Bharuch

"Brotsch", by Peeters Jacob, 1690

Bharuch (Gujarati: ભરૂચ, Bharūca, About this soundlisten (help·info)), formerly known as Broach or Bhrugukachchha, is a city at the mouth of the river Narmada in Gujarat in western India. Bharuch is the administrative headquarters of Bharuch District.

The city of Bharuch and surroundings have been settled since times of antiquity. It was a ship building centre and sea port in the pre-compass coastal trading routes to points West, perhaps as far back as the days of the pharaohs. The route made use of the regular and predictable monsoon winds or galleys. Many goods from the Far East (the famed Spice and Silk trade) were shipped there during the annual monsoon winds, making it a terminus for several key land-sea trade routes. Bharuch was known to the Greeks, the various Persian Empires, in the Roman Republic and Empire, and in other Western centres of civilisation through the end of the European Middle Ages. During the British Raj it was officially known as Broach.

Quotes

• Broach (Bharuch) is south of Baroda (Vadodara). Here you can find a temple of Bhrigu Rishi on the bank of the river east of town. Bhrigu was the great astrologer who is given credit for the astrological treatise called the Bhrigu Samhita. Followers of Bhrigu are usually very good astrologers.
  • Knapp Stephen, Spiritual India Handbook (2011)

• The metropolis of this country is Minnagara, from which much cotton cloth is brought down to Barygaza. In these places there remain even to the present time signs of the expedition of Alexander, such as ancient shrines, walls of forts and great wells."
  • Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. Periplus, Chap. 41 [1]

• To the present day ancient Drachmae are current in Barygaza, coming from this country, bearing inscriptions in Greek letters, and the devices of those who reigned after Alexander the Great, Apollodotus and Menander.
  • Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. Periplus Chap. 47[2]

• Unlike the Patan Mosque, the Jami‘ Masjid of Bharoch, which is also dated C. AH 700/AD 1300 is a new creation. Although it does incorporate Hindu pillars, it is built on the usual Mosque plan with which we are familiar in earlier works. The brackets of the incorporated pillars and the carved interior of the corbelled domes are particularly fine. They, of course, necessarily recall the much earlier work of the Quwwat al-Islam at Delhi. It is important to realize that these primitive methods were still being used in the Indian provinces two hundred years after they were fully developed at Delhi.
  • Syed Mahmudul Hasan, Mosque Architecture of Pre-Mughal Bengal, Dacca (Bangladesh), 1979.