General :: Clear Screen Command For BASH Shell

I am unable to use clear or cls command on bash shell. I have recently installed Cygwin and am using that for practicing unix commands.

I see that I can use Ctrl + L to clear the screen. I created an alias in my .bashrc to do the same as
alias cls='^L'

This is how i defined other aliases e.g.

And they work. Hence I assume cls will work too but this is what I get when I try to give cls on command prompt. Am i missing something? Is there a way to do this?

Then someone suggested, You cannot alias keystrokes to commands or vice versa. You could just alias cls to an echo command: echo -en "x0c"

And I added the following to .bashrc,

Sourced the .bashrc file. No errors but cls still does not clear the screen. Infact when I typed the echo -en "x0c on command prompt as well, nothing happened. What does this command do?