Why India’s Shekhawati region will leave you gasping

It’s dark when I arrive at the Vivaana Culture Hotel in Churi Ajitgarh, 240 kilometres south-west of Delhi, headlights ricocheting off a wall painted with camels and elephants. The electricity is out and I’m led to my room by torchlight. Candles are lit and my guide leaves me to it.

The historic painted Shekhawati havelis depict traditional folk tales, hunting scenes, battles, ancestor portraits and stories.Credit: Getty Images

The next morning I wake in a painted garden. The walls are frescoed with twining pink roses, encircling stucco columns that rise to an arcaded gallery overhead. Krishna stands beside a woman under a banyan tree that shades a doorway; in the courtyard outside my room, turbaned figures are set into wall niches overlooked by small windows surrounded by elaborate architraves.

This part of Rajasthan is known as Shekhawati, named after Rao Shekha, who wrestled this part of the state away from the rulers of Amber, today’s Jaipur. It was populated by Shekhawat Rajputs, agile businessmen who set themselves up as merchants on the edge of the Thar Desert, one of the strands of the Silk Road. When the British East India Company came to rule the subcontinent the trade
died, and from the early 1800s the Shekhawats shifted their mercantile skills to Calcutta and Bombay.

But while those cities made them rich, their hearts lay in their dusty homeland. Weddings, births, the first rice-eating ceremony of an infant and the many festivals of the Hindu religious calendar drew them back to their ancestral lands. Their wealth enabled them to build extravagant havelis, walled compounds with lavish interiors surrounding a series of courtyards.

Whimsical architecture, Delft tiles, crystal chandeliers and doors encrusted with metalwork weren’t enough – the merchants also wanted colour, so they painted every square centimetre of their homes in a competition to outshine their neighbours. Inspiration came from myriad sources – traditional Rajasthani folk tales, hunting scenes, battles, ancestor portraits and stories from the Ramayana. European influences worked their way into the paintwork. Ganesh, the elephant-headed god, is depicted beside the trumpet speaker of a gramophone, and on Poddar Haveli in Nawalgarh, a steam train with veiled women at the carriage windows chugs along a wall.

A haveli is a self-contained mini-village with water storage rooms, prayer rooms, a salon for conducting business, kitchens with grindstones for spices and butter churns, big copper urns and servants’ quarters. Some rooms were furnished with punkahs, canvas blinds suspended from the ceiling and pulled by a punkah wallah to waft cool air over the inhabitants in the hot, dry Rajasthani summers. At the front of the haveli, balconies overhang the street with honeycombed windows which allowed the women of the house to see without being seen.

More than 20 villages scattered across this part of Rajasthan have painted Shekhawati havelis, the largest open-air art gallery in India. The town of Mandawa has 175 havelis, half a dozen of which will leave you gasping. The Gulab Rai Ladia Haveli is a standout, ornamented with flowers and intricately carved wooden screens. In one artwork, saucy Lord Krishna has stolen the milkmaids’ clothes while they’re bathing and they’re pleading for their return, not quite managing to hide their naked bodies in a river.

In nearby Dundlod, the 150-year-old Seth Arjundas Goenka Haveli has been majestically restored and opened as a museum where almost two dozen rooms packed with artefacts bear witness to the style and tastes of the rich Shekhawati families.

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