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

22 May

22 May

In India

1545 Sher Shah Suri (born Farid Khan), founder of the Suri Empire in India, with its capital in Sasaram in modern-day Bihar, died. He introduced the currency of rupee. An ethnic Pashtun ruler, Sher Shah took control of the Mughal Empire in 1540.

1772 Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Indian reformer, was born in Radhanagore, West bengal. He was one of the founders of the Brahmo Sabha in 1828, the precursor of the Brahmo Samaj, a social-religious reform movement in the Indian subcontinent. He was given the title of Raja by Akbar II, the Mughal emperor.

1961 The Jnanpith Award was instituted. It is given for the best creative literary writing by any Indian citizen in any of the languages included in the VIII Schedule of the Indian Constitution. From 1982 onward, the award is given for overall contribution to literature; earlier a specific work used to be cited.

1989 India successfully tested Agni, an Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile.

2004 Manmohan Singh became the 13th Prime Minister of India.

Elsewhere

0760 The 14th recorded perihelion passage of Halley's Comet occurred.

1570 The first atlas Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World), was published by Abraham Ortelius in Antwerp with 70 maps.

1807 First US public library opened in Connecticut.

1859 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes series, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He wrote four novels featuring Sherlock Holmes.

1885 Victor Hugo, French poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and dramatist of the Romantic movement, died. He is the author of Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

1908 The Wright brothers registered their flying machine for a U.S. patent.

1939 Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini sign a "Pact of Steel" forming the Axis powers.

1972 Ceylon changed its name to Sri Lanka.

1980 The arcade game Pac-Man was released. The game featuring a dot-munching round yellow figure moving through a maze became one of the best-known video games in history.

1990 Microsoft released Windows 3.0.

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