Kaiwan Mehta
Picture Urbanity
Towns in Shekhawati
and Empire Cities
Cities within a Network
This essay on the towns of Shekhawati is an
invitation to consider the relationship between
urbanity and the idea of “visuality”, focusing
on cities that took shape in the context of the
19th century. Morphological urban studies
are important no doubt; however they bind
the study of cities to physical division of
spaces and built form only. To explore the
experience and role of urban formations
beyond physical division and organization of
space is very necessary; other constructions
such as processional routes, temporary use of
FINAL Shekhawati Pages 001-112.indd 68
city spaces during festivals, dominant stylistic
(architectural) formations in different parts of
a city or their visual presentation in different
city corners are necessary to urban studies. It is
precisely the last aspect – the visual geography
of an urban form – which is something
that is specific to Shekhawati towns, and to
explore that in the context of other 18th–19th
century urban development across the Indian
subcontinent will be the aim and methodology
of this essay.
The towns of Shekhawati such as Mandawa,
Nawalgarh, Fatehpur, Ramgarh, Churu,
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 Picture Urbanity 69

Bissau, Jhunjhunu and Lachhmangarh are
structured on various features we identify with
cities in the region – fort walls lost over time
as the city grew, a strict grid-iron formation
in some, while winding streets and markets
dominate others, wells or market chowks1
being often the dominant public feature, and
so on. In the case of each town, the specific
characteristic is important and central to its
identity, especially as we discuss its preservation
and conservation. However, there is no
morphological characteristic that defines all
the towns in Shekhawati within one typology
and sets of relationships were not the only
influencing ideas in the development of
Shekhawati towns; rather it was a result of the
peculiar 19th century construction of economic
and political relationships under colonialism,
and the Shekhawati towns are part of what I
would term “distributed urbanity”.
Towns and cities at times are geographies
based on central thematic ideas – axial layouts
that indicate certain power structures, radial
plans that emanate from a religious core or a
palace campus, to quote two. In certain cases
geometrically defined urban morphologies

1 (opposite)
Shops at the ground level
of some havelis developed
a particular type of street
structure, often identified
with 19th century mercantile
cities where a street develops
a ground level architecture of
shops and shopping verandas/
otlas while the upper level
is composed of residential
windows, balconies and
jharokas.

2
The havelis allow for an
intersecting visuality,
controlled at times to restricted
quarters, but allowed to
connect the streets and
courtyards at others. The
interconnections between
different registers of spaces are
an aspect of these towns.

or style, except for the organizational sense of
the havelis – and that as formations of painted
surfaces. The towns are clearly developments
of trading communities, under the patronage
or protection of local rulers, which is why
the existence of forts in some towns, or the
spontaneous indigenous development of some
and the planning of others on the style of
Jaipur, are clearly understandable. Jaipur was
indeed the model for some towns in their
attempt to imitate the city higher-up in the
political hierarchy of the region. However,
we will soon see how the regional hierarchy
result from dominant political and historical
conditions. Yet, not all cities and towns go
through such morphological formations; they
may have an urban structure that simply
emerges from the daily routines of life in a
city, and you have streets, chowks, houses and
institutional spaces. At a primary level some
of these urban compositions emerge from the
geography of the place, the climate and the way
functions of trade, work and living develop.
Within these winding streets and verandas,2
chowks and gateways, there is something
specific that develops as the visual experience

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 70 Kaiwan Mehta

and trademark of cities. Some cities with their their urban-ness; and these aspects in larger
vistas, some with their composition of open cities define one area, one precinct as distinct
and built spaces, some with their architectural from some other. Given this context, we will
styles and patterns of scale or colour, define concentrate in this essay on the aspect of the

3
The havelis also define a
clear urban edge – and hence
the haveli plan as much
as the nature of the city
oscillates between hard edges
and interconnecting visual
passages.

