliser and chemical plants cluster around the Gujarat Refinery, and the city holds over 35% of India's makers of power-transmission equipment, along with rail-coach factories run by Bombardier, Alstom and Siemens. Its river often dwindles to a trickle in summer yet flooded catastrophically in 2005 and 2008.
Source: Vadodara
