Early Morning In Mukundgarh
I was invited to stay in an old merchant’s house in Mukundgarh, in the Shekhawati region of Rajasthan and I was asked to make paintings of the house and the town and also a map to show where this extraordinary place is situated.
The Haveli Gateway
The house is called Makunda and it is an 1860 merchant’s haveli with 3 courtyards, one has a pool and a fountain. The inner walls and outer walls are covered in murals depicting scenes from Hindu mythology with lots of gods fighting demons, scenes from the Ramayana, paintings of Rajasthani life, and animals and birds, flowers and trees, suns and moons.
Feeding The Cows Outside The Haveli
Pankaj and Neeraj Sharma own the house and they are sensitively restoring it in the old and traditional ways. Using lime plaster and pigment paints the house is slowly being coaxed back to its former beauty and stateliness. A textiles exporter built the house and on the walls of one of the 12 bedrooms you can see a collage of beautiful old labels taken from bolts of cloth that he dispatched around the world.
It’s an 18th century town settled by wealthy merchants from Calcutta, Bombay, and Delhi, and other wealthy Indian cities. It lies on the trade routes and Silk Road used by the merchants to transport their goods overseas.
Mukundgarh is right at the centre of Shekhawati and within easy reach of Delhi and Jaipur, Bikaner and Agra.
It has a train station with regular services to Delhi and Jaipur.
The merchants were encouraged to build a school, a temple, health facilities, some deep wells and a dharamsala for the travelling traders to rest up and recover with their retinue of workers and animals before heading off to the next town on their journey.
Shekhawati is in the Thar Desert of Rajasthan and is the most populated of all the World’s deserts. It’s a densely farmed and agricultured region with lush green fields of crops, vegetables and fruits and trees and shrubs heavy with nuts and spices.
There are about 26 towns and villages in the region and all were settled by merchants.
The merchants’ houses are called havelis and they vary in size and style and are noted for their elaborate interior and exterior murals and frescoes. The painted houses display scenes from the Mahabharata and Ramayana and show blue spotted dog-headed demons torturing beautiful saints and Gods and vice versa.
There are portraits of political leaders, of heroic figures who bravely fought in the struggle for independence.
Beautiful courtesans and handsome princes enjoy erotic lovemaking.
There is even a man performing erotic arts with a donkey.
Later you will see men with slippers spank the man for his misdeeds.
New modes of transportation are celebrated with men riding bicycles, steam trains full of passengers adorn the front façade of a building, and aeroplanes and balloons fly across the skies. Tradesmen and craftsmen are depicted making pottery and weaving cloth, accountants and scribes are busy book keeping. Musicians play classical music, armies march in formation and soldiers are portrayed casually smoking pipes.
Time and changes in taste have not been kind to the havelis’ murals and many of the pictorial scenes have been painted over in thick paints and whitewashes or have been washed away by harsh monsoons and bleaching sunlight but there are plenty remaining to enjoy and delight in all around Shekhawati in its big towns and little rural villages.
The Gopinath Temple Steps & The Bazaar
Mukundgarh is laid out on a grid pattern with the hot pink Gopinath Temple at its centre. In front of the temple is the bazaar, a long street of market stalls and sweet shops, chai shops and cloth merchants’ stores. At the far end of the bazaar, near the sweet shop and shoe stalls you will find the Venugopal Temple. If you climb to the top of the temple steps you will get a grand view over the bazaar and across the central part of the town.
The Cow House At Mukundgarh
On the west side of the town you will find the Cow House, with it’s bright pink gateway topped with a sculpture of Lord Krishna playing his flute, and flanked by two plump white cows.
It acts as a dairy where you can go and buy fresh milk and as a sanctuary for spare cows and calves. There is an excess of cows in India.
The dairyman who takes care of the 2 cows at Makunda also milks cows at the Cow House.
The Gopinath Temple
The Ganesha & Krishna Temples
Women’s Puja At The Krishna Temple
The Women’s Temple Procession
Birds In Flight At The Gopinath Temple
Next to the Venugopal Temple is a grand and deep well called a baoli, typical of the Shekhawati region. It has 4 ornately carved stone columns on a platform surrounding the astonishingly deep well shaft and on each corner stands a domed pavilion where once people would have sat and relaxed in the shade enjoying the cool water and maybe listening to some music and story telling.