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“visual”. This would not only be justified in the
case of towns in Shekhawati, which are known
for their paintings on the walls of havelis;
rather one could slowly move towards making
a case for “visuality” as the definitive aspect
of urbanity – a case where we could shift the
study of cities from morphology to “visuality”.
Nawalgarh, Ramgarh, Bissau and
Lachhmangarh were well planned on a grid-
iron system, and most of these towns had a
chowk, a market-street, a baoli, a bagichi,
gateways as their urban elements through
which the town was oriented, dharamshalas
and havelis that formed clusters as
neighbourhood. Although hierarchy would have
been part of these urban formations, reflecting
the prevalent social relationship patterns, the
sense of a mercantile community dominating
the urban structure would also be evident in
its fairly consistent growth through the main
town. Mohallas or neighbourhoods would be
an important aspect for investigation. Shared
plinths, spaces and streets would be common
urban features. The haveli is an interesting
cluster of many different types and hierarchies
of spaces, these mix and match of scales even
entered the neighbourhood street by way
of plinths or sometimes blank walls. This
network of spaces is at times organized around
a structure of elements – jharoka, seat at the
gateway, plinth – but at times these clusters of
spaces also allow for a meandering movement.
This dual principle within the organizational
structures of these towns is its characteristic
morphology, which is further enhanced by the
way all possible walls and corners in these built
structures become surfaces for paintings and
images. Havelis do indeed form the central
morphological motif of the Shekhawati towns
and their urban structure.
Like the towns in Shekhawati, there is
something about cities like Bombay,3 Calcutta,
Delhi, Bikaner and Bhuj that makes them
visually charged in a certain way and they are
all cities that experience their definitive urban
period in the 19th century. It should also be
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Picture Urbanity 71
noted that the visually vibrant nature of these
cities is very different from the cities of the
Renaissance period or the Mughal empire
for example, where the sense of visuality was
contained within the urban morphology of the
cities.4 Whereas colonial cities including the
towns in Shekhawati retain a very different
quality of visuality – a picturesque-ness which
we have in the past described as ornamental.5
They are vibrant and alive with images in
stone, plaster and in paint and this has been
seen as “native” and exotic as compared to the
more colonial parts of metropolitan cities. They
do not present or represent a larger thematic
urban scheme through geometrical structuring
of space and physical fabric, nor are they
easily tied by a stylistic idea. To the naked eye
they are a riot of images and styles, they are
scattered pictures and buildings in a landscape
that has no apparent form or structure – the
yardstick of geometry and view corridors is
largely missing. How then is the “urban”
imagined in these examples of the 18th–19th
centuries?
To revisit the experience of moving in any
of these Shekhawati towns revives memories
of “native” town areas in 18th–19th century
settlements of colonial India, town quarters
that essentially take shape in these centuries
and are closely linked with the mercantile
culture of the time. A characteristic that is
common to them and which is the crux of this
exploration is their strong visual character. The
buildings in these towns are literally surfaces
filled with pictures and images – the buildings
in that sense present themselves to the urban
street in their avatars as screens – surfaces of
pictures. These pictures and images often seem
to be a cut and paste job. In the cities we are
discussing, the ornamental or the pictures seem
like collected panels pasted on building surfaces
largely developing the street into a collage of
images. The images and pictures also seem to
freely borrow from ideas and locations quite
varied and far apart, but in their rendering
within these streets on these buildings they do
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 72 Kaiwan Mehta

4
Every haveli with its large and
small courtyards encourages a
series of spatial interactions within
the world of large joint families
of these mercantile communities,
with many of their members
often out on travels; often two
or four havelis come together
with combined entrance courts,
or combined entrance verandas
or otlas, forming a kind of street
neighbourhood or mohalla.

5
The urban edge is a combination
of various architectural edge
conditions – gateways, otlas,
doors, verandas, a projecting
upper level balcony. All these
modulate the urban edges at
the street level as well as at an
upper level, which affects the
way streets are used and their
visual experience. Their visual
ornamentation further enhances
the perception of these urban
moments.

