The crumbling elegance of the mural capital of the world

Churu in Rajasthan was home town for super-rich merchants who set about outdoing each other with extravagantly decorated mansions.

After an intense day in Delhi – there isn’t really any other kind – Donne and I got on a train and trundled west into Rajasthan. Through the slums we’d seen on films, past small modern blocks, then on to Churu. It was the place on our three week tour that we knew least about. But – as so often happens – it turned out to be one of the most extraordinary.

We were met by Bharat, who was to drive us with unbelievable calm for the next 2,000 miles. He took us to our first surprise: our hotel, the Malji Ka Kamra. Or was it a wedding cake, or maybe a theatre set?

I don’t usually spend time describing hotels I’ve stayed in, but I must here. First a map, to show where we were:

Getting up close to the hotel, we could see little figures dancing in niches. Some Indian, some distinctly British-looking. These needed some explanation.

The next morning our guide, Lal Singh Shekhawat, arrived to take us for a jeep drive into the Thar desert. We saw animals, we saw birds, we saw desert.

Then he took us on a walk around Churu. We realised that he was not any old guide. His name was a giveaway, for the region we were in was Shekhawati, and his family was part of its fabric (he lived in a mansion nearby).

As we walked he explained all. Starting with the hotel. It was built in the 19^th century by Malji Kothari , a wealthy merchant, as a party and guest house; hence the feel of joy, even frivolity. It was also just about the only mansion – they are called havelis – that is in good condition in Churu. As we walked around the town, we saw so many buildings that had once been so grand, and now are crumbling:

Most intriguingly, they were covered with vast numbers of murals and frescos. Lal Singh has written the foreword to a book by an Australian photographer, Kip Scott, that documents the havelis (Abandoned India: The Mansions of Shekhawati). And, he says, the region has the largest collection of murals in the world. There is scarcely a wall that has not been decorated, sometimes beautifully, sometimes a little crudely, but always bursting with life.

As on the hotel, the themes mix the local …

… with the imperial (King George V and Queen Mary if you are wondering) …

People travelling through the region came to know this as the ‘open air art gallery of the world,’ Lal Singh writes. Why? The starting point, he explains, is geography. Shekhawati is on the edge of the Thar desert in north-west Rajasthan, on the route between Delhi and cities to the west. Camel trains loaded with spices, grains, textiles and much more gathered here before heading off across the desert, which meant Churu and its neighbours became natural centres of business. That in turn led to a trading mentality. Many people were Marwaris, an ethnic group that is still known for its entrepreneurial nous. Lakshmi Mittal, who built up the steel giant Arcelor, comes from near Churu, and a quarter of the Forbes Indian billionaires are Marwari.

Another relevant bit of geography is that Churu gets incredibly hot. I found a newspaper cutting from May 2020 saying it was the hottest place on earth that week, at 50 degrees. Rather than making the locals curl up to keep cool (as they would me), the extreme conditions seem to have sharpened their determination to succeed. As well as servicing the camel trains, they moved to where the money was which, in the nineteenth century, often meant Calcutta. Here they worked with the British as agents, and used their sophisticated financial skills to insert themselves into the trade flows in and out of the Raj. By the late 19^th century Marwaris dominated cotton and jute trade, and from there many of them moved into industry.

All this of course generated vast wealth, and where better to show of that wealth than in their home town. From around 1820, Marwari tycoons competed with each other by building ever more extravagant havelis:

Here another set of Shekhawati skills came into play. The custom of painting murals came from the Mughals via the court of Amber – Jaipur’s predecessor – and even before the big money arrived, local chiefs were used to having their houses decorated. When the merchants decided to do the same, it all went a little mad. As Lal Singh says, the architecture of the 19^th and 20^th centuries was ‘an exaggerated display of Marwari wealth’.

Havelis were being built well into the 20th century. One of the most intriguing we saw was pure art deco.

But by then, things were starting to go wrong. Camels were being replaced by ships, merchants were moving their families to the ports of Bombay or Calcutta. Then came Indian independence in 1947, and the princes who had supported the local economies lost their privileges. That was not good news for Churu.

As the new generations of merchant families grew up far away, they lost their emotional links with Shekhawati. The havelis were abandoned. The families still owned them, but the inheritance system meant they were now shared between any number of relatives. Lal Singh took us into homes where a handful of people lived in magnificent but decrepit surroundings. Some were welcoming to inquisitive foreigners, others not so much. If the family does agree to make repairs, he says, it is too often with cheap cement, while murals are sometimes just painted over. The harsh conditions do not help – not so much the heat as the monsoon rain that collects on terraces and in courtyards, seeping into the walls and roofs.

Lal Singh would like a government scheme to protect them, but right now there is nothing. India has much poverty, but is getting richer fast. I wondered, as Bharat whooshed us around Rajasthan, whether things that tourists find attractive, but the owners find a bit of a nuisance, will be preserved. The great palaces are already beautifully cared for (yes, the Taj Mahal is the most beautiful building I have ever seen), but what of these less well known wonders?

You can find more articles by David Bowen here: https://davidbowenwriter.substack.com