History of Kota and Shahabad Stone Flooring

Long before vitrified tiles arrived in cardboard boxes, India's floors were cut from the ground nearby. In Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Delhi that usually meant Kota stone: blue-grey or green-grey slabs with a faint cloudy texture. Across the Deccan — Karnataka, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and much of Maharashtra — it often meant Shahabad stone, a similar grey limestone from the plains of north Karnataka. Railway platforms, government offices, school corridors, temple courtyards, hospital wards and the living rooms of grandparents' houses were laid in these two stones for most of the twentieth century. Many of those floors are still in daily use.

The two stones are often confused, and both are often dismissed as old-fashioned. Neither view helps a homeowner who has inherited an old floor, or a designer who wants a cool, natural, low-energy surface for a new project. The story of how these limestones were formed, quarried, carried and laid explains why they behave the way they do — why they split so neatly, why they stain with oil, why they can be polished back to life after fifty years, and why a floor laid by a careful mason in 1960 can outlast a tile floor laid last year.

This article is the history companion to the practical Kota stone guide on this site. It traces both stones from the riverbed to the railway wagon to the modern factory polishing line, compares them honestly, shows how their floors were built, and ends with what that history means for anyone deciding today whether to keep, restore or newly lay a stone floor. Prices, where they appear, use the same indicative October 2026 bands as the rest of this blog.

Two limestones, two regions

Both stones are sedimentary limestones: rocks made mainly of calcium carbonate, laid down as fine lime-rich mud in ancient shallow seas and basins and slowly compressed into stone. What makes them unusual is the fineness and evenness of that original mud. It settled in thin, regular layers, and the boundaries between layers — the bedding planes — became natural lines of weakness. A quarryman who drives wedges along a bedding plane can lift a slab of fairly even thickness with very little sawing. That single geological fact explains most of the history that follows: these were cheap stones because nature had already done much of the cutting.

Kota stone is quarried in the Hadoti region of south-eastern Rajasthan, principally in Kota and the neighbouring Jhalawar district, with Ramganj Mandi as the best-known quarrying and processing centre. It takes its trade name from Kota city. The rocks belong to the very old Vindhyan sedimentary sequence that stretches across central India — the same broad family of rocks that has given the subcontinent many of its building sandstones and limestones.

Shahabad stone comes from the area around the town of Shahabad in Kalaburagi (formerly Gulbarga) district of north Karnataka, close to the Bhima river. The same limestone belt that supplies flooring slabs also feeds the cement plants of the area, which tells its own story: this is a lime-rich rock in plenty. Shahabad slabs travelled out across the Deccan, to Hyderabad, Pune, Solapur, Mumbai and the towns of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, in much the way that Kota slabs travelled north and west.

In daily life the two are cousins rather than twins. Both are dense for limestones, both absorb little water compared with most sandstones, both are cool underfoot, and both can be ground and polished to a soft sheen or a high gloss. The differences are mostly of colour and character: Kota tends towards a more even blue-green, while Shahabad slabs often show a warmer grey with more visible variation from slab to slab. Quality varies within each source, so a good batch of one can outperform a poor batch of the other. A designer chooses between them mainly by what is local and available in good, calibrated quality.

Before the railways: local stone, lime and craft

In the regions where these limestones outcrop, people used them long before they were traded. Rajasthan and the Deccan both have deep stone-building traditions: stone slabs for floors, steps, verandah edges, water troughs, window sills, roof slabs on stone beams and the platforms of wells and step-wells. Wherever the bedrock split into flat layers, builders took advantage of it. A stone that could be prised up in slabs of four or five centimetres was far easier to use than one that had to be hewn block by block.

Precise dates for when Kota or Shahabad slabs were first used as flooring are not well recorded, and it is safer not to invent them. What is clear is the pattern: until modern transport, heavy stone rarely travelled far. A house or a temple used whatever good stone lay within a cart journey, and the craft of splitting, dressing and laying it was local knowledge passed from master to apprentice. Flooring slabs were dressed by hand with chisels and hammers, edges trued with a straight-edge, and the faces rubbed smooth with harder stones, sand and water. The result was a floor that was slightly uneven, deeply matt, and very durable.

