Ratlam
— — the city the trains and the sev built.
Not only on a wall.
“A market city on the Malwa plateau in western Madhya Pradesh, long known for two things — the junction that ties the Mumbai–Delhi line to the Ratlam–Khandwa branch, and the thin spiced gram-flour sev that carries the city's name across India. The old quarter holds the kind of streets where gold merchants keep their shutters half-down and the smell of besan frying in oil reaches the platform. Trains slow on the curve into the station and the city collects them, the way it has since 1885.
Ratlam, 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.
Ratlam sits on the Malwa plateau in western Madhya Pradesh, about 480 metres above sea level and roughly 130 kilometres northwest of Indore. The district was a princely state under the Rathore dynasty from the seventeenth century until accession to India in 1948, and the modern city grew around the railway junction opened in 1885 on what is now the Western Railway's Mumbai–Delhi corridor. The Mahi and Chambal river basins drain the surrounding farmland, which carries wheat, soybean, and the gram crop that feeds the city's most famous export.
The Rathore prince Ratan Singh received the jagir in 1652 from the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, and the city took its name from him. Under the British, Ratlam State was a 13-gun salute state of the Central India Agency. The line through Ratlam Junction, completed in 1885, made the city a node on the western trunk route and shifted its economy from courtly trade to wholesale grain, gold, and the sev for which it is now known nationwide.
Ratlam Junction is served daily by long-distance trains on the Western Railway, with the Avantika Express and Malwa Express among the regular runs to Mumbai and Delhi. The old city's Sarafa Bazaar — the gold market — opens late morning, and the sev shops along Chandni Chowk run from dawn. October through February is the workable window; May routinely passes 40°C. Indore's airport, 130 kilometres east, is the nearest commercial field.