Kota
— — the sandstone city the river bends around.
Not only on a wall.
“A working city on the Chambal, walled in honey-coloured stone and ringed by the limestone country that gives Kota its name. The river runs wide and slow past the old palace ghats. In the late afternoon the cenotaphs at Kshar Bagh throw long shadows and the parrots come back to the fort. A place that has been quarried, painted, and lived in for four hundred years. from the studio
Kota, 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.
Kota sits on the east bank of the Chambal River in southeastern Rajasthan, about 240 kilometres south of Jaipur, at an elevation of around 271 metres. It grew up around the Garh Palace complex begun in 1264 and expanded by successive Hada Rajput rulers, who broke from neighbouring Bundi in 1631 to form their own kingdom. The river, dammed downstream at the Kota Barrage, supplies one of India's older hydroelectric grids. The old city's quarries gave the country a building stone — Kota stone — used in floors and courtyards across India.
The Kota school of painting, a court tradition that broke from Bundi in the seventeenth century, is best known for its hunting scenes set in the Chambal ravines. The same ravines fed the city its building material. Kota stone, a fine-grained limestone quarried in the Ramganj Mandi belt south of the city, has been used in Indian flooring for over a century and is shipped from here across the country. The City Palace murals, the cenotaph friezes at Kshar Bagh, and the working quarries all share one palette of grey-green and honey.
The City Palace and Rao Madho Singh Museum sit inside the Garh complex on the riverbank, open most days for a modest entry fee. The Chambal Garden and the cenotaphs at Kshar Bagh are short auto-rickshaw rides from the old city. October to March is the comfortable season; summer temperatures climb past 40°C. Kota Junction is a major stop on the Delhi-Mumbai rail line, with overnight trains from both cities, and the nearest airport for most travellers is Jaipur, three hours north by road.