The bedding material was lime, not cement. Builders laid slabs on a bed of lime mortar over rammed earth or lime concrete, and the joints were pointed with lime. Lime is softer and more flexible than cement and lets moisture pass through, so these early floors could breathe; it also meant that a cracked or sunken slab could be lifted and re-bedded without destroying its neighbours. That repairability — a theme that runs through the whole history of these stones — begins here.

How the stone is quarried and why it splits so well

Quarrying followed the rock. Workers stripped the overburden of soil and weathered rock, exposed the bedding planes, and then split slabs along them using wedges, crowbars and hammers. Sound slabs were lifted out, squared up and stacked; thinner or broken layers became smaller tiles, steps or rubble. The thickness of a slab was set largely by the natural thickness of the bed, which is why traditional slabs vary a few millimetres from piece to piece and why old floors needed so much grinding after laying.

Over the twentieth century, mechanisation changed the trade in stages. Power saws with abrasive and later diamond blades replaced hand dressing for edges, so slabs arrived square and straight. Gang saws and block cutters made it possible to cut tiles of repeatable sizes — 600 × 600 mm, 600 × 300 mm, 300 × 300 mm — rather than random slabs. Grinding and polishing moved partly from the site into the factory, where lines of abrasive heads produce honed or polished tiles in one pass. Calibration — machining every tile to the same thickness — is the most recent big change, and it matters more than it sounds: calibrated tiles need a thinner, more even bed, less site grinding and fewer lipped joints.

The railway era: how two regional stones became national floors

The real turning point was transport. Stone is heavy and cheap, so for most of history it could not pay for a long journey. The railways that spread across India from the second half of the nineteenth century changed that arithmetic. Shahabad sits on the old main line between Mumbai and Chennai through Kalaburagi and Wadi, and slabs could be loaded at the quarry towns and unloaded at depots hundreds of kilometres away. Kota likewise sat on a rail corridor between western and northern India. Once a wagon of stone could reach a city, the local quarry acquired a regional market.

The railways were also customers. Station platforms, booking halls, waiting rooms, staff quarters and workshops needed hard, cheap, washable floors, and stone that split into flat slabs was ideal. The same logic applied to the public works of the late colonial period and the decades after independence: courts, collectorates, hospitals, schools, colleges, police lines, post offices and government housing. Public works departments specified Kota and Shahabad stone because they were durable, economical, easy to lay with ordinary masons and easy to repair. Countless corridors laid in that period are still in use.

How an old stone floor was built

Anyone restoring an old Kota or Shahabad floor should know what lies underneath it, because the build-up decides what can and cannot be done. Traditional ground floors were built from the earth up: compacted soil, a base of rammed rubble or lime concrete, a bed of lime mortar, then the stone. As cement became common through the twentieth century, cement concrete replaced lime concrete as the base and cement-sand mortar replaced lime mortar as the bed. Joints were kept tight and filled with neat cement or coloured cement slurry, and the whole floor was ground flat after curing.

Grinding — ghisai, as masons across north and west India call it — was the step that turned a set of slightly uneven slabs into a floor. In the early days it was done by hand with heavy abrasive stones pushed back and forth with water. Later, electric floor-grinding machines took over, working in two or three passes with progressively finer abrasives. The final shine came from polishing compounds; oxalic acid was the traditional polishing aid on limestone and marble floors, used with care and washed off thoroughly. Today many polishers prefer diamond abrasive pads and stone crystallisers, which give a more controlled result.

