Town, 29 miles north of Bombay, on the island of the same name. It was founded in 1536 and became the most important Portuguese settlement in northern India and a center of missionary activity. Saint Francis Xavier visited it in 1544 and again in 1548 when he founded the College of the Holy Name of God. It was the birthplace in 1564 of Saint Gonsalo Garcia, the Indian martyr. The Franciscan Father Antonio do Porto, known as the apostle of Bassein, founded an orphanage in the northern Bassein district in 1535 and it was there that the first Indian martyrs suffered in 1540. The town was taken from the Portuguese by the Mahrattas in 1739 and from the latter by the English in 1802. It is still an important center of Catholicism and a place of pilgrimage.