Majuli
— — a forest island the river keeps redrawing.
Not only on a wall.
“The largest river island in the world, in the brown braid of the Brahmaputra in upper Assam. Vaishnavite monks have lived on it since the sixteenth century, and twenty-two satras still hold prayer, dance, and the mask-making craft of Samaguri. Ferries from Nimati Ghat cross in about an hour. The island is losing ground to the river every year, and most everyone here knows it.
Majuli, 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.
Majuli sits in the Brahmaputra in upper Assam, about twenty kilometres north of Jorhat. Once estimated at more than 1,250 square kilometres, the island has lost roughly half its land to river erosion since the early twentieth century and now measures around 350 square kilometres. It was constituted as India's first island district in 2016. The population, mostly Mising, Deori, and Assamese, lives in fewer than 250 villages. Bamboo houses on stilts and rice paddies cover the floodplain between the satras.
Majuli is a place of monasteries called satras, founded by the Vaishnavite reformer Srimanta Sankardev in the late fifteenth century. Twenty-two are still active. The largest of these (Auniati, Dakhinpat, Garamur, and Kamalabari) keep a daily round of prayer and the classical Sattriya dance, recognised by India's Sangeet Natak Akademi in 2000. At Samaguri Satra, the bhaonas use lightweight masks of bamboo, clay, and cow dung, built by a few mask-maker families who teach the craft to anyone willing to sit and learn.
The Brahmaputra runs strong here, fed by the Lohit and the Dibang upstream and braided across a floodplain that shifts every monsoon. The river carries one of the heaviest silt loads in the world, and its annual rise can erode a hundred metres of bank in a single season. Embankment work and porcupine spurs slow some of it. Ferries from Nimati Ghat near Jorhat cross to Kamalabari in about an hour, two or three sailings a day depending on the water and the weather.