Indore
— — a city that goes out to eat after dark.
Not only on a wall.
“Indore is the Malwa Plateau city, set on a tableland of black cotton soil at around 550 metres, and the heat eases the moment the sun is down. The Holkar queens built it in the eighteenth century around the Rajwada palace, and the seven storeys of that facade still anchor the old town. After ten at night Sarafa Bazaar shuts its jewellery shutters and opens its food carts, and Chhappan Dukaan does the same on its own stretch. The city has been judged India's cleanest, year after year, and you can feel the civic pride in the swept streets. from the studio
Indore, 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.
Indore is the largest city of the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, with a metropolitan population above 3 million. It sits on the Malwa Plateau at an elevation near 553 metres, on the small Khan and Saraswati rivers, about 190 kilometres west of the state capital Bhopal. The city grew under the Holkar dynasty of the Maratha confederacy from the early eighteenth century, particularly under Ahilyabai Holkar, who ruled from 1767 to 1795 and is remembered across India for her temple-building and civic works. Indore is the commercial and educational centre of central India.
The Rajwada, the seven-storey Holkar palace, stands at the centre of the old town and dates in its current form to the early eighteenth century, with later additions. The lower three storeys are stone; the upper four are timber, with carved wooden balconies and a deep central archway tall enough for elephants. Damaged repeatedly by fire — most recently in 1984 — it has been carefully restored. A short walk away, the Lal Bagh Palace, completed in 1921 for the Holkar maharajas in a hybrid European style, sits in twenty-eight hectares of gardens and is now a public museum.
Indore has been judged India's cleanest city in the national Swachh Survekshan survey every year from 2017 onward, a record no other city has matched. The two great food streets are the night market at Sarafa Bazaar, which opens around 10pm when the jewellers close and runs past midnight, and Chhappan Dukaan — fifty-six shops on a single curve in New Palasia, mid-morning to late evening. Both are walkable and welcoming to first-time visitors. Mandu, the medieval hill fort of the Malwa sultans, is a clear two-hour drive south and worth a day.