On This Day

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Important events of history that took place in India and elsewhere on today’s date.

22 August

🇮🇳 In India

1639

The British East India Company established Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu (erstwhile Madras). Francis Day of the East India Company who had obtained permission from Vijayanager Emperor Peda Venkata Raya, secured the land grant from local Nayak for land on the Coromandel coast on which the Company would build a factory and warehouse for their trading activities. The place became the nucleus of the growing colonial city.

1996 Tamil Nadu changed the name of Madras to Chennai.

2012 Pranab Mukherjee was elected the 13th President of India.

2014 U. R. Ananthamurthy, Indian author, poet, and playwright, passed away.

2017 India's Supreme Court outlaws instant divorce (talaq) for Muslim men.

🌎 Elsewhere

1893 American short-story writer and poet Dorothy Parker, who was especially known for her wit, was born.

1894 Mahatma Gandhi forms the Natal Indian Congress (NIC) in order to fight discrimination against Indian traders in Natal.

1902 Theodore Roosevelt became the first United States president to ride in an automobile.

1920 Ray Bradbury, American science fiction writer and screenwriter was born.

1932 BBC begins experimental regular TV broadcasts.

1962 OAS (Secret Army Organization) gunmen unsuccessfully attempt to assassinate French president Charles de Gaulle; the incident inspires Frederick Forsyth's novel The Day of the Jackal.

2004 "The Scream" (1910 painted version) and "Madonna", two paintings by Edvard Munch, are stolen at gunpoint from the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway. It was recovered two years later.

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