Shekhawati is the area of the Rajasthan located at the north of Jaipur. The landscape consists of a dry savanna with acacias, but nevertheless largely cultivated, especially since facilities of irrigation developed during last decades.
The villages are dispersed and nothing, in their general aspect, rather decrepit, does not let predict the presence of houses magnifiquement decorated with the turning with dusty lanes, rescapés treasures of the easy time that knew this area between the medium of the 18 2nd and the beginning of the 20 2nd century.
It is in these boroughs encircled by the sand dunes, that one indeed finds the haveli They are middle-class manors of the end of 19 2nd and beginning of the 20 2nd century. They belonged to commercial rich person, Marwari (Marwar is the semi-desert area of the Rajasthan) who had founded their economic power, in the centuries spent, on the trade caravaneer, sometimes smuggler, between India of north and its Western areas (current Pakistan).
In testimony of their opulence, they competed to make build in their area of origin, Shekavati, with the north of Jaïpur, these large and beautiful residences.
It was often of truths small palates. Their interior walls as external are decorated painted frescos whose high reasons colors represent mythical scenes of épopées, for example the epic of Krishna or various gods and goddesses: Lakshmî, goddess of the richness, Sarasvatî goddess of arts, Ganesh with his/her parents, or accompanied by its wives, etc.
One also meets laic subjects suggesting the modernism of these middle-class rich person: Europeans, the car at the beginning of the years 1900, the telephone, the railroad, the flying machine of the brothers Wright, etc.
These painted frescos, called "will chitera" were carried out by craftsmen of the caste kumbhar (potters) or cheraja (masons), when this corporation assumed simultaneously construction and decoration of the haveli.
They used primarily vegetable pigments: lampblack (kajal) for the black, lime (safeda) for the white, indigo (neel) for blue, saffron (kesar) for orange, and various clays of color for the green (harabhata), the red (geru), yellow ochre (pevri).
These dyes mixed with the lime water, were then mixed with plaster. One coated as a preliminary the wall of three fine successive layers of clay, the last consisting of a filtered lime dust, on which the artist plotted the drawings and combed them before it was not dry.
In fact, as of the 19 2nd century end, one imported of Germany and the United Kingdom of the mineral dyes which allowed the execution of more complex reasons, and especially the drawing on a dry wall.
But gradually, the owners of these houses of Master left towards urban centres (Bombay, Calcutta) where the economic activity and commercial developed. The haveli, gradually given up, were degraded with the wire of time, without efforts of conservation of naive paintings being made.
However, one can visit in Nawalgar a haveli magnifiquement restored and transformed into school. It makes it possible to have a good idea of what were the frescos in the beginning, in the glare of their sharp colors.
But the majority of the haveli are inhabited more only by guards, in general accessible for the visitor of passage which comes to admire this original inheritance and leaves a small testimony of its sympathy...