Jalandhar
— — where the world's hockey sticks are shaped.
Not only on a wall.
“Jalandhar sits in the Doaba region of Punjab, between the Beas and Sutlej rivers, on the old Grand Trunk Road. The city makes much of the world's hand-stitched cricket and field-hockey gear, and has done since partition sent the workshops of Sialkot eastward in 1947. At its centre, the Devi Talab Mandir holds a sacred tank older than memory, one of the Shakti Peethas of the Hindu tradition.
Jalandhar, 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.
Jalandhar is a city of roughly 870,000 in the Doaba region of Punjab, north India, set on the Grand Trunk Road between the Beas and Sutlej rivers. It is one of the older continuously inhabited cities of the subcontinent, named in the Mahabharata as Jalandhara. Today it is the headquarters of Jalandhar district and a major junction on the rail line from Delhi to Amritsar, about 380 kilometres northwest of the capital and 80 kilometres southeast of the Pakistan border at Wagah.
Devi Talab Mandir, in the centre of the old city, is built around a sacred tank believed to mark one of the fifty-one Shakti Peethas of the Hindu tradition — the spot where the right breast of Sati is said to have fallen. The principal shrine is to Tripurmalini, an aspect of Durga. The present structure dates largely from the early twentieth century, raised over a much older site; a replica of the Amarnath ice lingam was added in the 1980s and draws pilgrims through the summer months.
Jalandhar makes much of the world's hand-stitched sports equipment — cricket bats, leather balls, field-hockey sticks, boxing gloves. The trade arrived in 1947 with refugee craftsmen from Sialkot and grew into hundreds of small workshops clustered around Basti Nau and the Sports Goods Complex on the southern edge of town. The industry employs tens of thousands and supplies many international tournaments; field-hockey sticks bound for the World Cup are still finished by hand in the lanes south of the GT Road. Workshops generally welcome buyers in the cooler months of November through February.