Latur
— a market town the plateau holds steady.
Not only on a wall.
“A district town on the Balaghat plateau of inland Maharashtra, about four hundred kilometres east of Mumbai. The streets ring out from Ganj Golai, an old grain market laid in sixteen radial spokes. Sugarcane country. Coaching country — students sit the medical exam from here in their tens of thousands each year. The earth here remembers 1993, and the town was rebuilt around the memory. — from the studio
Latur, 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.
Latur is the headquarters of Latur district in the Marathwada region of eastern Maharashtra, on the Balaghat plateau at about 636 metres above sea level. The city sits roughly 400 kilometres east of Mumbai and 100 kilometres south of Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, formerly Aurangabad. The urban population is on the order of 400,000, with a wider district of about 2.4 million by the 2011 Census. The historic centre is built around Ganj Golai, a circular grain market laid out in 1917 with sixteen radial streets.
The town carries the memory of 30 September 1993, when a magnitude 6.2 earthquake struck the villages south of here before dawn. Nearly ten thousand people died and tens of villages collapsed. The reconstruction effort drew the World Bank and the Maharashtra government into a multi-year programme that reshaped local building practice. Drought is the slower weather — the district sits in a rain-shadow belt and has seen severe water crises, most recently the train-borne supply of 2016.
What outsiders know of Latur is often the Latur Pattern — a coaching culture that sends thousands of students each year into the state's medical and engineering entrance exams. Rajarshi Shahu College, founded in 1953, anchors that reputation. The other public room of the town is Ganj Golai, the round-plan market built in 1917 by the Nizam's administration, where sixteen lanes spoke off a central Lakshmi temple. The Tuesday and Friday produce days are the busiest.