Satna
— — a junction town that takes you to the temples.
Not only on a wall.
“The town most pilgrims pass through on the way to Chitrakoot, an hour south, or to Khajuraho, three hours east. The Mumbai–Howrah trunk line of Indian Railways runs straight through the centre, which is why the cement works are here — Vindhyan limestone in the hills, rail to every coast. The light at dawn is dust-coloured and warm, and the road south leaves early.
Satna, 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.
Satna is a city and district headquarters in the northern Vindhyan plateau of Madhya Pradesh, with a 2011 census population of about 283,000 in the municipal area. It lies on the Mumbai–Howrah main railway line, the busiest trunk route in central India, and is sometimes called the Cement City of India for the cluster of large limestone-fed cement plants that ring it. The town sits at roughly 317 metres above sea level on the small Satna river, a tributary of the Tons that flows north into the Ganges basin.
The Vindhyan range south of the city is a long shelf of Proterozoic limestone and sandstone, mined for cement since Birla Vikram Cement opened its first plant near Satna in 1959. By the 2010s the Satna belt produced over 10 million tonnes of cement a year across plants run by Birla, Prism, Reliance and others. The same Vindhyan sandstone, quarried further east a thousand years earlier, was carved into the Khajuraho temples — the building material is older than the town that now sells it.
Satna is most often a transfer point. Chitrakoot, an important Hindu pilgrimage site associated with Rama's forest exile in the Ramayana, is 75 kilometres south by road. The Khajuraho temple complex, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1986, is about 120 kilometres east. Maihar, with its Sharda Devi hilltop temple reached by 1,063 steps or a ropeway, is 40 kilometres west on the rail line. Satna Junction has direct trains to Mumbai, Howrah, Delhi, and Varanasi, which is why the town is on so many itineraries at all.