Patterns and borders

Most old floors are laid in plain straight-joint or staggered patterns, but the better ones show real design. Borders of a contrasting stone — brown Kota against blue, or a strip of black or white marble — frame rooms and corridors. Some verandahs alternate blue and brown slabs in a chequerboard, and many temple and haveli courtyards set slabs on the diagonal inside a straight border. A common detail in Gujarat and Rajasthan homes was a single long Kota slab as the threshold of each door, a hard-wearing piece that took the wear of every footstep. These details are worth preserving in a restoration, and worth borrowing in new work.

Why these floors lasted so long

The longevity of old Kota and Shahabad floors is not luck. It comes from a set of properties and habits that reinforced each other. The stones are hard-wearing for limestones and absorb little water, so they tolerate the daily wet mopping that Indian homes depend on. They are thick and solid, unlike a tile with a thin decorative layer, so wear simply exposes more of the same stone. They are cool, because stone conducts heat away from bare feet and holds the average temperature of the room. And when they are damaged, they can be ground back, repolished or have a single slab cut out and replaced — repairs that no printed tile allows.

Kota and Shahabad today: what they cost and where they fit

Both stones are still quarried and sold. Kota is the more widely marketed nationally, and its prices are well documented. Indicatively, in October 2026, a Kota floor costs about ₹70–150 per sq ft installed, including the stone, mortar bed, laying labour and basic grinding; mirror-polished, grooved and specially finished work runs about ₹90–180 per sq ft installed. The stone alone at dealers in Gujarat and nearby markets is roughly ₹30–70 per sq ft, depending on thickness, size, calibration and finish. These are the same bands used in this site's Kota stone guide.

Shahabad stone is priced in a broadly similar way near its own source — material plus mortar, laying and grinding — and, like Kota, it is cheapest close to the quarries and noticeably dearer once long transport is added. Because its market is more regional and the supply is less standardised, prices vary more between dealers; it is best to ask two or three local suppliers for a rate per sq ft, the thickness and whether the tiles are calibrated. In much of Karnataka, Telangana and southern Maharashtra, a local Shahabad floor will be the economical natural-stone choice, just as Kota is in Gujarat and Rajasthan.

Where do they fit now? Honed or leather-finished Kota and Shahabad suit living rooms, bedrooms, passages, verandahs and courtyards in homes with a natural, Indian-modern or tropical-modern palette. Grooved or textured finishes suit bathrooms, ramps, steps and outdoor paving. Polished finishes belong only in dry indoor rooms. Kitchens and dining areas need a penetrating sealer against oil and turmeric. And the stones' strongest modern argument is environmental: they are quarried and cut rather than fired in a kiln, so their embodied energy lies mainly in quarrying and transport — another reason to use whichever stone is local.

Restoring an old Kota or Shahabad floor

Many homeowners first meet these stones as an inheritance: a grandparent's house, an old bungalow bought for renovation, a 1970s flat with grey slabs under a layer of grime. The instinct is often to tile over it. Usually that is a mistake. A sound old stone floor can almost always be cleaned, reground and polished or honed to look close to new, at a fraction of the cost of a new floor and without adding weight or raising the floor level. The first job is to tell the stone apart from look-alikes — terrazzo, cement tiles, mosaic — and to check that the slabs are sound.

How to recognise the stone

Kota and Shahabad slabs show no chips or aggregate when ground, unlike terrazzo and mosaic, which reveal coloured stone chips set in cement. They are usually larger and thicker than cement tiles, with fine joints. The colour runs right through the slab, visible at any chipped edge. Kota tends towards blue-green or blue-grey, with brown Kota used for borders; Shahabad tends towards grey and grey-brown. A drop of a mild acid such as lemon juice on a hidden corner will gently fizz or leave a dull mark on any limestone — a test best done by the polisher, on a hidden spot, and only if identification really matters.

