It’s like something out of Ripley’s Believe it or Not. Nallasopara, the suburb associated with unscrupulous builders and tanker thugs, may have played a small but significant role in the decline of the Roman Empire. So surmises archaeologist Kurush Dalal.

For between the first century BC and the fourth century AD, Nallasopara (then called Sopara) was a bustling port city. Trade between India and Rome was at its peak, and Sopara, among other Indian ports on the Arabian Sea, lay at the heart of this trade. The Europeans came looking for Indian silk, ivory and, most importantly, spices – delicate cardamom, pungent cinnamon and fiery black pepper corns. But wily Indian traders insisted on being paid in silver in exchange. The payment in silver slowly but steadily bled the Roman coffers dry, hammering one more nail in the Roman Empire’s coffin, says Dalal.

Today, the history of this ancient port town, which finds its earliest mention in the Mahabharata written in the Vedic period, lies scattered between the Asiatic Society of Mumbai, the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sanghralaya and a few archaeological sites in the suburb.

The hunt for Nallasopara’s past began in 1882, when an archaeologist named Bhagwanlal Indraji decided to excavate a mound in the area. The village of Nirmal, where the mound stands, was rife with rumours of a fakir having found coins in it. Indraji’s dig revealed a Buddhist stupa. The brick stupa was cut open to reveal eight bronze sculptures of Buddha; seven caskets, one sitting inside the other, made of stone, copper, silver, crystal and gold; and fragments of a begging bowl believed to have belonged to Gautam Buddha himself. Since Indraji was a dedicated member of the Asiatic Society of Mumbai, the artefacts were presented to the Society. The black stone casket stands on display in the lobby leading to the society’s library. The rest of the relics, however, have been hidden away in a bank vault, says Hari Das, the cultural secretary of the Society.

The stupa dates back to the third century BC, probably around the time the Buddhist Mauryan emperor Ashoka ruled over India. However, the statues of Buddha are believed to have been installed in the stupa in the ninth century AD. As Dalal explains, after the decline of Hindu-Roman trade, the sea port saw activity again between the ninth and the eleventh centuries. This wave of trading activity was spurred by the stability that the rise of Islam brought to West Asia. This time Sopara formed a part of a wide network of trade spreading from West Asia to Japan. Perhaps, the renewed prosperity allowed the expensive sculptures to be installed inside the stupa.

Apart from the stupa, sporadic digs in Nallasopara have also uncovered fragments of three Ashokan stone edicts - or announcements of law. Ashoka placed 33 edicts across north India and Pakistan during his reign from 272 BC to 231 BC. One of them, a Prakrit language decree written in the Brahmi script, sits at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sanghralaya.

The decline of the seaport was largely a result of siltation, says geographer B Arunachalam, author of the book Mumbai By The Sea. He says that the port completely disappeared under the mounds of sand in the seventeenth century AD, leaving little trace of its existence.

The last archaeological dig in Nallasopara took place in the early 1990s, conducted by the Maharashtra state archaeology department in collaboration with some British scholars, but their findings remain unpublished. Today, the residents of Nallasopara are largely oblivious to their own rich cultural and commercial history. With development stretching its tentacles to this suburb, large tracts of land are quickly getting built over. While many people know of the existence of the Buddhist stupa, few understand its historical significance. Instead, most residents take pride in the antiquity of a few Hindu temples in the suburb. The priest of Vimleshwar Temple at Nirmal points out, “It was built in 1705, you know.”
The stupa at Nirmal is a 15-minute ride away from Nallasopara railway station.