Muzaffarnagar
— — the sweetness on the wind at crushing season.
Not only on a wall.
“A working city of the upper Doab, the long alluvial corridor between the Ganges and the Yamuna. The land around it is sugarcane country, flat to the horizon, fed by canals run off the Ganga at Haridwar. From October into March the mills run day and night and the air carries the warm vegetal smell of cane being crushed. The city itself is older than its quiet reputation suggests, named for the Mughal noble who founded it in the 1630s, and it has long been a market town for the farms that ring it.
Muzaffarnagar, 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.
Muzaffarnagar is a city in the western corner of Uttar Pradesh, about 130 kilometres north of Delhi on the National Highway 58 corridor. It sits in the upper Doab, the alluvial plain between the Ganges and the Yamuna, at an elevation of around 237 metres. The city is the administrative seat of Muzaffarnagar district, and the population of the urban area is roughly half a million. It was founded in 1633 and named after Sayyid Muzaffar Khan, a Mughal noble of the era of Shah Jahan. Today it is one of the largest sugar-producing centres in India.
The year here turns on the sugarcane cycle. Planting runs from February into April; the cane stands tall through the monsoon; the crushing season opens in October and runs through March, when the sugar mills around the city take in trolleys of cut cane around the clock. The Upper Ganges Canal, drawn off the Ganga at Haridwar about 90 kilometres north, has carried water to these fields since 1854 and is the reason the Doab grows what it does. Winters are cool and often hazy; summers before the monsoon are dry and very hot, with temperatures past 40°C.
Muzaffarnagar is a working city more than a tourist one. The Shukratal pilgrimage site, where the Bhagavata Purana is said to have first been recited, lies about 30 kilometres south-east on the Ganges. Day trips reach the Hastinapur Wildlife Sanctuary, a Ganges floodplain refuge for swamp deer, and the older market towns of Saharanpur and Meerut. The city is on the Delhi to Dehradun rail line, with trains in both directions through the day, and the drive up from Delhi takes roughly three hours when the highway is clear.