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 Picture Urbanity 73

6
Terraces and jharokas open
up vistas across a landscape of
streets, terraces and courtyards,
which are further enhanced
through their ornamentation
in plaster and painted surfaces,
and the life within these
plastered and painted surfaces
merges with the life lived
across the havelis and the
streets.

7
Shekhawati towns work as
much with a picture urbanity
as with a morphological
structure, where the geography
of painted images constructs
visual landscapes and
references that connect to sites
and towns that figure in the
larger map of the mercantile
community who live across
many cities and towns.

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 74 Kaiwan Mehta
not seem too much to care about this mix and
match.
As we are looking at this visual geography
of “cut and paste” – a collage of disparate
pictures becoming an integral aspect of
architecture – we can claim this kind of
urbanity as unstructured, not bound by a
FINAL Shekhawati Pages 001-112.indd 74
logic or any ideological theme and also not
within assumed virtues of planning urban
spaces – organizing built masses and un-built
spaces. However, we can also propose a newly
emerging urban form that is less morphological
and more visual; in fact we can understand
how the visual is the morphological itself. Also
8
Painting occupies various parts
of the haveli – odd corners,
behind doors, under chhajjas
– and not simply the vertical
and large wall surfaces. The
haveli is a bioscopic object that
you are expected to encounter
in multiple ways and views,
which extends to the way
the city stretches in and out
of the various images and
architectural elements that
compose it.
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9
The havelis in their spatial
experience are a series of
transitions through different
types of spaces – they are
literally an urban cosmos in
their own right and often
verandas, otlas, jharokas
connect the inside to the urban
outside allowing for a generic
flow through the urban spaces
and the havelis.
one will notice that in these urban situations
that we are discussing the built mass consists
of individual buildings emerging along a street
or road rather than buildings integrated into a
thematic schema. The nature of this urbanity
is dependent on the emerging and growing
merchant classes of the 18th–19th centuries
and many historians continue to explore the
intricacies of the mercantile structures in India
during the colonial period.6
Home and Native Town
The merchants, and especially the Marwaris,
who worked as agents and moneylenders,
developed intricate networks of travel and
relationships across the length and breadth of
the colonial empire, not only within the Indian
subcontinent but also in Central Asia and
Africa. At the same time centres like Calcutta
and Bombay were emerging as the sites of
economic and political control and power,
and for a mercantile community these centres
were the places to be in. So one should start
picturing the idea of home as well as the city
as one that is not geographically located, but
precisely one that is geographically scattered,
yet connected along networks. The fact that
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Picture Urbanity 75
these mercantile communities and trading
agencies were large family establishments,
with brothers and cousins7 working in the
same business set-ups and spread all across
the networks in different cities and towns
meant that the large “undivided family” was
indeed divided and spread across a network.
The Marwaris in Shekhawati, like most other
mercantile communities also came from a
history of shifting “home” and their base,
depending on how trade networks shifted. Now
in the 19th century the connection of cities
through a network of railway systems allowed
for an existence across different cities, adding a
new dimension of space and time to the sense
of urbanity.8 In this network it is important
to remember the hierarchy between centre and
periphery, which was a characteristic pattern of
the colonial empire.9
Can one then propose that centres like
Calcutta or Bombay which had to be treated
with value and importance as they were the
centres of trade and emerging capital, were
indeed seen by the trading families as home-
cities where they developed a base within their
networks, patterns and urban geography? In
this context, the idea of a “native town” and
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 76 Kaiwan Mehta
having a “home” faraway that was “original”
and distant from the new metropolitan site was
important – not only important, it had to be
nurtured, and it had to be invested in. That
investment had to be cultural since the space
of the “family” was the space of “culture”, even
for the mercantile families where “family” was
also the site for expanding business with the
confidence of trust and safety. Also this “home-
city” or “native place” becomes the virtual
centre, a locus for the otherwise scattered
family and community, spread across networks
and cities. The “native town” also became the
“other” of the colonial Fort town. The towns
of Shekhawati, and some others in the 19th
century, were hence not constructed on the
same concepts of urbanity or ideological themes
as their metropolitan counterparts would be
invested with. Could one then say that like