What the history teaches a designer today

The long life of these floors offers lessons that apply to every material, not just stone. First, use what is close: a stone that is cheap near its quarry becomes expensive and carbon-heavy when it crosses the country, and the old regional pattern — Kota in the north-west, Shahabad in the Deccan — still makes sense. Second, prefer materials that are the same all the way through. A floor that can be reground is a floor that can be renewed many times. Third, design for repair: keep spare slabs from the original batch, record the stone and its source, and use a bed that lets a damaged slab be replaced.

Fourth, choose the finish by the room, as the old builders did without being told. Rough or grooved stone went where people walked wet; smooth stone went indoors. A polished slab on a bathroom floor or an outdoor step is a modern mistake, not a traditional one. Fifth, respect the stone's chemistry: limestone and acid do not mix, and oil marks unsealed limestone. And finally, value the craft. The best old floors were laid by masons who sorted every slab by tone, kept joints tight and ground the floor patiently. In Aaditya Interior's projects in Gujarat, an old Kota floor that is sound is restored and kept wherever possible; it is usually the most authentic and economical floor the house can have.

Where the two stones are heading

The future of both stones is a mix of old and new. Calibrated, factory-honed tiles are making them faster and cleaner to lay. Factory-applied impregnating sealers and better anti-slip treatments are reducing their two biggest weaknesses. Larger-format slabs suit contemporary rooms with fewer joints. Designers are using the stones beyond floors — for kitchen and vanity tops, wall cladding, built-in benches and window seats — and pairing them with lime plaster, teak and cane. At the same time, quarrying raises real questions about land, dust, water and the wellbeing of quarry workers, and responsible specification means asking suppliers about how and where the stone was quarried. The stones will last; the question is whether they are sourced and laid with the care their history deserves.

Rules for using Kota or Shahabad stone well

• Use the stone that is local: Kota in the north and west, Shahabad across the Deccan — it is cheaper, lower in transport energy and easier to match later.
• Before tiling over an old stone floor, tap-test every slab and get a polisher's opinion; most sound floors can be restored.
• Ask for calibrated tiles in new work, sorted and dry-laid by tone before fixing, with joints of 1–2 mm.
• Choose finishes by room: honed or leather indoors, grooved or textured in wet areas and outdoors, polished only in dry rooms.
• Seal kitchen and dining floors with a penetrating sealer and renew it as the manufacturer recommends.
• Clean with plain water or pH-neutral stone cleaners; never use acid-based toilet or descaling cleaners on limestone.
• Keep 3–5 per cent spare slabs from the same batch for future repairs, labelled with the stone and source.
• Check structural loads before laying a new stone floor over an old one on an upper floor — ask a structural engineer.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between Kota stone and Shahabad stone?

Both are fine-grained limestones that split into flat slabs and are used mainly for flooring. Kota comes from south-eastern Rajasthan and is usually blue-grey or green-grey, with a brown variety; Shahabad comes from north Karnataka and is usually grey to grey-brown with more visible variation between slabs. They perform similarly: cool, durable, repairable, sensitive to oil and acid. The practical choice is usually whichever is local and available in good, calibrated quality.

Is Shahabad stone good for flooring?

Yes, when a good-quality batch is laid and finished properly. It has served for decades in homes, offices and public buildings across the Deccan. Use honed or polished finishes in dry rooms, textured finishes in wet areas, and seal kitchens against oil.

How old is Kota stone flooring?

Stone slabs have been used locally in Rajasthan for a very long time, but exact dates for the first use of Kota stone as flooring are not well recorded. Its spread as a common floor across north and west India came with the railways and public works of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Can an old Kota or Shahabad floor be polished again?

Usually yes. A polisher regrinds the floor in stages to remove a thin worn layer and the lippage at joints, then hones or polishes it. Hollow slabs should be rebedded and cracked ones replaced first. Because each regrind removes only a little stone, a 20–25 mm slab can be restored several times over its life.

Should I tile over an old stone floor?

Only if the floor is beyond repair or the level must change for another reason. Tiling over adds weight, raises the floor and door thresholds, and hides a material that usually looks better restored. Have the floor surveyed and quoted for restoration first.