Purnia
— — a town the rivers and the trains both come through.
Not only on a wall.
“A district town in the northeast corner of Bihar, on the plains between the Kosi and Mahananda rivers. Purnia carries an old name from the Sanskrit Pūrṇāraṇya, the complete forest, from a time before the land was cleared for paddy and jute. Today it is roughly half a million people, a railway junction, and the eastern anchor of the National Highway between Porbandar and Silchar.
Purnia, 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.
Purnia is the headquarters of Purnia district in the northeast division of Bihar, about 300 kilometres east of the state capital Patna and within a day's drive of Siliguri and the Nepal border. The 2011 census recorded a city population of just over 280,000; the wider district carries roughly 3.2 million. The Saura, a small tributary of the Mahananda, runs along the eastern edge of the old town. Purnia became a regular district under the East India Company in 1770 and has been an administrative seat without interruption since.
Three rivers shape the district. The Mahananda runs along the east, carrying snowmelt down from Darjeeling. The Kosi, called the sorrow of Bihar for the breadth of its historic floods, swings west of the town. The Saura is the small one, slow, sometimes choked with hyacinth, but the one Purnia actually lives along. Every monsoon the rivers rise; some years they breach. Paddy fields the colour of new tea cover the plain between them. The whole landscape is flat enough that a stand of bamboo can be the tallest thing for miles.
Northeast Bihar runs four distinct seasons. November through February is cool and dry, with mornings in the low teens Celsius and clear skies; this is when the tea estates north of town look greenest. March into May turns hot and dusty; afternoons can cross 38 degrees. The monsoon arrives in mid-June and runs heavy into September, with the Kosi and Mahananda flooding most years. October is the breath between, the air still wet and the paddy turning gold. Local farmers count their year in three harvests of rice, with maize and jute folded between.