the “native town” in colonial Bombay where
indigenous traders, businessmen and working
population resided, the towns of Shekhawati
were also indigenous and “native towns” of
a type. The only difference being that the
“native towns” in the metropolitan cities
were thriving trade and market areas, also
housing production spaces, unlike the town in
Shekhawati that became largely a residential
suburb of a kind over a period of time. But
this suburb was also not the periphery; it was
the “centre” for home and “tradition” as we
discussed earlier – an overlapping role of being
centre (home) as well as periphery.
The “native town” in the metropolis and
the “home town” were nurtured as sites for
showcasing family as well as indigenous wealth
which was the newly emerging capital through
trade. The indigenous is stressed here, but
also enters the game of showcasing, and the
reasons for this lie in three pegs – competition,
cultural encounter and historical memory. In a
fertile financial landscape, competition between
different merchant families and business houses
is bound to happen.
In the 18th–19th centuries, the cities and
towns seem to be collectors of ideas – in a
FINAL Shekhawati Pages 001-112.indd 76
way these towns and cities are “cabinets of
curiosities”, developing a landscape of visuals.
This landscape seems to be constructed like the
museum or the ajayab ghar or the “house of
wonder” where paintings from different styles,
genres and historical contexts came in. This
is the century of world exhibitions in London
and Paris, beginning with the Crystal Palace
in London in 1851. The largest exhibition that
happened of this nature outside Europe was in
1883–84 in Calcutta,10 which was a city closely
linked with Shekhawati.11 These exhibitions
which claimed to collect and represent the
“The Industry of All Nations” became large
collections of objets d’art and curiosity – from
ornamental pieces of craft and architecture to
cultural reconstructions of cities and palaces
with mock-ups and marquees. These exhibitions
were imagined and structured as extensions of
the urban life of the metropolitan cities12 they
were staged in; but they also created a bubble
of experience into which world cultures were
transported. Various avatars of such exhibitions
were staged in India too – whether it was
the exhibition in Calcutta or the Coronation
Darbars that happened in Delhi where princes
and large retinues travelled to. The World
Exhibitions resulted in the formation of the
Department of Science and Arts in Kensington
and India saw the establishment of the Indian
Museum in Calcutta (1814) and the setting up
of art schools in the colonized metropolitan
centres of Madras (1854), Calcutta (1854),
Bombay (1857) and Lahore (1878). These
institutions became sites for collecting and
exhibiting “Indian ornamental” objects as well
as works of “fine art”.13 Rajput miniature, and
then even Mughal miniature emerged as the
Indian equivalent of European Fine Art, and all
of these examples would occupy space within 10 (opposite)
these galleries and museums.14 Hard edges like walls with
very few windows or jharokas
In the way visual themes, pictures and
at a very high level, combined
images start occupying “native towns” and with lower walls and gateways
“home towns” there is clearly a flow of memory that allow for controlled
visual penetrations, make for
across different historical and geographical an essential feature of most
locations. We need to constantly imagine that Shekhawati towns.
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picture-ideas are flowing all along the many
networks of trade and metropolitan colonial
empire; the imagination of “home” and “city”
is not exactly located in one place. In the case
of these small towns, the idea of the “cabinet
of curiosities”, which was a kunstkammer (art
room) and a wunderkammer (room of wonder)
alternating or simultaneous, gets actually
employed as a “binder” or “connector” – rather
than a collection of motley objects – as we
often see the pictures in a haveli or down a
street. They are in fact establishing identifiable
connections, weaving a visual structure through
urbanity: a visual structure that is negotiating
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Picture Urbanity 77
politics of culture, economics and vibrant
histories of the era.
An Urbanity of Pictures
The arguments above establish how the
visual and picture-culture in the towns of
Shekhawati is not simply collecting visuals
from historical and metropolitan locations
and developing trophies in the town “back
home” but it is in fact the development of a
sense of urbanity within a larger network of
cities and relationships. The havelis are surely
trophies constructed in the town-back-home.
Rather than simply borrowing architectural
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 78 Kaiwan Mehta

11–13
The painted walls are not simply a form
of surface decoration but actually produce
an architectural and urban interface – the
painted architectural features like windows
and arcades, columns and panels produce
the urban edge through a picture, and
the picture is as potent as the real thing it
represents. Human figures and other scenes
further produce the world of objects and
elements that reflect the different cities
and spaces the merchants of Shekhawati
travelled through and lived in.

