Ulhasnagar
— — a city begun the day a country split.
Not only on a wall.
“A city built in 1949 out of a wartime barracks, when Sindhi families displaced by Partition were given land in the Kalyan transit camp and told to begin again. Nehru renamed it the city of joy the same year. Five numbered camps still organise the street grid. The papads here travel to half of Mumbai before sunrise.
Ulhasnagar, 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.
Ulhasnagar sits in Thane district of Maharashtra, on the Mumbai suburban rail's central line about 55 kilometres northeast of central Mumbai. The settlement began in 1949 as the Kalyan Military Transit Camp, a Second World War barracks that the new Government of India turned over to Sindhi Hindu families displaced by the 1947 Partition. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru gave the new town its name, Ulhasnagar — city of joy. Today the municipal area covers about 13 square kilometres and holds around 506,000 people on Maharashtra's central rail corridor.
The 1947 Partition of British India moved an estimated 14 million people across the new India-Pakistan border in the largest forced migration of the twentieth century. Hundreds of thousands of Sindhi Hindus, with no Sindhi-majority region inside the new India, were resettled across the country; one of the largest single placements was the Kalyan camp, which became Ulhasnagar. The city's five numbered camps, Camp 1 through Camp 5, still organise its street grid and its identity as the largest Sindhi settlement in India.
The Ulhasnagar markets are the city's working face. The denim and jeans trade out of Camp 5 supplies wholesalers across western India; the electronics market along Netaji Chowk runs on Sindhi family firms three generations deep. Papads, salty snacks, and the Sindhi sweet sev mithai are made in small workshops and shipped to Mumbai daily. The Sai Baba Temple at the centre of Camp 3 is the city's largest religious site; the Jhulelal Mandir, dedicated to the Sindhi patron deity, is the cultural one.