Mahanadi
— — a river that carries the monsoon to the sea.
Not only on a wall.
“The Mahanadi rises in the Sihawa hills of Chhattisgarh, runs east for roughly 858 kilometres, and empties into the Bay of Bengal through a wide delta near Paradip. Held back at Hirakud by one of the longest earthen dams in the world. Cremation ghats at Sambalpur, fishing boats at Cuttack, monsoon floods that have shaped every town on its banks. A working river, not a postcard one.
Mahanadi, 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.
The Mahanadi (literally 'great river') is one of the major east-flowing rivers of peninsular India. It rises in the Sihawa hills of the Dhamtari district in Chhattisgarh, runs roughly 858 kilometres east across the Deccan plateau and the eastern coastal plain, and discharges into the Bay of Bengal through a wide delta near Paradip in Odisha. The catchment covers about 141,600 square kilometres across Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Jharkhand and Maharashtra. Major tributaries include the Seonath, Hasdeo, Mand and Ib. The river is the principal water source for both Raipur and the eastern Odisha coast.
At Hirakud, near Sambalpur in Odisha, the river is held back by the Hirakud Dam — completed in 1957, just over 25 kilometres long including its earthen flanks, and for decades the longest dam in the world. The reservoir behind it, Hirakud Reservoir, covers about 743 square kilometres at full pool and irrigates roughly 1.55 million hectares of cropland. Downstream, the river has historically been the most flood-prone basin in India; the 1855 and 1866 floods drove the colonial-era embankment system that still shapes Cuttack today. The delta itself is one of the most fertile rice belts on the subcontinent.
The Mahanadi is a monsoon river. About 80 percent of its annual discharge runs in the four months between June and September, when the southwest monsoon arrives over the Eastern Ghats. In a strong year the river at Mundali (just upstream of Cuttack) carries close to 50,000 cubic metres per second at peak; in the dry months it drops to a thread between sandbars. The cycle is the whole calendar — Bali Jatra at Cuttack in November marks the end of the rains and the old maritime trade with Bali, Java and Sumatra that the river once carried.