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systems, styles or features from existing Rajput
architecture, which existed in the region, why
is there a choice of painting walls adopted,
and this too not as full wall-length murals
but as picture-frame panels – literally like a
salon exhibition of multiple works of art? The
discussions presented explain this choice of
architectural format, which becomes urban as
the paintings weave a sense of spaces in and out
of the street, the veranda and the courtyard,
extending then into the interiors of the rooms.
The subjects of the paintings are varied, from
legends and myths to lifestyle and erotica.
The haveli is like a folding-box that you can
explore inside-out as well as outside-in and in
these ways it involves the urban morphology
as a weave of spaces – streets, chowks, blank
walls, courtyards, terraces, rooms and so on.
Various patterns and motifs map urban and
natural landscapes into this network of home
and town spaces. Objects like the sewing
machine, the aeroplane or train are not only
objects of curiosity brought in as display but
they are ritual objects of colonial modernity
which are invoked in such a way as to connect
the different locations of urbanity along the
networks of life and trade. The towns of
Shekhawati and the pictures invoke life (not
just its memory) in the provisional, but yet
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Picture Urbanity 79
very definitive, construction of metropolitan
urbanity in these town-extensions of the
colonial metropolis. The urban dandy, the
Rajput riding a camel, a marching file of
British soldiers, clouds in the Chinese style and
the portrait of a Victorian Madame and the
patriarch of the family framed – they all make
up the urban cosmos of 19th century life. The
visual construction of these 19th century towns
and cities is not simply an embellishment of
these urbanscapes, nor a recall to historical or
nostalgic memories, but an essential way of
constructing the urban experience itself. The
urban is not limited to a geographical location
– but is distributed across a landscape where
the “visual” is the apparatus through which the
urban is constructed.
The urban morphology of towns in
Shekhawati is not simply in accounting for
the structure of streets and built-up fabric, but
the intricacies of this fabric developed along
view corridors, viewing cones and sight lines.
Paintings and pictures occur in corners not
easily visible, or high up behind chhajjas15 or
on the ceilings, some visible only when walking
in a direction other than the usual in the way
the space is regularly used, some visible only
when the room is closed, while others crowd
walls along streets or along verandas that define
the edges of these streets. The haveli with its
sequence of spaces is like a folding-box, and the
nature of urbanity here is exemplified in the
folding-unfolding-box idea; the revealing-hiding
play, the sequence of disclosures and exposures,
and the visual-spatial navigation are more the
urban characteristic of these towns than a
simple relay of streets and squares physically
drawn on ground. In a way these havelis that
are otherwise seen as interiorized spaces are
transparent objects containing, revealing and
exhibiting life collected along the networks
of the colonial metropolitan empire, and the
town is a motif of the colonial cosmos. This
explains why ancestral images, events framed
like imitations of photographs, landscapes
from Venetian paintings copied from collected
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 80 Kaiwan Mehta
travelling posters, smoke-puffing trains, a
garland of freedom fighters, vignettes from
the life of Krishna, eroticized representations
of Krishna stealing the clothes of the bathing
gopis,16 and couples engrossed in love-making
complete the metropolitan urbanity within
these “towns back home”. The anxieties of a
distributed family, the exchanges, of life and
trade or work, all are collected within the
imaginations of these towns, as a temporary
space of landing. The town is not perceived
through view corridors and vast expansive
squares but only by a “moving eye”. The bodily
and visual movement along spaces and surfaces
is crucial to the imagination and appreciation
of this urbanity. The terraces of the havelis, or
the jharokas do open up the vista to a wide and
spread landscape, but the street is a navigation
of speaking surfaces, animated screens, as if
the people and life on the street and in the
veranda, the chowk and the room, can easily
vanish or move across the painted and plastered
picture-scenes.
FINAL Shekhawati Pages 001-112.indd 80
NOTES 14
Paintings weave in and out of
1 A city square, generally small in scale, formed by
the courtyards and verandas as
the meeting of more than two roads as a junction. much as they do on the street-
2 A semi-covered area, usually linear-rectangular in facing parts of the havelis; this
allows for a kind of seamless
proportions, marking a transition from the street viewing experience through the
or courtyard to the house (or a set of rooms); urban and family spaces.
generally imagined as a semi-public space.
3 Cities like Mumbai and Kolkata will be referred
to by their older names – Bombay and Calcutta
respectively – if the discussion refers to a period
or instance before the name of the city was
changed. Bombay was changed to Mumbai in
1995, and Calcutta to Kolkata in 2001.
4 In the cities that emerge in the Renaissance or
the Mughal period, like Venice or Shahjahanabad,
or those that follow them soon like Paris or
London, at Campidoglio or Versailles, the
development of vistas, public spaces and
geometry within spatial structures along with
definite architectural styles constructs the essential
urban-ness of these places. Their architectural
styles are fairly driven by master-ideas or master-
styles that dominate, from the planning of city
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 Picture Urbanity 81

