Satgaon

Satgaon, or Saptagram, 'the seven villages', was the great port of western Bengal, on the Saraswati River near its junction with the Hooghly. Gold merchants, perfume dealers, weavers, scholars and religious communities shared its streets, and riverboats joined the town to the sea and to the interior. Traders from Southeast Asia and the western Indian Ocean came for Bengal rice, cloth and sugar.

Under the Bengal sultans the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries were its golden age. In 1534 Sultan Mahmud Shah allowed the Portuguese to settle at Satgaon and Chittagong, and in 1567 the Venetian traveller Cesare Federici counted thirty to thirty-five ships at the port. Large vessels unloaded farther downstream at Bettore and sent cargoes upriver in smaller boats. The Saraswati meanwhile was silting up, and war between the Afghans and Mughals disturbed trade. By about 1580 the Portuguese had founded a new settlement at Hooghly on the main stream, and after Mughal forces drove them out in 1632 the new town of Hooghly, not Satgaon, was the main port of the delta. Paper-making and other crafts continued in the old town for generations.