Havelis in Shekhawati

Well, hello! It's been a long time since I posted, and I've got so much to catch you up on. In fact, I reckon that India tales will be pouring forth for some time to come, so for now I'll tell you a little bit about Shekhawati and otherwise, just bring you up to date, to the present, where I am sitting writing from my room in Oxford, which is full of the scent of flowers. I flew back from India on Monday. After our trip to Udaipur, we headed back up to Jaipur (overnight sleeper) and from there onto a little area of Northern Rajasthan called Shekhawati. It is famous for the gorgeous murals and paintings on the walls of the havelis, so or mansion houses built by rich merchants in the nineteenth century. These murals depict stories from the Hindu epics, the Rajput royalty, new inventions such as cars and aeroplanes (evenme showing fairly grotesque looking Western women in evening dress), men smoking opium, English soldiers, one of a woman giving birth, kama sutra-like scenes (though many of these have been obliterated by recent inhabitants)...you name it, it's depicted in these pictures. The sad thing is that many of these houses are crumbling and the paintwork is in desperate need of restoration. And this restoration can be well or badly done - just repainting it strips away the original paintwork and leaves the building in a poorer condition than before. A French woman has restored one haveli to great acclaim, but our guide was dismissive of her work, saying that the work is inferior to the originals, will not last and has obliterated the delicate work of the original house. It is clearly a very sensitive issue.

In Shekhawati, we stayed at an eco-farm called Apani Dhani in a dusty little town called Nawalgarh, and enjoyed the home-cooked cuisine, cool and beautiful interior design of the mud huts, and the delightful company of some fellow travellers.

We had been planning to get the night train from Nawalgarh to Delhi, but discovered that the Shekhawati Express train was no longer running, so instead, we embarked on what can only be described as an insanely long journey by local (read rickety, bare, upright) bus from 10am (read heat of the day) to Delhi, arriving at about 6pm, and got an onward night sleeper train to Kathgodam, followed by a shared taxi up to Nainital. (Oh so many stories to tell!)

In brief now (so I can bore you at length later), from Nainital (too cold & wet) to Rishikesh, from Riskikesh back to New Delhi - where we were very kindly hosted by Kamla Bhasin, the mother of my friend Meeto, which meant very much to me - before flying home. This week since my return, I've been trying to recover from jet-lag, taught my first solo tutorial, ran our history conference in Meeto's honour, with Megha, on Thursday (more about that anon), and attended a careers day in London on Friday. Busy, busy!

[If you can't wait for further installments, you can see the whole story - at least in pictures - here].