Panihati
— — the river that remembers the festival.
Not only on a wall.
“A river town on the Hooghly, about 20 kilometres north of Kolkata, where the ghats step down into brown water and the bathers go in slowly. Once a year the place fills for the Chida-Dadhi Mahotsav, the flat-rice and yoghurt festival the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition has held here since the sixteenth century. The rest of the year it sits quietly, between the rail line and the river.
Panihati, 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.
Panihati is a town in the North 24 Parganas district of West Bengal, set on the eastern bank of the Hooghly River about 20 kilometres north of central Kolkata. The town sits along the suburban rail line and is part of the Kolkata Metropolitan Area, with a population of roughly 380,000 at the 2011 census. Its ghats face the river, and its history is bound up with the medieval Bengal Vaishnava revival led by Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and his companions.
The town is best known for the Chida-Dadhi Mahotsav, the flat-rice-and-yoghurt festival held each year on the bright thirteenth day of the lunar month of Jyaistha (May or June). The festival commemorates a sixteenth-century episode involving Raghunath Das Goswami and Nityananda Prabhu and draws Gaudiya Vaishnava pilgrims from across Bengal and beyond. For a day the riverbank fills with offerings of chira, dadhi, and bananas, and the rest of the year is measured from it.
The Hooghly here is a working river, a distributary of the Ganges that carries trade, ritual, and silt down to the Bay of Bengal. The ghats at Panihati step into water that runs heavy with monsoon when the rains come up from the south in June. Bathers descend in the early morning, and the small boats of the watermen cross with the current. The far bank is Hooghly district, low and green, often half lost in haze.