Kalyan, India - History

History

Kalyan is known for its rich culture and glorious history. One such trace of the cultural remains is Durgadi Fort. Along the riverbanks of Ganesh Ghat, old brick lighthouses, which were used to guide vessels sailing up the river during the Maratha period, can also be found. Kalyan is a port for more than two millennia until siltation and the rise of Mumbai eclipsed it and its sister ports, Nallasopara, Thane, Vasai, etc. The port was ruled by the Maurya and Gupta Empires of North India and later was part of a petty Konkan principality vassal to the Yadava dynasty of Deogiri. Extensive ruins in Kalyan indicate the city's former magnificence.

Kalyan stands pretty on east side of a deep bend in the Ulhas River. Before the construction of railways it was a famous port from where a large quantity of trade was handled. Though now its importance as a port has diminished, there is considerable trade in goods, especially construction goods, now-a-days.

In the early Sixteenth century, kalyan was a small town, inhabited by Maharashtrians and Konkani Muslims.

After the Khilji sack of Deogiri, the Yadavas fled into the Konkan region and set up their base at Mahikawati, modern Mahim; Kalyan was a part of the brief Yadava state of Mahikawati. Mahikawati was conquered by the Muslims who set up petty coastal principalities.

As a major entrepot, Kalyan soon became, by 530-535 CE the seat of a Nestorian bishop. The Churches of South Asia which were ecclesiastically dependent on the Church of Assyria and Chaldea in Mesopotamia or modern Iraq, lands then subject to the Persian Empire (Sassanians), early fell with it into the Nestorian Schism and used Middle Persian as the liturgical language. The Konkan, Tulunad and Malabar Coasts of South Asia are marked by stone crosses with Pahlavi inscriptions.

According to some interpretations, Bombay region on the Konkan coast, a region which have been known after the ancient town Kalyan, was the field of Saint Bartholomew missionary activities and his martyrdom.

During Moghul period kalyan was as Gulshanabad. The moghul king Aurangzeb built fort & iddgah at port kalyan. He also built many mosques in & around kalyan, one famous mosque today know as kaali masjid.

During the Middle Ages, Pope John XXII, headquartered at Avignon, sent a group of five missionaries to the Mongol Emperor at Khanbalik, modern Beijing in China, under the Dominican Fray Giordano or Jordanus. On their way, they picked up a novice, Demetrius, from West Asia and then travelled through South Asia, succoring the Nestorian Christians there, who were hard pressed by the Muslims. Giordano left his colleagues at Kalyan and travelled back north to Gujarat. During his absence, the Muslim governor and Qazi of Thane summoned the missionaries and demanded submission to Islam; when they refused, they were murdered (1321). The local Nestorians collected their remains and buried them; Giordano, on his return, took them to Sopara and buried them there. The Muslim Arab sultan of Gujarat, when informed of this development, summoned his governor of Thane and the Qazi; the Qazi fled but the governor was executed for his actions that militated against international commerce. When a later missionary, Odoric de Pordenone (fr:Odoric de Pordenone), visited Thane in 1324-1325, he collected their remains and moved on to China.

The Martyrs of Thane were canonized by Pope Leo XIII and are Saints Thomas of Tolentino, James of Padua, Peter of Siena and Demetrius of Tiflis.

In the later Middle Ages, Kalyan was occupied by the Ahmednagar Sultanate, an indigenous dynasty founded by a man forcibly converted from a Hindu Brahmin family as a child, and then by the Bijapur Sultanate, an Indo-Turkish state in the Deccan in the 16th century, and later by the Mughals under the Emperor Shah Jahan, who fortified the city in the mid-17th century. It came under Portuguese sway for a brief time before being re-conquered by the Muslim allies of the Mughals, and was later conquered by the Marathas, who made it one of their strategic centers because it guarded the entrance to Mumbai and the western coast of India. Kashibai, wife of the Peshwa Bajirao was born in Kalyan. About eighty years after the Maratha conquest, the Maratha Empire was forced to cede it to the British and Kalyan became part of the Bombay Presidency, a British India province that became Bombay state after India's independence in 1947.

In the Middle Ages, when Kalyan was occupied by the Ahmednagar Sultanate, they gave name as Gulshanabad and in the time of Maratha it was changed to Kalyan..Kalyan is a port city of Shivaji Maharaj.India's first women Doctor Was from Kalyan City her name was Anandi Gopal Joshi