Guwahati
— the city the great river bends around.
Not only on a wall.
“The city sits where the Brahmaputra slows and widens, just before it turns south toward Bangladesh. On the wooded hill above the western neighbourhoods, the Kamakhya temple draws pilgrims from across the subcontinent every June. The old ferry crossings still run at dawn, and the long road bridges carry trucks bound for Shillong and the rest of the Northeast. The river is roughly a kilometre wide here, and brown most of the year.
Guwahati, 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.
Guwahati is the largest city in Assam and the principal gateway to India's Northeast, sitting on the south bank of the Brahmaputra at roughly 55 metres elevation. The metropolitan area holds about 1.1 million people. The city is named for the Sanskrit words for areca-nut groves, which once covered the riverbanks. National Highway 27 and a major broad-gauge rail junction connect it west to Kolkata, north into Bhutan, and east toward Dibrugarh and the Tinsukia oilfields. Lokpriya Gopinath Bordoloi airport handles the region's international traffic.
The Brahmaputra is one of the world's largest rivers by discharge and the defining feature of the city. At Guwahati the channel narrows to about a kilometre between the south bank and Peacock Island, the small forested midstream rock that holds the Umananda temple. Mean annual flow at Pandu, just downstream, runs roughly 19,800 cubic metres per second, with monsoon peaks far higher. The river rises in southwestern Tibet as the Yarlung Tsangpo, crosses Arunachal Pradesh as the Siang, and joins the Lohit and Dibang in upper Assam.
The Kamakhya temple on Nilachal Hill is the city's principal pilgrimage site, dedicated to the goddess Kamakhya and reached by a steep road from the western neighbourhoods. The Ambubachi Mela, held over four days in late June each year, draws several hundred thousand pilgrims. The Assam State Museum on Dighalipukhuri Tank holds Pala-era sculpture and Ahom-period manuscripts. Most cross-river trips run from Fancy Bazaar ghat to the Umananda temple on Peacock Island, a ten-minute ferry. The dry season, from October through March, is the established time to visit.