Bhagalpur
— — the river where the dolphins still come up.
Not only on a wall.
“A city on the south bank of the Ganges in eastern Bihar, about four hundred kilometres downstream of Patna. Two things are known here: tussar silk, woven on family looms for several generations, and the Gangetic river dolphin, blind and surfacing in the slow stretch the local sanctuary holds. The Vikramshila ruins lie up the bank, the brick footprint of a Pala-dynasty Buddhist university the Khalji armies broke in 1193.
Bhagalpur, 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.
Bhagalpur sits on the south bank of the Ganges in eastern Bihar, roughly four hundred kilometres downstream of Patna and three hundred upstream of where the river bends toward the Bay of Bengal delta. The municipal population is around 410,000, with the wider district above three million. The city is the administrative seat of Bhagalpur Division. Two railway lines run through it on the Howrah-Delhi corridor, and the older quarter holds river ghats that still serve a working ferry crossing in the lower-water months between October and March.
The Vikramshila Gangetic Dolphin Sanctuary runs from Sultanganj down to Kahalgaon, sixty kilometres of the Ganges through Bhagalpur district. India declared it in 1991, and it remains the country's only protected stretch for the species. The Ganges river dolphin is blind, finding fish by echolocation, and surfaces in slow water at dawn and dusk. The Wildlife Institute of India counts a few thousand individuals across the whole basin. Boatmen run quiet dawn trips from Sultanganj ghat between October and March, when river flow is lowest and the dolphins are most visible.
Vikramashila University, founded by the Pala emperor Dharmapala around 800 CE, drew Buddhist scholars from across Asia for four centuries until the Turkic general Bakhtiyar Khalji destroyed it in 1193. The Archaeological Survey of India excavated a cruciform brick stupa, monastic cells in a square grid, and a small votive temple at the site near Antichak village, thirty-eight kilometres east of Bhagalpur. The ruins are open daily, and a small site museum holds bronze and stone sculpture lifted from the dig and from the surrounding fields.