Place · Bay of Bengal port · India

Tamralipta / Tamluk

Also known as Tamluk, Tamralipta, Tamralipti, Tamluq

Periods

Second Urbanisation

Function

Trade & production

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

22.290, 87.920

Worth knowing

Ancient Tamralipta was one of eastern India’s most important maritime ports. Buddhist and Hindu traditions both passed through the region, and ancient texts describe its connections with overseas travel. The site’s Shakti tradition therefore sits within a much larger history of trade, migration and cultural exchange.

Connections (8)

• Trade routeMantai

  Tamralipta at the head of the Bay of Bengal and Mantai at the Palk Strait were the two ends of the eastern coasting route: Faxian sailed from Tamralipta and Ashoka's mission to Lanka is said to have left from there, and Mantai was the pearl and cinnamon entrepot where Bay of Bengal shipping met the Arabian Sea trade. A ship that did not want to round Sri Lanka transhipped at Mantai, which is why so small a place mattered so much.

• Maritime Buddhist corridorGuangzhou / Canton, China

  Tamralipta was the eastern Indian terminal of the sea route to China: pilgrims and merchants sailed from here through the Straits to Guangzhou, and Yijing's voyages in the 670s and 690s describe the whole circuit, including his long stops at Srivijaya to learn Sanskrit on the way. The maritime road replaced the Central Asian one for Chinese Buddhists over the seventh century, and these two ports were its ends.

• Traveller routeXuanzang

  Tamralipti was a major port in eastern India that Xuanzang visited during his journey. He described it as an important centre of maritime and religious exchange. From here he learned about Sri Lanka and its Buddhist teachers. The city illustrates how Buddhist intellectual networks were connected to India’s coastal trade routes and overseas world.

• Trade routePātaliputra

  Tāmralipta was the Ganges plain's outlet to the Bay of Bengal, about six hundred kilometres downriver from Pātaliputra. Faxian sailed from it, Ashoka's mission to Sri Lanka is said to have left from it, and Yijing came back through it — the eastern port for everything the middle Ganges sent abroad.

• Maritime routeNālandā mahāvihāra

  Yijing came by sea rather than over the passes, stopping in Srivijaya to learn Sanskrit, landing at Tāmralipta and going up to Nālandā where he stayed about ten years. His account of monastic discipline is the most detailed description of how an Indian mahāvihāra actually ran day to day. He also lists what a monk might own, how meals were timed and how the rains retreat was kept, in the kind of administrative detail no Indian source of the period bothered to write down.

• Sacred transplantAnurādhapura

  Tamralipta at the head of the Bay of Bengal was the port for Sri Lanka, and Sri Lankan chronicle tradition has Ashoka's daughter Sanghamitta sail from here carrying a cutting of the Bodhi tree to Anuradhapura, where it was planted and still grows. Her brother Mahinda had gone before her with the teaching. It is the founding act of Sri Lankan Buddhism, and the tree at Anuradhapura has outlived the one at Bodh Gaya, which has been replaced more than once from its descendants.

• River flowGaur (Lakhnauti)

  Tamralipta at the delta's mouth and Gaur two hundred and fifty kilometres upriver were both abandoned by the same westward channel as the Ganges migrated east. One lost its access to the sea and the other its river altogether. The whole western delta becomes a moribund landscape in the same centuries, which is the context for Calcutta being founded on it anyway.

• Life routeMahāvaṃsa

  The Mahavamsa has Prince Vijaya exiled from Sinhapura in the Lala country of eastern India and landing on the island on the day of the Buddha's death, and places the descendants of the same line in what is now Odisha and West Bengal. Tamralipta at the Ganges mouth is the port that coast sailed from, and the chronicle's own lion ancestor is where the word Sinhala comes from.

On these journeys

• Shakti Pitha system
• Uttarāpatha — the Great Northern Road
• Indo-Roman & monsoon trade
• Faxian — overland to India, home by sea (399–414)
• Yijing — the sea road to Nālandā (671–695)
• Ports transformed by rivers, sediment & coastlines
• India–China: Buddhist & knowledge exchange

Sources

Faxian's record; Tamluk excavation reports

• Wikipedia