You will find these deep wells all around the town built in different styles and in various grades of grandeur. Some are painted in bright colours and others have bare stone.
The most elaborate well in Mukundgarh lies on the extreme west side of town and has its own caravanserai or dharamsala. You can still see its waterwheel that was used to draw water from the depths in animal skin bags worked by donkeys, buffalo or camels.
At The Neighbour’s House
I spent my days in Mukundgarh exploring the town, looking for the most beautiful havelis with the best murals. Most of them are locked up now and are protected by a caretaker or chowkidar while the owners get on with their lives back in the big cities far from the quiet of Mukundgarh.
The change in world trade means they no longer have need to spend time or even visit their old painted palaces.
Some of the houses are falling down with no caretaker to guard them and open to anyone to squat or vandalise them.
Others are used as places to store their goods or keep animals.
I visited one haveli where a local shopkeeper used it as a storehouse for her stock.
In one grand room there was a huge heap of coal in the centre of the room and another room was filled with bright red chilies. In the overgrown garden chickens ran about foraging and roosting.
Parakeets In The Garden
Banwari is a local man who lives and works in Makunda, the haveli where I was staying.
He knows everyone in the town and he took me on walks to find the caretakers with the keys to the locked up havelis.
We went inside several in the town, all huge and empty, with astonishing murals inside and out, remnants of former inhabitants lives, calendars on the walls from 1947, beds still made up, glasses and crockery waiting to be used again.
With rooms decorated in strange colour schemes and a ghostly and abandoned air to the place.
Morning Birds
Morning Routine In Mukundgarh
Yellow Morning In Mukundgarh
After The Storm
Washing & Cleaning
Laundry Day At The Pink House
House By The Lake
The Fort In Mukundgarh
For me it was a joy to spend time in a small Rajasthani town with no tourists and no tourist attractions. Everyone was just getting on with their lives including me. My job was to explore and draw the town and to tell the people back home about it. It felt good to be a part of the place and to get to know some of the people who live and work there.
The Peacock Tree
The peacock is the national bird of India and they are to be found all over Mukundgarh strutting about and leaping off and onto walls and roof tops and up in the trees where they sleep at night.
I love the eerie wailing sound they make and the drama they create.
I drew and painted them everywhere I saw them.
They are a protected species and it is forbidden to interact with them, so no feeding, no petting, no nothing.
Peacocks & Puja
Like many towns in Rajasthan Mukundgarh has several lively and thriving handicraft industries. There are potters and metal workers, weavers and silversmiths.
It has a busy dyers quarter where you will see purple and yellow tie-dyed clothes hanging out to dry. These textiles are sold all over Rajasthan. You will see coloured dyed water running down the streets. There are women working in pairs twisting and hand wringing out brightly dyed fabrics.
Drying The Red Sari
Nearby groups of young men lay the wet cloths on sandy ground to dry in the sun and when they are ready the same lads will gather them up into huge colourful bundles and send them off in auto rickshaws to shops and traders
There is a solitary bangle maker who sits on the floor of his little shop quietly twisting and teasing colourful resins into fine and delicate bracelets.
Near the fort you will find the scissor maker’s workshop. It is a forge really, quite dark and sooty where a man works with his three sons.
It was his father’s shop and his grandfather’s before that. There are faded photographs of the whole lineage on the wall. He sits on the floor and bashes and beats heated metals rods into the scissors. His sons sit nearby sharpening the new tools on stone wheels and sending sparks high into the air.
There is a black silhouette of a pair of scissors painted outside the shop to identify it.
He wraps your new sharp scissors in newspaper and ties it up with string.
Map of Mukundgarh
Next to the bright pink Gopinath Temple you will see men making wool-stuffed mattresses and quilts. They too work sitting on the ground stitching and stuffing brightly coloured textiles.
The finished mattresses are piled up in huge heaps on the ground and the quilts are hung across the street on washing lines to air.
On the corner you will find the oil mill where seeds are pressed and oils are made and then canned ready to be sold.
When I visited the miller was making mustard oil.
Down the street from the temple is the street of tailor’s shops, all in a row. If business is quiet or the day is hot you will see the tailors fast asleep on the their long cutting tables.
