Nagaon
— — a river town with a saint at its root.
Not only on a wall.
“A district town in central Assam, set along a slow bend of the Kolong river south of the Brahmaputra. The plain around it is rice and mustard, broken by tea gardens further east. Nagaon is the birthplace of Srimanta Sankardev, the fifteenth-century saint and reformer who shaped Assamese Vaishnavism and its sattras. Kaziranga lies a couple of hours up the road. — from the studio
Nagaon, 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.
Nagaon is a town in central Assam and the headquarters of Nagaon district, set on the Kolong river, a southern distributary of the Brahmaputra. It lies roughly 120 kilometres east of Guwahati and serves as a commercial hub for the rice, mustard, and sugarcane farms of the surrounding plain. Tea estates begin a short distance further east, on the rising ground toward the Karbi hills. The town sits at modest elevation, around 60 metres, and its weather is monsoonal, with heavy rain from June through September and warm humid summers.
The town is the birthplace of Srimanta Sankardev, born in 1449 at Bordowa a few kilometres outside Nagaon. The Bordowa Than, the monastic complex on the site of his birth, is a centre of pilgrimage for the Ekasarana Dharma tradition he founded. Its annual Tithi observances in September draw devotees from across Assam. The naamghar prayer halls that Sankardev introduced are still the centre of village religious life in Assam, used for daily congregational singing of his borgeet hymns and for the bhaona drama performances he wrote.
Nagaon is reached by road and rail from Guwahati in about three hours. The town itself is a working district seat rather than a tourist stop, but it sits well for visitors heading on to Kaziranga National Park, the one-horned-rhino reserve about 100 kilometres east, or to the Mising and Karbi areas south of the Brahmaputra. The Bordowa Than complex is open daily and welcomes visitors; the surrounding sattras at Barpeta and Majuli, both within a few hours' drive, give a fuller sense of the tradition Sankardev set in motion.