Jyotir Math
— — a monastery town the mountain is slowly taking back.
Not only on a wall.
“A town in the Garhwal Himalaya of Uttarakhand, at roughly six thousand one hundred fifty feet, on the pilgrim road to Badrinath. Adi Shankara is said to have founded the math here in the eighth century, one of four monastic seats marking the cardinal corners of the Indian subcontinent. The town is also the winter seat of the Badrinath deity. In 2023 large cracks appeared in its streets and houses, and the ground beneath Joshimath began, measurably, to sink.
Jyotir Math, 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.
Jyotir Math, also called Joshimath, sits at roughly 1,875 metres in the Garhwal Himalaya of Uttarakhand, where the Alaknanda and Dhauliganga rivers converge a short distance below the town. It lies on National Highway 7 between Rishikesh and Badrinath, and serves as the road head for the Auli ski region and the upper Alaknanda valley. The town's population was recorded at around 16,700 in the 2011 census. It is one of the four cardinal cathedras founded by the eighth-century reformer Adi Shankara.
Each November, when the Badrinath temple closes for winter, the deity is carried down the valley and installed in the Narasimha Temple at Joshimath, where worship continues through the snowed-in months. The procession returns to Badrinath the following May. Joshimath itself holds the seat of the Shankaracharya of the northern math, one of four such seats in India. The town's calendar is shaped by these cycles, by the pilgrim season from May to October, and by the ski months at Auli, above.
In January 2023 the National Disaster Management Authority confirmed that more than 860 buildings in Joshimath had developed cracks, with parts of the town sinking measurably over a matter of weeks. Geologists have long warned that the settlement is built on the debris of an old landslide, on a slope destabilised by drainage, by road-cutting, and by the headworks of the Tapovan-Vishnugad hydroelectric project below. Several wards were evacuated. The fracture lines through pavements and walls were widely photographed at the time.