A Konkani port at the mouth of the Kali, built as a British district headquarters in 1857 on a harbour Arab traders had been calling the bay of safety for centuries — and the beach a Bengali poet spent four months looking at and never stopped writing about.
Karwar begins with a harbour rather than a town. The bay is sheltered by hills on the land side and by a string of islands on the sea side, the four-fathom line lies close in, and the tide moves only a metre and a half to two and a half metres. Arab traders called it Bait-e-kol, the bay of safety, and the name survives as Baithkol, which is what the port is still called. Pepper, cardamom and muslin went out of here long before anyone thought of building a town beside it.
The traders came in that order. The Portuguese knew the place as Cintacora, and also as Chitrakul and Sindpur, and in 1510 they captured and burned the fort at the river mouth — calling it Forte de Piro after the dargah of the Sufi saint Shah Karamuddin they found there. In 1638 the English Courteen Association, a rival to the East India Company, opened a factory at Kadwad village six kilometres east, buying muslin, pepper, cardamom, cassia and the coarse blue cotton the trade called dungari. The Association merged into the Company in 1649 and Karwar became a Company town. The Company built fighting ships in this harbour: the Britannia of 1715, eighteen guns, was built here to defend Bombay against the Maratha admiral Kanhoji Angre.
There was still no town. What existed was a creek, a factory, and a scatter of hamlets — Kodibag, Baad, Kathinkon, Sunkeri, Shirwad, Binaga, Habbuwada, Kajubag. The district headquarters of Canara was at Honnavar. Then came 1857, and after the Rebellion the British split Canara in two: South Canara went to the Madras Presidency with its headquarters at Mangaluru, and North Canara went to Bombay with its headquarters at a town that did not yet exist. Karwar was built to be it — laid out deliberately, like Panaji or Dharwad, which is why a place this size has a grid, a wharf, a sea wall and a Deputy Commissioner's office.
The Bombay connection is the thing that made Karwar what it is culturally. For nearly a century the town looked north — Konkani-speaking families with marriages in Bombay, Marathi-medium schools, Marathi films released here, drama troupes from Bombay and Poona touring every year. When the states were redrawn on language in 1956 there was no Konkani state to go to, because Goa was still Portuguese, and Karwar went into Mysore State. The Konkani conferences held in this town through the 1950s and 60s are part of how Konkani came to be recognised as a language in its own right rather than a dialect of Marathi, and it was the Konkani-speaking leadership here, led by P. S. Kamat, that argued before the Mahajan Commission that Karwar belonged in Karnataka. Maharashtra and Goa have both said otherwise since.
The modern town turns on the Navy. INS Kadamba, commissioned on 31 May 2005 and still being built out under the codename Project Seabird, is the third largest naval base in India and the home port of the carrier INS Vikramaditya; the armament depot INS Vajrakosh followed on 9 September 2015. The base took in two beaches and the island of Anjediva. Karnataka Tourism calls Karwar the cradle of Indian naval tradition, and between the wartime training establishment, the Company's shipyard and the base, the phrase is more accurate than most tourism copy.
Legend & myth
The oldest claim made for this coast is in the Sahyadrikhanda of the Skanda Purana, which places the city of Govapuri seven yojanas north of Gokarna and calls it papanashini, the destroyer of sins. Karwar sits inside that stretch, and the reference is the reason the town is sometimes described as part of an ancient Konkan sacred geography rather than as a nineteenth-century British creation. Both are true; they are just seven centuries apart.
Kurumgad, the island four kilometres offshore, is shaped like a tortoise, and the name says so — kurma is the tortoise, the second avatar of Vishnu. The temple on top of the hill is to Narasimha, the fourth. The island's jatra draws boats out from the mainland once a year, which is the one day it is genuinely busy.
More about Karwar
History
1510 — the Portuguese capture and burn the fort at the river mouth, known to them as Cintacora and renamed Forte de Piro after the dargah of Shah Karamuddin.
1638 — the English Courteen Association opens a factory at Kadwad, six kilometres east of the present town, trading muslin, pepper, cardamom, cassia and coarse blue cotton.
1649 — the Courteen Association merges into the East India Company and Karwar becomes a Company town.
21 February 1665 — Shivaji, having marched up from Bednore by way of Gokarna and seized Ankola, crosses the Kali and takes Sadashivgad.
1715 — Basavlingraj of Sonda names the fort at the river mouth Sadashivgad after his father, building it partly from the stones of the old Karwar fort. The Company launches the 18-gun Britannia from this harbour in the same year.
1803 — after the war with Veer Henja Naik the port activity shifts from Kadwad to Baithkol, and the old port is left behind.
1857 — after the Rebellion the British divide Canara, and build Karwar as the new headquarters of North Canara under the Bombay Presidency.
1882 — Rabindranath Tagore, aged twenty-two, comes to stay with his brother Satyendranath, the district judge here, and later devotes a chapter of his memoirs to the town.
1862–1947 — as a Bombay Presidency district headquarters the town gets its roads, its wharf and wharf road, its sea wall, a warehouse, staff housing, a post office, a kutcheri and a Christian burial ground.
1956 — the linguistic reorganisation puts Konkani-speaking Karwar into Mysore State; the Konkani conferences of the following years are held partly in this town.
31 May 2005 — INS Kadamba is commissioned at Binaga under Project Seabird.
9 September 2015 — INS Vajrakosh, the armament and missile depot, is commissioned at Karwar.
Why visit
Because it is the coast Goa used to be, forty minutes further south and without the price. A long shallow bay, a headland, islands offshore, and an evening promenade that belongs to the town rather than to visitors.
Because of the one museum: a decommissioned missile boat sitting on the sand that you can walk through, with a retired maritime patrol aircraft parked beside it.
Because it is a Konkani town in a Kannada state, and the food follows the language — a Goan-Konkan fish curry of coconut and cashew rather than anything you will eat in Bengaluru.
Because the district behind it is the best of coastal Karnataka — Gokarna, Yana, Mirjan, the falls at Magod and Sathodi, the Kali running back up into the Ghats — and Karwar is the practical base for all of it.
