...With
the naissance of a rich ship building and seafaring culture and craft
manufacturing traditions, the coastal region of Bombay appeared prepared to face
global challenges and competition. The rapidly changing Gulf politics in the
second half of the eighteenth century paved way to major economic shifts. The
consequential ports of trade, like Bandar Abbas, Basra and Surat, lost their
importance and diverted trade of the Gulf to Muscat, Mandvi and Bombay in the second
half of the eighteenth century. Bombay
was especially a significant centre for this commerce since it was at this
harbour, that goods from the Persian Gulf, Red Sea, Africa, India and Europe
entered the Arabian waters. Bombay’s
strategic location between traditional pearling regions
of the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Mannar and the Red Sea and its commercial
viability along the East-West naval route made Bombay the commercial capital of
the nineteenth century.
...To the physical
landscape of the Bombay coast, the merchants had built networks to sustain a
mercantile economy, involving relationship with interior groups to obtain
commodities for trade. The decaying remains
such as the lighthouses, docks, forts and dharmashalas
or Musafirkhanas (rest houses) adjacent to the Bombay harbour reflect the
existential of once a busy mercantile age. For centuries, forts
and lighthouses have stood on the coasts where so much of our maritime history
has played out. It is fair to say
that the story of Mumbai’s maritime heritage is incomplete without the stories
of her forts and lighthouses, docks, rest houses, esplanade land among others.
First, we stopped at the Chakreshwar lake in Nalasopara West. Outside the temple along the compound wall are a row of stone carvings. Legend has it that these were all retrieved from the lake, presumably as a result of destruction of the original temple by the Portuguese who apparently destroyed most of the temples in the Bassein area after they took it over from the Sultan Bahadur Shah of Gujarat in the treaty of 1533 for helping him to counter the threat posed by the Mughals. The most impressive is this idol of Brahma with four faces that represent the four Vedas.
Later we went to what remains as ruins of a Buddhist stupa. In April 1882, Bhagvanlal Indraji, a noted archaeologist excavated at the Burud Rajache Kot mound in Merdes village, near Sopara. . From the center of the stupa (inside a brick built chamber) a large stone coffer was excavated which contained eight bronze images of Maitreya Buddha which belong to the c. 8th-9th century CE. This coffer also enclosed relic caskets of copper, silver, stone, crystal and gold, along with numerous gold flowers and fragments of a begging bowl. A silver coin of Gautamiputra Satakarni (Satvahans) was also found from the mound.
