Godavari River
— — the river the south remembers first.
Not only on a wall.
“The second-longest river in India, and the older of the two great peninsular rivers. The Godavari rises at Trimbakeshwar in the Western Ghats and travels about 1,465 kilometres east across the Deccan plateau to a wide delta on the Bay of Bengal. Along the way it passes the ghats at Nashik, the temple-town of Bhadrachalam, and the broad bend at Rajahmundry where the Pushkaram festival is kept every twelve years. The Telugu speakers downstream call it Ganga of the South. It is a working river, a sacred river, and an old one.
Godavari River, 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.
The Godavari is the longest river of peninsular India and the second-longest river in the country after the Ganges. It rises near Trimbakeshwar in the Western Ghats of Maharashtra at about 1,067 metres elevation and flows roughly 1,465 kilometres east-southeast across Maharashtra, Telangana, and Andhra Pradesh before reaching the Bay of Bengal in a delta near Antarvedi. Its drainage basin covers about 312,800 square kilometres, almost a tenth of India's land area. Major tributaries — the Pravara, the Manjira, the Indravati, the Sabari — join from both sides. The lower delta is one of the most productive rice-growing regions of the country.
The river is fed almost entirely by the southwest monsoon, which arrives in the upper basin in June and runs into September. Mean annual flow at the delta is about 110 cubic kilometres, with a sharp wet-season peak; most of that volume passes in roughly three months. The Jayakwadi dam in Maharashtra, the Sriram Sagar project in Telangana, and the Dowleswaram Barrage near Rajahmundry — built in 1850 by Sir Arthur Cotton and rebuilt in 1970 — manage the lower flow for irrigation. In the dry months the upper river can run shallow over bare basalt; downstream of the barrages it remains broad and slow year-round.
The Godavari is one of the seven sacred rivers of Hindu tradition. Pushkaram, the river's principal festival, is observed once every twelve years when Jupiter enters Leo; the most recent full Pushkaram on the Godavari ran from 14 to 25 July 2015 and drew an estimated thirty million pilgrims to the ghats at Rajahmundry, Bhadrachalam, and Nashik. Trimbakeshwar at the source holds a Simhastha Kumbh on the same twelve-year cycle. The temple complex at Bhadrachalam, dedicated to Rama, sits directly on the river and is the focus of the Sri Rama Navami festival each spring.