spaces to the treatment of building elevations – 11 The towns of Shekhawati which exhibit a
and these are available easily for the naked eye – particular kind of visuality were not a direct
in fact they are meant for public consumption result of these happenings, but surely these
in their totality. Objects that define urban different occurrences are related and strongly
structure, such as public monuments, gateways, contribute to the role and importance of visual
roads or public squares are clearly the anchor ideas, visual motifs, the idea of collage and
points which hold the city, its daily life as well as “coming together of disparate objects” as a
its ritual and festival life; yet in some cities they prevalent ideology of the 19th century.
may not define all that is urban about them. 12 See Mitchell.
5 The ornamental has often been seen as specific 13 The work of Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Arindam
to detail but not essentially a larger schema; Datta is crucial in developing some of these ideas.
often imagined as a collection of random motifs 14 The Marwaris were also always historically in
and decorative patterns. contact with the Rajputs and cities of Rajput rule,
6 The author would like to point towards the works hence the visual culture that was associated with
of scholars and historians like Christopher Bayly, the Rajputs was always familiar to them.
Lakshmi Subramaniam and Harsh Damodaran, 15 Extension beyond the building line used for
who have invested research and studies towards weather protection.
a nuanced and thick description of 19th century 16 Milkmaids with whom Krishna dallied as a young
mercantilism. man in Vrindavan.
7 See Harsh Damodaran, India’s New Capitalists:
Caste, Business and Industry in a Modern Nation
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
8 Even if one imagines that it was men and
especially those in their working-age that moved
and lived across cities, for women, children and
older family members their husbands, sons,
fathers and many relatives were indeed scattered
across different locations, hence also conjuring up
for the “non-mobile” members of the family the
idea of places faraway and travel as an essential
part of existence.
9 The work of Anthony King discusses these
relationships and urban networks in the context of
colonial empires, especially in Urbanism,
Colonialism, and the World Economy: Cultural
and Spatial Foundations of the World Urban System
(London: Routledge, 1990, 1991).
10 For detailed notes on the role of World Exhibitions
and their impact on India see Tapati Guha-
Thakurta’s Objects Histories Monuments (Delhi:
Permanent Black, 2007). To read further on the
ideological role that World Exhibitions played,
see Timothy Mitchell, “The World as Exhibition”,
in Donald Perziosi, ed., The Art of Art History: A
Critical Anthology (USA: Oxford University Press,
2009).

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