Gujarat's Tapti port racing to be the world's fastest-growing city
Surat, on Gujarat's Tapti near the Arabian Sea, means face in Gujarati, Hindi, and Urdu. An Economic Times study calls it the world's fastest-growing city from 2019 to 2035 after 11.5 percent annualised GDP growth between 2001 and 2008.
Roughly nine in ten of the world's diamonds are cut and polished here, and the city is also a textile and clothing powerhouse, the economic heart of South Gujarat and the state's second city after Ahmedabad. It lies 289 kilometres north of Mumbai and 265 south of Ahmedabad. Surat was named India's best city by a 2013 urban survey, picked as the country's first smart IT city under a Microsoft programme with TCS and Wipro, and shared the cleanest-city title with Indore in 2023 after sliding in earlier rankings.
Legend says a Hindu merchant named Gopi built the town around 1500, that astrologers proposed calling it Suryapur, city of the sun, and that Gujarat's Muslim king changed it to Surat after the Qur'anic word surah. Both names, however, appear in older sources, so the town predates Gopi. An army from Anhilwara passed through Suryapur in 990, and after Qutb ud-Din Aibak beat the Chaulukya king Bhima II in the 1190s, the local Hindu chief of Kamrej submitted and kept his post.
Under the Delhi Sultanate Muhammad bin Tughluq sacked the town in 1347, and Firoz Shah Tughlaq built a fort there in 1373. Gujarat broke away in 1407, and after its sultanate fell in 1538 local nobles such as Chengiz Khan ran Surat. Its rise owed much to the decline of neighbouring Rander, whose Arab merchants traded with Burma, China and Sumatra until Portuguese raids crippled it in the 1500s.
In 1514 Duarte Barbosa found a busy harbour crowded with ships from Malabar and far beyond. The Portuguese burned it in 1512 and again in 1530, Akbar's Mughals conquered it in 1573, and in the 17th century the Maratha king Shivaji raided it twice. European visitors spelled the name in many ways, from Suratt to the Dutch Sourratte.
Source: Surat
