Faridabad
— — a city the Aravallis lean against.
Not only on a wall.
“The largest city of Haryana, set on the southern edge of the National Capital Region with the worn ridge of the Aravalli hills along its western flank and the Yamuna river to the east. Faridabad was named for Shaikh Farid, a seventeenth-century treasurer of the Mughal court, and grew through partition refugee settlement and post-independence industry into one of north India's heaviest manufacturing belts. Surajkund, the ancient reservoir cut into the hill, still fills during the monsoon. The annual crafts mela there gathers artisans from every state.
Faridabad, 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.
Faridabad sits in southern Haryana, immediately south of Delhi within the National Capital Region, with the Yamuna river forming its eastern boundary and the Aravalli ridge running along the west. The municipal corporation covers roughly 200 square kilometres and the urban population is above 1.4 million, making Faridabad the most populous city in Haryana. National Highway 19, the Delhi to Mathura corridor, runs the length of the city, and the Delhi Metro Violet Line extends nine stations into the older sectors. The district was reorganised in 1979 and again in 2008.
Faridabad was founded in 1607 by Shaikh Farid, treasurer to the Mughal emperor Jahangir, who built a fort, a tank, and a mosque to secure the highway from Delhi to Agra. The city stayed small through the colonial period and grew sharply after partition, when refugee townships were laid out for families displaced from West Punjab. The 1960s and 1970s brought industrial estates — tractor plants, textile mills, foundries — and the population rose past a million by the 1990s. The annual Surajkund Crafts Mela, started in 1987, runs each February with artisans from across India and a different partner state every year.
Surajkund, six kilometres south of the city centre, is a tenth-century reservoir cut as a stepped amphitheatre into the Aravalli hill, attributed to Suraj Pal of the Tomar dynasty. The tank holds water through the monsoon and into the cool months. Above it, the Aravallis run as one of the oldest mountain systems on earth, eroded to a low ridge of quartzite and schist. The Asola Bhatti Wildlife Sanctuary, immediately west of Surajkund across the Delhi line, protects roughly 33 square kilometres of dry deciduous forest where leopard, nilgai, and jackal still range.