The textiles shop is one of my favourite places in the bazaar.
So neatly arranged and so colourful! So many rolls of cloth!
It’s a place of joy.
I had several blissful shopping sessions looking for silks and embroidered fabrics, the brighter the better!
The hardware store is good too and full of all sorts of wonderful tools and implements, all hand made, like pieces of folk art.
The chai stall outside the Gopinath Temple has seating for about 6 customers and you sit under a cloth awning while the chai man prepares your hot sweet tea. He works like a priest performing a sacred ritual and the ultimate reward is your glass of steaming aromatic chai.
I love the taste of the cardamoms and the camaraderie of the chai house.
Mukundgarh Family Rickshaw
The Gopinath Temple is a good place to find an auto rickshaw if you need to get somewhere fast. They zip around the town, Ben Hur style avoiding all jams and road blockages.
The Musicians Rickshaw
The Pink Love Rickshaw
I look on them as fine examples of Indian folk art. Some people adorn and decorate their vehicle with all kinds of decorations, like silver birds at the front, a swan or maybe a peacock. Others cover them in heart shapes and stars and fishes and with flashy tassels in tinsel-like materials and they cover the seats in zingy fabrics. One rickshaw I drew even had a curtain to protect the passenger’s identity.
At the haveli all the cooks are from Nepal,
Pankaj is passionate and very knowledgeable about Indian cuisine.
He is working on a cookbook with Deborah Wastie , an exquisite photographer from England who was also staying at the house.
Their days were spent creating astonishing desert dishes using ingredients from the Thar Desert and jaggery and exotic spices, curds and chutneys. They made wonderful photo shoots using all of Pankaj’s kitchen pots and dishes.
The Chef And His Pots & Pans
I had never heard of desert cuisine before and we ate desert foods most days. I didn’t realize how bountiful and fruitful the desert could be.
Pankaj took us to his desert farm about 2 hours south by car and we spent the day walking through lush green fields of garlic and onions, potatoes and carrots. There were fields of yellow mustard plants everywhere and orchards of fruit trees. Every year he plants about 150 new trees.
The black jagged Khejari trees that you see all over the desert were just coming into leaf. They provide seeds and fruits and are seen as an essential life-giving crop.
Panjaj and Neeraj run a very specialized and personally tailored travel company called Indian Moments.
If you want to visit classical Indian musicians they will arrange it. If you would like to go the Kumbh Mela just let them know. If you would like to meet elephant whisperers….Whatever it is that you want to see or explore just let them know and they will assist you.
They know and love India so well and they want to share their knowledge and passions with like-minded others. They have travelled widely from Ladakh in the Himalayas to the southern ocean.
There are more towns to explore too, like Jhunjhunu and Nawalghar with huge havelis and fortresses, and grand temples and palaces.
There are still more areas of Mukundgarh to search and more auto rickshaws to paint.
I want to explore the temples too.
There are some fascinating ones in the town.
We came across a bright orange Aghori temple for the followers of Shiva and Kali whose portraits adorn the temple walls. Big barking dogs added to the heavy atmosphere of the place
Just outside the town is a Hanuman temple with a gigantic orange statue of the monkey god visible for miles around. The temple is multi-coloured and shouts happiness and love.
Life In A Mukundgarh Haveli
Life in the haveli was so warm and welcoming.
It was a joy to be there. It felt like being at home in India.
I must thank Kate Hardy for inviting me to Makunda and Mukundgarh and Pankaj and Neeraj for hosting me and treating me like a brother.
And Tejvir who met me at Delhi airport and gave me a garland of orange marigiolds and whom I look on as a friend.
Banwari is like the house manager who makes sure everything is working well and all his team who work alongside him namely
Vikram and Ramesh, Kishan, Hari, Uttam, Mahaviri Ji, Raju, and Vimal who sits by the big front gates and who locks them at night.
You can see photos of the haveli on Instagram: havelioftales
And Pankaj and Neeraj’s travel company too:
travelwithindianmoments
Their website is www.indianmoments.com
Christopher Corr
February 26th 2025
Rose Evening In Mukundgarh
※
Christopher Corr / The Rowley Gallery
