Raigad Is A Living Mosaic Of World Cultures
By Manu Shrivastava
Sail out of Mumbai from Bhaucha Dhakka aboard an M2M ferry to Mandwa, step ashore, and then wind your way past Alibag, Nagaon, Revdanda and Kashid, continuing south through Murud towards Janjira, and the journey quietly transforms into a drift across layered histories rather than mere miles.
The Bene Israel synagogues, many of them locked and dark, stand in village lanes between Hindu temples and modest mosques. The Siddi community today is largely Muslim, with smaller sections being Hindu and Christian - assimilated, as they always were, into the living culture of the coast without dissolving entirely into it. Their descendants still live in and around Murud.
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| The Jewish cemetery in Korlai |
The Nawab's palace, a remarkable fusion of Gothic spires and Mughal domes, still stands on the Murud waterfront, inhabited by the present generation of the Siddi dynasty, its gate sealed with the old Janjira State crest.
The word Siddi comes from the Persian Sayed/Sayyid and means Master. The community that once commanded 572 cannons and received Mughal subsidies of 4,00,000 rupees now lives quietly on the same coast where their ancestors arrived as enslaved men and rose to build an unconquerable fort.
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| Murud-Janjira Fort, once ruled by the Siddis, stands tall in Murud |
At Revdanda, the crumbling Portuguese ramparts shelter vegetable gardens and children's games within their bastioned walls. The Church of Our Lady of the Sea, where St. Francis Xavier once preached to the inhabitants of 16th-century Chaul, stands open to the rain.
The lighthouse at Korlai still blinks across the water. And, somewhere on that beach, near a black stone plinth, Russian traveller Afanasy Nikitin's memory watches the same Arabian Sea he crossed more than five and a half centuries ago.
What does a traveller do with all of this?
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| Revdanda Fort is a remnant of the Portuguese influence in Raigad |
The honest answer is ... slow down. Come, not for a day trip but for three days. Take the ferry from Mumbai to Alibag. Walk past the Magen Aboth Synagogue on a quiet afternoon and peer through the gate at the teak bimah inside, still intact, still oriented toward Jerusalem.
Drive south along the coast to Revdanda and stand inside the Portuguese fort at the hour when the light turns amber on its old stones. Take the boat to Murud-Janjira and stay for two hours, not the forty-five minutes the ferry operators prefer. Walk around the Khokhari Tombs at dusk, when the baobab trees cast long African shadows on the sandstone domes and the Rajapuri Creek catches the last of the light.
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| Russian traveller Afanasy Nikitin's memorial in Revdanda |
"There is immense tourism potential in this zone that's just waiting to be tapped," says Salman Madhiya of Nargis Farm Resort in Murud, a preferred destination for tourists and revellers travelling to the zone. "When I arrived here in 2022, things weren't as developed, for tourists, especially.
Now, over the years, I have witnessed immense change in amenities, facilities and infrastructure by way of roads, connectivity and water supply. The government too, particularly, has been quite helpful," he maintains. "It has given a huge fillip to sustainable solutions like solar installations," he says. "With the introduction of M2M Ferries, where it took six hours to reach Murud from Mumbai, it now takes barely three hours." he adds.
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| Salman Madhiya of Nargis Farm Resort in Murud |
A ten-year-old darts off to retrieve a ball struck to the boundary by a batsman on a modest resort ground. He is ‘fielding’, eager to lend a hand to a group of weekend visitors occupying the space. “It’s great fun to play here,” he says, slightly out of breath. “I can go on for hours… basketball, cricket, swimming, or even carrom.” Nearby, other children erupt into delighted laughter, their voices rising above the clatter of play as they scramble across slides and swings meant for the young. "The Resort provides choices for all, young and old alike," says Salman.
The people, the landscapes, the food - the Konkani fish curry eaten on a banana leaf in a fisherman's kitchen is one of the great meals available to any traveller in India - all of this is here. But the deeper offering is something else - the proof, legible in stone and tree and text and living community, that this narrow strip of coast between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea was, for centuries, where the world arrived.
Not as empire alone, not as conquest, but as an accumulation of peoples who came by sea, who stayed, who ate the local rice and learned the local language and planted the trees of their homelands over their dead and built places of worship facing their distant Jerusalems even carved their epitaphs in Arabic on basalt and argued over trade and married into the landscape until the landscape was, without announcement or formal designation, the most quietly cosmopolitan district in India.
Just about 120 kilometres south of Mumbai by road, or a little over an hour by ferry across the harbour to Alibag, Raigad unfolds most generously between October and February, when the air is gentler and the coastline reveals itself in long, unbroken stretches.
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| Open space, swimming pool and kid-friendly amenities are great for families with children |
The road itself, now largely seamless from Alibag down to Murud, becomes less a route and more a narrative thread binding together beaches, ruins and settlements, best experienced in the unhurried comfort of a private vehicle, especially once you move south of Revdanda where the journey grows quieter and more contemplative.
From Murud, a short drive leads to Rajapuri Jetty, the gateway to the formidable Murud-Janjira Fort, reached by boats that ply the waters from morning until the sea permits, asking of the traveller at least ninety minutes to absorb its maritime defiance.
Further along, about six kilometres south towards Agardanda Jetty, the quiet dignity of the Khokhari Tombs, maintained by the Archaeological Survey of India, stands in contrast to the sea’s restlessness, while to the north, the weathered walls of Revdanda Fort and the historic Magen Aboth Synagogue remain easily accessible by road.
On the sands of Revdanda beach, facing the endless Arabian horizon, the Afanasy Nikitin Memorial stands as a quiet marker of journeys that, much like this one, blurring the boundaries between geography and time.
What emerges, in the end, is not merely an itinerary stitched together by distances and directions, but a slow, immersive passage through memory itself, where every bend in the road and every stretch of shoreline carries the weight of encounters of traders, travellers, conquerors and pilgrims, each leaving behind traces that refuse to fade.
The sea, constant and unyielding, appears less a boundary and more a witness, holding within its tides the stories that the land quietly echoes in stone, shrine and settlement. To move through this coastal arc is therefore to inhabit a continuum, where the past does not recede but lingers insistently, folding itself into the present, urging the traveller to look beyond the visible and recognise that here, time does not pass so much as it accumulates.
