Asansol
— — a coal town that learned to keep its own light.
Not only on a wall.
“An industrial city in the Paschim Bardhaman district of West Bengal, set on the banks of the Damodar River where the Raniganj coalfield meets the Chota Nagpur plateau. The collieries and the IISCO steel works at Burnpur have run since the British days; the long shed of the railway loco shop at Asansol Junction still turns engines through the night. Out past the slag heaps the Maithon and Panchet dams hold back the river. The Kalyaneshwari shrine sits above one of them, lit through the evening puja. from the studio
Asansol, 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.
Asansol is the second largest city in the Indian state of West Bengal and the headquarters of Paschim Bardhaman district, set on the south bank of the Damodar River about 200 kilometres northwest of Kolkata. The 2011 census recorded a municipal corporation population of about 1.24 million; later estimates push the urban agglomeration well above that figure. The city sits within the Raniganj coalfield, the oldest worked coal basin in India, on a low plateau between the Damodar and Ajay rivers. Its name is read locally as a compound of asan, the local hardwood, and sol, a level lowland, recorded on Company-era maps from the 1840s.
Asansol grew on coal and steel. The first commercial coal in India was extracted at Raniganj, twenty kilometres east, in 1774 by John Sumner and Suetonius Grant Heatly under a Company lease. The Indian Iron and Steel Company opened its Burnpur works on the western edge of Asansol in 1918; in 2006 it was merged into SAIL and a modernised plant brought online in 2015 with a hot-metal capacity of 2.5 million tonnes a year. The Eastern Railway loco shed at Asansol Junction is one of the largest in India, with a long covered turntable hall that has handled steam, diesel, and now electric traction.
The Damodar River, once known as the Sorrow of Bengal for its monsoon floods, is held in check above Asansol by a chain of dams built under the Damodar Valley Corporation, the first multipurpose river authority in independent India, established in 1948. The Maithon Dam, 48 kilometres west on the Barakar tributary, was completed in 1957 and is 4,860 metres long with an underground powerhouse. The Panchet Dam, 36 kilometres southwest, was completed in 1959. Above Maithon, the Kalyaneshwari temple draws steady evening pilgrim traffic. Below the dams the Damodar narrows and runs east through the coalfield toward the Hooghly.