Beawar
— — a market town the British drew on a map in 1836.
Not only on a wall.
“Beawar sits on the old Agra-Ajmer road in the Ajmer district of Rajasthan, founded as a garrison town by Colonel Charles George Dixon in 1836 and shaped from the start around its grid of cotton and wool markets. The bazaars run loud through the morning and quiet under awnings by midday. The Aravalli hills hold the horizon to the south. The town's old name, Nayanagar, still turns up on stone in the older quarters. from the studio
Beawar, 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.
Beawar is a city in the Ajmer district of Rajasthan, sitting at roughly 439 metres above sea level on the eastern edge of the Aravalli Range, about 54 kilometres southwest of Ajmer city. It was founded in 1836 by Colonel Charles George Dixon of the East India Company as the administrative headquarters of the Merwara region, on a planned grid laid out around four main bazaars. The 2011 Census recorded a population of about 151,000. The city was carved out of Ajmer district into the newly formed Beawar district in 2023 under the Rajasthan reorganisation of districts.
Dixon's grid still shapes the old town, with four named market squares — Soorajpole, Mewarpole, Chandpole, and Ajmeripole — at the cardinal gates of the original walled settlement. The Mayo School and the old Merwara Battalion lines were built in the local rough-cut sandstone of the Aravalli foothills. Beawar's nineteenth-century role as a cotton, wool, and grain entrepôt for Marwar and Mewar funded the haveli facades along the bazaar streets, many of which still carry their carved jharokha windows above the present-day shop boards.
The trade calendar still runs the town's rhythm. Beawar is one of the largest mandis in Rajasthan for wool, cotton, and oilseeds, and is known regionally for its tilpatti, a sesame-and-jaggery sweet that arrives in winter alongside the cooler weather. Holi and Teej draw the bazaars into the streets in March and August; the Urs at nearby Ajmer Sharif in the seventh month of the Islamic calendar pulls travellers through Beawar on the road from the south. The Aravalli's monsoon greens the surrounding fields from July into September.