Sri Ganganagar
— — a desert town the canal made green.
Not only on a wall.
“Sri Ganganagar sits in the Thar Desert at the northwestern tip of Rajasthan, a planned grid town laid out in the early twentieth century around the Gang Canal, which brought Sutlej water from the Punjab into a land that had been dry pasture. The result is a city of wide right-angle streets, wheat and cotton in the fields outside, and a January morning fog that comes up off the canal. from the studio
Sri Ganganagar, 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.
Sri Ganganagar is the headquarters of Sri Ganganagar district in the far northwest of Rajasthan, India, about ten kilometres from the international border with Pakistan and roughly four hundred and fifty kilometres west of Delhi. The town was founded in the 1920s under Maharaja Ganga Singh of Bikaner, who is also the namesake of the Gang Canal, the irrigation works that draw water from the Sutlej River and made settled agriculture possible in what had been arid Thar Desert grazing land.
The Gang Canal, opened in 1927, runs roughly a hundred and twenty-nine kilometres from the Ferozepur headworks on the Sutlej River into the district. It was the first major canal in Rajasthan and is the reason the surrounding land carries wheat, mustard, and cotton rather than scrub. The later Indira Gandhi Canal, one of the longest irrigation canals in the world, extends the same idea south and east. Without these waters the town would not exist in its present form.
Summers in Sri Ganganagar are among the hottest recorded in India, regularly above forty-five degrees Celsius in May and June, with the dry Thar wind coming off the desert. Winters are cool, with January morning fog along the canal and lows that can dip near freezing in the fields outside town. The wheat is sown in November and harvested in April, and the cotton goes in after the monsoon retreats in September.