GODAVARI  , a

river of central and western India . It flows at Cocanada, rice being shipped to Mauritius and Ceylon, and across the Deccan from the Western to the Eastern Ghats; its cotton and oil-seeds to Europe . Rice-cleaning mills have been total length is 900 m., the estimated area of its drainage basin, established here and at other places . The district is traversed 112,200 ' sq. m . ItJs traditional source is on the side of a hill by the main line of the East Coast railway, with a branch to behind the village of Trimbak in Nasik district; Bombay, where Cocanada; the iron girder bridge of forty-two spans over the Godavari river near Rajahmundry was opened in 1900 . There is a government college at Rajahmundry, with a training college attached, and an aided college at Cocanada . The Godavari district formed part of the Andhra division of Dravida, the north-west portion being subject to the Orissa kings, and the south-western belonging to the Vengi kingdom . For centuries it was the battlefield on which various chiefs fought for independence with varying success till the beginning of the 16th century, when the whole country may be said to have passed under Mahommedan power . At the conclusion of the struggle with the French in the Carnatic, Godavari with the Northern Circars was conquered by the English, and finally ceded by imperial sanad in 1765 . The district was constituted in 18J9, by the redistribution of the territory comprising the former districts of Guntur, Rajahmundry and Masulipatam., into what are now the Kistna and Godavari districts . See H . Morris, District Manual (1878); District Gazetteer (1906) .