Rajkot
— — the city where Gandhi learned to be still.
Not only on a wall.
“The fourth city of Gujarat, on the flat dry plain of Saurashtra. Kaba Gandhi No Delo, the family house where Mohandas Gandhi grew up, still stands on a side street near the old core. The small Aji river runs through the town. Lathe shops and casting yards stretch out along the highways; in the evenings the kite shops on Sadar Bazaar fill with the colours of Uttarayan.
Rajkot, 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.
Rajkot is the fourth-largest city in Gujarat and the principal city of the Saurashtra peninsula in western India, with a metropolitan population above 1.8 million. It sits on the banks of the small Aji river, on a dry plain roughly halfway between the Gulf of Khambhat and the Gulf of Kutch. The city was the capital of the princely state of Rajkot under the British Raj, and houses the Rajkumar College where many Kathiawari princes were educated. Modern industry centres on casting, machine tools, and auto components.
Uttarayan, the kite festival on 14 January, marks the sun's turn toward the north and shuts most of Rajkot down for two days. Rooftops fill from dawn; the sky above the old city goes solid with kites by mid-morning. The competitive cutting of strings has its own vocabulary, and the night of the festival closes with tukkals, paper lanterns lifted on strings. Sadar Bazaar's kite shops begin stocking in December. The festival shares roots with Makar Sankranti across the rest of India.
Most visitors come for two reasons: the Gandhian sites and the Saurashtra circuit. Kaba Gandhi No Delo, the three-storey haveli where Mohandas Gandhi spent his boyhood from 1881, is preserved as a small museum on Ghee Kanta Road. The Watson Museum on Jubilee Garden holds Kathiawar antiquities and a copy of an Ashokan edict. From Rajkot most travellers continue west to Junagadh, Somnath, and the Gir Forest, the last refuge of the Asiatic lion, about three hours south.