Muzaffarpur
— — the city the lychee season belongs to.
Not only on a wall.
“Muzaffarpur sits on the Burhi Gandak River in north Bihar, the kind of dense Gangetic-plain city the rest of India knows for one thing: the Shahi lychee. From late May into June the orchards around town empty into wooden crates, and the train sheds smell of crushed leaf and sugar. The rest of the year it is a working town — a junction on the old Tirhut railway, a university, brick kilns, the river running brown past the ghats. Litchi Gardens cover roughly thirteen thousand hectares within an hour's drive. from the studio
Muzaffarpur, 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.
Muzaffarpur is the administrative seat of Muzaffarpur district in north Bihar, on the Burhi Gandak River about 75 kilometres north of Patna. The city sits at roughly 57 metres elevation on the alluvial Gangetic plain, and the 2011 census put the urban population at about 393,000. It was founded in the eighteenth century as a revenue station of the East India Company and named for Muzaffar Khan, an amil under the Bettiah Raj. Today it is the headquarters of the Tirhut Division and a major node on the East Central Railway, with services south to Patna and north to Sitamarhi and the Nepal border.
The Muzaffarpur Shahi lychee carries a Geographical Indication, registered in 2018, that ties the fruit's name to a defined growing belt around the city. The orchards cover roughly 13,000 hectares across Muzaffarpur and the neighbouring districts of East Champaran, Vaishali, and Samastipur, producing on the order of 300,000 tonnes a year — a large share of India's total. The window is short: fruit ripens from the last week of May into the third week of June, and the National Research Centre on Litchi, opened here in 2001, sits on the road to Mushahari. The city ships by overnight train and air-freight cargo through Patna.
Muzaffarpur Junction is the main rail head, with through services to Delhi, Kolkata, Patna, and onward into Nepal via Sitamarhi and Raxaul. The nearest commercial airport is Patna's Jay Prakash Narayan, about 80 kilometres south. November through February is the cool, dry window, with daytime temperatures in the low twenties Celsius. The lychee festival in early June is the city's loudest moment of the year. Visitors usually base in the centre near Company Bagh, the old colonial park, with day trips out to the Litchi Research Centre and the river ghats along the Burhi Gandak.