Hugli-Chuchura
— — the brick the Dutch left to the river.
Not only on a wall.
“A river town on the west bank of the Hooghly, about thirty-five kilometres upstream of Kolkata. The Dutch built their warehouses here in the seventeenth century and held them for two centuries before handing the keys to the British. The Armenian church still rings the hour. The Bandel basilica, older than them all, watches the river from its bluff.
Hugli-Chuchura, 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.
Hooghly-Chinsurah is a municipality in the Hooghly district of West Bengal, on the west bank of the Hooghly River roughly 35 kilometres north of Kolkata. The 2011 census recorded a population near 178,000. The town was the Dutch East India Company's principal Bengal trading post from 1656 until it was ceded to the British under the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824. Earlier, the Portuguese founded Bandel just upriver in 1571 and built the Bandel Church in 1599, the oldest Christian church in Bengal.
The European inheritance is still visible in the masonry. The Dutch cemetery at Chinsurah holds graves dating to 1743 and a domed mausoleum to Susanna Anna Maria Yeats. The Armenian Church of St. John the Baptist, consecrated in 1697, stands a short walk from the river. Above the bend at Bandel the Portuguese basilica, rebuilt in 1660 after Shah Jahan razed the original during the 1632 siege of Hooghly, carries the keystone from the first church set into its facade. The Imambara of 1861 closes the line south.
The town's calendar runs on overlapping religious cycles. The Bandel Basilica's feast of Our Lady of the Happy Voyage falls in late November and draws pilgrims from across Bengal. The Hooghly Imambara observes Muharram with a procession that has run for more than 150 years. Durga Puja in early autumn shapes the rest of the streetscape, with pandals along the riverfront ghats. The river itself rises with the south-west monsoon from June through September, and the ferries at Naihati run hard against the flood current in August.