Barrackpore
— — where the 1857 rebellion lit its first match.
Not only on a wall.
“Barrackpore sits on the east bank of the Hooghly, about 24 kilometres upstream from central Kolkata, an old British cantonment that gave its name to the river road back to the city. The parade ground where Mangal Pandey fired the first shots of 1857 still keeps its open lawn. Down at Gandhi Ghat the river runs wide and brown, and the ferry across to Serampore takes a few minutes longer than it looks like it should. from the studio
Barrackpore, 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.
Barrackpore is a city in the North 24 Parganas district of West Bengal, on the east bank of the Hooghly River about 24 kilometres north of central Kolkata. It was established as a cantonment of the British East India Company in 1772, the oldest such cantonment in India, and grew alongside the Government House summer residence built for the Governor-General. The 2011 Census recorded the municipal population at about 152,000, with the wider Barrackpore urban agglomeration considerably larger. Barrackpore is connected to Kolkata by the Barrackpore Trunk Road and the Sealdah-Ranaghat suburban railway line.
The cantonment's older quarters still carry their colonial bones — the Government House park, now Latbagan, with its 1813 bungalow used as a summer residence by successive Governors-General; the Semaphore Tower, once the southern terminus of the optical telegraph line from Chunar; and the Flagstaff House on the riverfront. Gandhi Ghat, built where Mahatma Gandhi's ashes were immersed on 12 February 1948, faces the river in plain white marble. A short walk inland, the Mangal Pandey Park marks the parade ground where the sepoy fired on his officers on 29 March 1857.
The Hooghly at Barrackpore is roughly a kilometre wide and runs with the tide; the river still reaches this far upstream from the Bay of Bengal, and the water rises and falls visibly through the day. Ferries cross to Serampore on the west bank from the Barrackpore Rashtraguru Surendranath ghat in a few minutes, threading between cargo vessels working the river. Dolphins from the resident Ganges River dolphin population are occasionally seen from the ghats in the cooler months. Sunrise is the river's quietest hour, before the rowing clubs put out.