More than 150 years ago, the Madras Presidency under the British was spread across 1,59,798 square miles, occupying a considerable tract of the peninsula of India. The coastline of the territory included within the Presidency of Fort St. George extended on the east of the peninsula “from Orissa, in Bengal, to Cape Comorin.” On the west, the narrow strip of country, which included the Native States of Travancore and Cochin, formed the coastline “from Cape Comorin to the town of Cochin, where Madras territory again extends along the coast until its junction with the Bombay Presidency at the northern extremity of the South Canara District,” according to the Report on the Census of the Madras Presidency, 1871.
“In the centre of the peninsula are the Nagpore country and Berar, the territories of His Highness the Nizam, known generally as the Deccan, and the province of Mysore; but all of the centre of the peninsula, south and east of Mysore, belongs to the Madras Presidency,” says Chapter VI of the report, which dealt with the area, physical geography, and population of the vast region. The Presidency boasted of a coastline of about 1,600 miles. Its mountain ranges ran northward from Cape Comorin along the western coast, attaining an elevation in some parts, from 4,000 to nearly 9,000 feet.
