Bharuch today is a large
seaport city of more than a million inhabitants and a
municipality in
Bharuch district in the state of
Gujarat,
India. As a trading depot, the limitations of coastal shipping made it a regular terminus via several mixed trade routes of the fabled spice and silk trading between East and West, so that it became known to history by various names such as
Bharakuccha,
Bhrigu Kaksha (the domain of
Bhrigu, an ancient Indian sage),
Bhroach, as well as
Bhrauch.
Bharuch was once but a small village on the banks of the Narmada River but that rivers inland access to central and northern India and with a location in the sheltered Gulf of Khambat in the era of coastal sea travel grew and prospered as a trading transshipment center and ship building port. Until very modern times the only effective way to move goods was by water transport, and Baruch had sheltered waters in a era without weather forecasting, compasses, and when shipping was necessarily limited to coastal navigation, and the general East-West course of the Narmada gave access to the rich inland empires at the upper reaches of the Narmada, including easy caravan access to the Ganges valley and Delhi plain.
Certainly by the 500s&_160;BC, the city was known (at least by reputation, via land-sea routes reaching the Levant) to the Arab and Ethiopian traders feeding goods westwards to the Egyptians, Greeks, Persians, Western Romans, Carthaginians, and eventually, the Eastern Roman Empires, and the Republic of Venice. It is likely even the Phonecians knew of it and so it has acted since antiquity as a link port to the luxury goods trade from the Far East and the interior of the Indian sub-continent to the civilizations of South-west Asia, the Middle-East, the Mediterranean basin including Northern Africa and Europe.
It was considered to be sacred among sages, and they would come to Bharuch and pray. In Bharuch, the celebrated Asura king Mahabali, conducted a great sacrifice. In this sacrifice, came a Bhrahmin boy named Vamana, who interfered with the king's sacrifice and put an end to his reign. A sage named Guru Shukracharya, in the lineage of Bhrigu, was the priest of king Mahabali.
