Place · Portuguese fortified town · India
Moti Daman
The 1559 Portuguese fortified settlement at Moti Daman in Daman district, Daman and Diu Union Territory, 160 kilometres north of Mumbai — the oldest surviving Portuguese fortification in India after Diu. The 30,000-square-metre fort was constructed by the Portuguese to control the Daman Ganga estuary and the Gujarat trade. The 1559 Sé Cathedral (completed 1603 by Diogo de Melo Coutinho), the 1627 Dominican Monastery, the 1673 Church of Bom Jesus and the Jesuit Church of Our Lady of the Sea anchor its colonial-era architecture. Moti Daman (the 'Big Daman') is one side of the Daman Ganga; Nani Daman ('Little Daman') on the other bank was the medieval port town. The Portuguese held Daman until 1961; the Nehru government annexed it on 19 December 1961 in Operation Vijay.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 20.414, 72.832
Connections (3)
- Trade routeSurat
Daman and Diu sat on the Gujarat coast beside Surat, the Mughal empire's main western port and its Hajj embarkation point, and the Portuguese use of them was partly commercial and partly a licensing system: the cartaz, a pass every ship in the western Indian Ocean had to buy from them or be treated as a prize. Enforcing that on the Mughal Hajj traffic out of Surat is what made the relationship permanently hostile.
- Imperial administration ofEstado da Índia — Portuguese India
Moti Daman is one of the four Portuguese pockets that survived to 1961: Damão was held from 1559 as the northern port of the Estado da Índia, twinned across the river with Nani Daman. The Bom Jesus church, the fort walls and the Portuguese street grid inside them are still legible, and its incorporation into the Indian union in December 1961 came in the same operation that took Goa.
- Site adjacencyFort of St Jerome, Daman
The Fort of St Jerome stands on the north bank of the Daman Ganga in Nani Daman, immediately opposite the much larger Moti Daman bastion fort across the estuary; the two are a paired Portuguese defensive ensemble either side of the river rather than one inside the other.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Daman Ganga River”. Charles Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire; the Historical Archives of Goa; UNESCO’s Churches and Convents of Goa file.
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