The painted Shekhawati havelis of Nawalgarh

Tucked into the semi-arid belt of northern Rajasthan, the town of Nawalgarh reads like an open-air museum. Its lanes are lined with grand merchant mansions known locally as havelis, built by Marwari traders whose fortunes came from caravan routes to Gujarat and beyond. What sets these structures apart is visual ambition: walls, ceilings, eaves, and door jambs became canvases for stories drawn from Hindu mythology, colonial life, folk legend, and merchant ritual.

For heritage professionals, the painted havelis present opportunity and anxiety. Pigments have begun to flake, plaster is separating from the brick core, and many buildings stand vacant or have been divided among heirs. Each passing year reduces the chance of recovering original iconographic programmes. Documenting these mansions is therefore less about cataloguing pretty pictures than about preserving the social memory embedded in every brushstroke.

The work undertaken by the Archaeological Survey of India's Jaipur Circle draws on decades of regional fieldwork, including the Hadauti rock art study, which has refined techniques for tracing pigments and binders. Applying similar methods to the havelis, conservators and epigraphers are building a shared vocabulary of materials and motifs that will guide future interventions.

The merchant legacy behind the walls

The havelis were built by families whose networks stretched from Calcutta to Bombay and on to East Africa. A merchant returning from a successful expedition often commissioned a new wing, each carrying its own decorative programme. The result is a layered townscape where the Poddar haveli, the Aath Haveli complex, and the Bhagton ki Haveli reflect individual taste and a regional aesthetic blending Rajasthani court painting with European visual references.

Social historians read these paintings as a kind of visual diary. Images of trains, gramophones, women in Victorian gowns, and early motorcars appear alongside Krishna lifting Mount Govardhan and scenes from the Ramayana. This mingling of cosmologies signalled the worldview of a mercantile class eager to display both piety and cosmopolitan reach. Understanding the architecture without the paintings would miss the point of why these structures were commissioned.

The documentation project treats each wall as both artwork and document. Interviews with elderly residents recover stories about who commissioned each scene and why. Where a motif cannot be matched to known temple iconography, the team flags it for further study, recognising that the most interesting material may lie in the gaps between canon and everyday life.

Iconography, pigments, and the painter's hand

The painters belonged to artisanal castes, often working from pattern books passed down through generations. Mineral pigments dominated the palette: lapis-derived blues, malachite greens, ochres, and the reds of cinnabar or red lead. Gold leaf and tin highlighting lifted key elements such as jewellery and sacred symbols. The technical sophistication visible in the finest rooms of the Morarka or Bhagchand Baid havelis suggests a workforce trained in miniature-painting traditions adapted to a much larger scale.

Close inspection reveals signatures, dates, and small devotional inscriptions tucked into corners of compositions. These marginalia are often the only clue to workshop, patron, and year of execution. Cross-referencing them with merchant account books held in family archives has allowed the team to construct rough chronologies for stylistic change.

The painters left few written records, and trade knowledge of pigment preparation, plaster recipes, and surface treatment risks vanishing with the last hereditary artisans. Oral history work, patiently conducted over cups of tea during long afternoons, what locals simply call their "arvo" rest, has gathered technical terms that never made it into the published literature. Preserving this intangible knowledge is as urgent as photographing the walls themselves.

Methods of recording a disappearing craft

The current strategy combines conventional photography with digital photogrammetry, drone-assisted roof surveys, and structured lighting that reveals underdrawings hidden beneath later repaints. Each haveli receives a unique identifier, and its rooms are mapped wall by wall. The resulting dataset feeds into an accessible archive where researchers, conservators, and descendants of the original owners can compare notes.

Fieldwork is not without logistical headaches. Some buildings are locked for years due to property litigation; others have been modernised with cement plaster, PVC pipes, and electrical conduits that damage the original fabric. The team negotiates access patiently, working through local panchayats where necessary, and always prioritises non-invasive methods before any physical intervention.

The visual record is increasingly shared through an online documentation image archive where high-resolution scans allow scholars anywhere to study brushwork at pixel level. A researcher based in Sydney or Adelaide can now examine the same surface details that a conservator on the ground sees, a democratic shift in access that would have astonished the original patrons.

Conservation choices and difficult decisions

Documentation is only the first step. Where a wall has lost its pigment entirely, conservators face the choice of leaving the void visible, applying a neutral fill, or attempting speculative reconstruction based on comparable paintings elsewhere in the same building. Each option carries ethical weight, particularly when descendants hold strong views about how the surfaces should appear.

Some difficult decisions involve later overpaintings, where earlier restoration campaigns using incompatible materials have become part of the building's history. The team records these layers rather than removing them, recognising that the visible archaeology of repair is itself a document. Monitoring stations installed in selected rooms will track how walls respond to seasonal humidity and monsoon ingress over the coming decades.

That monitoring only matters if the buildings remain in use. Wherever possible, the team encourages adaptive reuse that does not destroy the painted fabric, working with families considering homestay conversions or small museums. A haveli kept alive as a working space has always fared better than one left as a vacant monument.

Heritage beyond borders: shared lessons

The challenges facing the painted havelis echo those confronting painted heritage elsewhere in the world. In Melbourne, the street-art laneways of Hosier Lane are constantly repainted, and heritage practitioners there grapple with questions of authorship, ephemerality, and the ethics of preservation that resonate with the Shekhawati situation. Sydney's Rocks district, with sandstone buildings carrying traces of painted signage, has a parallel story of meaning slowly eroding under weather and development.

Australia also offers a direct analogue in its Aboriginal rock art sites, from the painted galleries of Arnhem Land to the stencil works of the Sydney Basin, where pigments have survived for tens of thousands of years. Heritage professionals from both countries now meet at forums where discussions are frank and, as an Australian colleague might put it, "fair dinkum" about what really works.

Across these contexts, the central message is consistent. Buildings are not just stones and plaster; they carry stories, identities, and livelihoods. A painted haveli in Nawalgarh, a laneway mural in Melbourne, and a rock shelter in Arnhem Land each reward careful documentation because the people who made them deserve to be remembered.