Agartala
— — a small capital under a very large palace.
Not only on a wall.
“Agartala is the capital of Tripura, tucked into the far northeast corner of India where the land narrows to a corridor between Bangladesh and the hills. The city grew around the Ujjayanta Palace, a Mughal-Indo-Saracenic pile built by Maharaja Radha Kishore Manikya at the end of the nineteenth century, its three domes still the city's skyline. The streets read more like Dhaka than Delhi — flat, green, woven with ponds — and the cafés open early. Half an hour south, the water palace of Neermahal floats on Rudrasagar Lake. from the studio
Agartala, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Agartala is the capital and largest city of Tripura, in northeast India, sitting on the plain of the Haora River at about 13 metres elevation. The international border with Bangladesh runs roughly two kilometres west of the city centre, making Agartala the closest Indian state capital to a foreign capital — Dhaka is about 140 kilometres away. The 2011 census put the urban population at around 400,000. The city was founded as the seat of the Manikya dynasty after they moved the capital from Old Agartala in 1849; the British recognised Tripura as a princely state, and it acceded to India in 1949.
Ujjayanta Palace anchors the centre of the city. The current building was completed in 1901 under Maharaja Radha Kishore Manikya, after the original 1862 palace was lost to the great Assam earthquake of 1897. It is a large two-storey masonry building in the Indo-Saracenic mode, with three domes — the central one rising about 26 metres — and Mughal gardens fronting two ornamental tanks. The state legislature met inside until 2011, when the building became the Tripura State Museum. South of the city, the water palace of Neermahal sits on Rudrasagar Lake, built between 1930 and 1938 by Maharaja Bir Bikram Kishore Manikya as a summer retreat.
Maharaja Bir Bikram Airport, west of the city centre, has daily flights from Kolkata, Delhi, Guwahati, and Bengaluru. The Akhaura Integrated Check Post is the most-used land border crossing into Bangladesh and connects to Dhaka by rail and road. The best months are November through February, when the plain is dry and cool, with daytime temperatures in the low twenties Celsius. The monsoon from June through September is heavy. Ujjayanta Palace and the Tripura State Museum are open Tuesday through Sunday; Neermahal is reached by a forty-kilometre drive south to Melaghar and a boat across Rudrasagar Lake.