Munger
— — a fort the river keeps walking around.
Not only on a wall.
“An old fort town on the southern bank of the Ganges in Bihar, about 180 kilometres east of Patna, where the river makes a wide bend against a low hill. The walled fort sits on the bluff above the water, built and rebuilt across a thousand years of Pala, Sultanate, Mughal, and British layers. Cigarette factories and a famous yoga school sit inside the old town. Mornings begin with cremation smoke from the ghats and bells from the Chandika Sthan temple.
Munger, 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.
Munger is a city and district headquarters on the southern bank of the Ganges in eastern Bihar, about 180 kilometres east of Patna and 65 kilometres east of Bhagalpur. The municipal population sits near 213,000 by the 2011 census, with the district close to 1.37 million. The town occupies a low rocky bluff where the Ganges curves north, the only stretch in Bihar where the river flows against high ground rather than flat alluvium. Munger is reached by the New Delhi–Howrah main line of Indian Railways and by the Munger Ganga Bridge, opened to road traffic in 2016, which crosses to the northern bank.
The fort sits on the bluff above the river, enclosing about 222 acres behind a wall pierced by four gates. The earliest standing fabric is attributed to the 9th-century Pala dynasty, with major rebuilding under the Delhi Sultanate in the 14th century and again under Mir Qasim, who made Munger his capital from 1762 to 1764 during his war with the East India Company. Inside the walls stand the white-domed tomb of Pir Shah Nufa from 1497, the Karnachaura mound, and the British-era cigarette factory of the Imperial Tobacco Company opened in 1925, still operating as ITC's main north-Indian plant.
The Bihar School of Yoga, founded in 1964 by Swami Satyananda Saraswati, sits at Ganga Darshan on a low hill above the river and draws students from across India and abroad for residential courses of two weeks to four months. The Chandika Sthan temple on the eastern edge of town is one of the Shakti peethas; pilgrims arrive most heavily on the new moon of October and during the Navaratri festivals. The Kashtaharini Ghat and the older Bari Bazaar ghat below the fort are working ghats, busiest at dawn for bathing and at dusk for the small evening aarti.