Jamnagar
— — a brass city that ties its own colour.
Not only on a wall.
“An old Jadeja capital on the Gulf of Kutch coast, founded in 1540 by Jam Rawal. The walled core opens onto Ranmal Lake, where the small Lakhota Palace sits on its own island and a stone causeway carries the evening walk. The bandhani dyers have worked the same tied-and-dotted patterns for centuries; the brass workshops on the city's edge supply parts to half the country. Out past the salt flats the world's largest oil refinery hums on the horizon. from the studio
Jamnagar, 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.
Jamnagar lies on the southern shore of the Gulf of Kutch, in the Saurashtra peninsula of western Gujarat. The city was founded in 1540 by Jam Rawal of the Jadeja Rajput clan and served as the capital of the princely state of Nawanagar until 1948. The 2011 census recorded a city population of about 600,000, with the wider district closer to 2.1 million. Jamnagar holds two major modern distinctions: the brass-parts cottage industry that supplies roughly seventy percent of India's brass components, and the Reliance Jamnagar refinery complex at nearby Motikhavdi, the largest oil refinery in the world by capacity.
Jamnagar is the historic home of bandhani, the tie-and-dye craft of Kutch and Saurashtra. Dyers work raw cotton or silk by pinching tiny points of fabric and binding them with thread before each dye bath; the unbound ground takes the colour while the bound dots resist, leaving a field of small white circles. A finished bandhani odhani may carry between 5,000 and 75,000 tied points. The deepest reds come from alizarin and lac; the yellows from turmeric and pomegranate rind. The Khatri community in the Khambhalia gate quarter has worked this pattern, by hand, for at least four hundred years.
The old city is walked, not driven. Inside the gates, Bedi, Khambhalia, and Chandi Bazaar circle the central Bhid Bhanjan temple and the chowk of the Willingdon Crescent, a colonial arcade laid out in 1920 by the cricketer-prince Ranjitsinhji. Lakhota Palace sits on its own small island in Ranmal Lake and now holds a district museum of Saurashtra sculpture and arms. The Marine National Park, India's first marine reserve (1982), runs along the offshore reefs north of the city and is best reached by boat from Bedi port at low tide. Jamnagar Airport connects to Mumbai daily.