Mandsaur
— — a town the old empires kept coming back to.
Not only on a wall.
“An old town in the Malwa plateau, on the bank of the Shivna river where it slows before joining the Chambal. Mandsaur was Dasapura in the older books — a stop on the trade road, a seat of the Aulikara kings, the place a victory pillar still stands at Sondhani for a battle fought around 528 CE. The Pashupatinath temple holds an eight-faced lingam pulled from the riverbed in 1940, and the bells start at first light. Opium poppies bloom pale across the surrounding fields in late winter. The town moves slowly. The river moves more slowly than the town.
Mandsaur, 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.
Mandsaur sits at roughly 435 metres on the Malwa plateau in north-western Madhya Pradesh, on the bank of the Shivna, a tributary of the Chambal. The district borders Rajasthan and lies about 340 kilometres north-west of Bhopal. In the inscriptions it appears as Dasapura, a seat of the Aulikara dynasty whose king Yashodharman set up the Sondhani victory pillars after defeating the Alchon Huna ruler Mihirakula in the 6th century. The town is the administrative centre of Mandsaur district and a stop on the Ratlam-Nimach rail line, with a permanent population near 150,000.
Two stones carry the town's older memory. The Sondhani pillars, three kilometres south-east of the centre, were raised by Yashodharman around 528 CE and carry Sanskrit verses claiming his victory over Mihirakula reached as far as the Brahmaputra. The other is the eight-faced Pashupatinath lingam, just over a metre tall in black basalt, recovered from the Shivna in 1940 and now the centre of the riverside temple. The four lower faces represent the directions; the four upper faces the elements. The form is rare — comparable lingams are known mainly from Nepal and a few sites in Kashmir.
The year in Mandsaur is shaped by the opium poppy. The district sits inside India's licensed opium belt, regulated by the Central Bureau of Narcotics, and a large share of the country's legal poppy crop is grown across the surrounding fields. Sowing follows the kharif harvest in late October; the white and pale-mauve flowers open in January and February; the capsules are scored and the latex collected over a few short weeks in March before the wheat goes in. The Dasara fair at the Pashupatinath temple in autumn and the Gandhi Sagar reservoir to the south-east, on the Chambal, mark the other two corners of the local calendar.