A fort built to guard the caravans
Before the railways, camel trains crossing this plain carried opium, cotton, spices and silk between the Gangetic plain and the ports of Gujarat. Mandawa was built to keep them safe, and to tax them.
A merchant's standing in his own town was measured by the size of his haveli, the depth of his well and the number of rooms he could have painted. Families who made money in Calcutta sent it home to build, and that is why you are here.
Rao Shekha: a fifteenth-century Kachwaha chief who broke away from Amber and ruled from Amarsar until his death in 1488. Shekhawati takes his name.
The Shekhawats spread: his descendants moved north across the sandy plain over the next three centuries.
Facts to know
- Region named for
- Rao Shekha, died 1488
- Jhunjhunu taken
- 1730, by Thakur Shardul Singh
- Fort built
- 1755, by Thakur Nawal Singh
- Painting era
- 1830s to 1930s
- Hotel since
- Around 1980
- 1730: Thakur Shardul Singh took Jhunjhunu from its Kaimkhani nawabs, and his sons divided the land.
- The founder: one son, Thakur Nawal Singh, founded Nawalgarh and in 1755 raised a fort at Mandawa to protect an outpost on the caravan road.
- Security brought merchants: mostly Marwari Agarwals and Maheshwaris, the Goenkas, Chokhanis, Ladias, Newatias, Jhunjhunwalas, Sarafs and Murmurias.
- Their trade: they lent money, financed caravans and kept accounts in the old mahajani script.
- Following the money: when Calcutta, Bombay and the railways pulled trade from the desert routes in the nineteenth century, they moved east and south. Many became great industrial houses of modern India.
- A century of building: from the 1830s to the 1930s Mandawa's lanes filled with courtyard mansions, painted inside and out by Shekhawati's masons and painters.
- Absent owners: most lived far away and came back only for weddings and festivals, which is partly why so much painting survives, and why so much is fading.
- The castle: it stayed with Nawal Singh's descendants, who opened it to guests around 1980, among the first noble families in Rajasthan to do so.
- Early days: at the time almost nobody drove out from Jaipur to look at painted walls.
- Still family: they still run it, and their portraits hang in the darbar hall.
The town as it is now
At seven in the morning Mandawa belongs to milk carts, school bells and the clink of tea glasses. By eleven it belongs to tour buses. Choose your hours well.
The most visited painted town: with signboards in French and English, rooftop cafes, a few too many souvenir stalls and boys on bicycles offering to guide you.
Also a real market town: farmers come in on tractors for seed and steel buckets, women in bright odhnis, the long head-veils of the region, haggle over bangles.
Camel carts: they still carry fodder through the lanes.
Facts to know
- Busiest hours
- About 10am to 2pm
- Films
- Bajrangi Bhaijaan, PK
- Havelis
- Almost all private property
- Caretaker
- Chowkidar
- On film: parts of the town stood in for Pakistan in Bajrangi Bhaijaan, and PK also shot here. Children will point out where a song was filmed.
- Keep perspective: ask your guide if you're curious, but don't let the films replace the older stories on the walls.
- Town one: the loop everyone walks, half a dozen famous havelis near the bazaar.
- Town two: beyond it, lanes that go to sand, havelis locked, lived in by a caretaker's family or slowly collapsing.
- Private homes: some havelis charge a small entry fee and are kept like museums. In others a chowkidar lives with his family in two rooms of a thirty-room mansion.
- Manners: ask before stepping into a courtyard and keep your voice down.
- Never touch the paintings: the oils from fingers do more damage than a century of sun.
Local tip
Treat Mandawa as two towns. We spend the first morning on the famous loop and the second wandering the outer lanes, where you can stand before a painted wall with nobody else in sight.
The havelis worth your time
Mandawa has more painted buildings than you could see in a week. These are the ones we stop at, and the detail to look for in each.
- The bigger picture: our guide to Shekhawati's painted havelis shows how the towns fit together, and things to do in Mandawa has the full list.
Jhunjhunwala Haveli and its golden room
The Golden Haveli: the one people mean by that name.
- Upstairs: one small room painted with gold on its ceiling and upper walls, showing Krishna with the gopis, Shiva and Parvati, the Devi and Rama's court.
- Late morning: coloured glass in the windows throws pools of light across the floor.
- Best kept: run like a museum, it is the best preserved interior in town.
Murmuria Haveli, where the old world meets the new
Late work: built in the 1930s, with a pale facade and arched windows that look almost European.
- Politics on the walls: Nehru on horseback, King George V, Bharat Mata and a panel of freedom fighters including Gandhi and Tilak.
- Look for: Krishna herding cows through a plainly English country landscape, copied from a print by a painter who had never seen one.
Binsidhar Newatia Haveli and the first aeroplane
The twentieth century arrives: on the outer walls.
- The flying machine: usually read as the Wright brothers' first flight, with a European gentleman speaking into a telephone nearby.
- Their source: the artists almost certainly worked from magazine pictures sent back from Calcutta.
- When to look: stand across the lane in the early morning, when the light is flat and the colours read clearly.
Gulab Rai Ladia Haveli
- A merchant's world: the owner appears with a fort behind him.
- Details: a couple in a railway compartment, a bird tending its eggs, and a tiger and a horse painted as mirror images.
Goenka Double Haveli
Two gateways: side by side, with a grand facade of painted elephants and horses.
- The family: a name that went on to Calcutta and beyond.
- The double plan: brothers could share one great house, or close the doors between them and live apart.
- Rare find: a painting of Yama, the god of death, unusual on Shekhawati walls.
Chokhani Double Haveli
Twin houses: two identical wings for two sons, joined by a shared central wall.
- Huge courtyards: among the largest in Mandawa, and they say more about merchant wealth than any gold paint.
- Try this: stand in the inner court and count the doors.
Harlalka Well
A gift to everyone: in a desert town, merchants who paid for wells had their names remembered.
- The form: about a century and a half old, with slender pillars topped by small domed canopies, the classic Shekhawati well.
- The ramp: a long slope where animals once hauled up the water bags. Women from nearby havelis drew water here.
- At sunset: a lovely spot, with the rooftops turning gold behind it.
Raghunath temple
A surprise: built in the haveli style, with no spire.
- Look up: at the painted porch ceiling, where small labels name each scene.
- Etiquette: remove your shoes, and if the priest is there, a small offering is welcome.
How to read a Shekhawati wall
Our grandfather taught us to start at the bottom of a facade and read upwards, the way you would read a family. The gods are at the top, the gossip at eye level.
True frescoes: the earliest paintings were made on wet lime plaster in red and yellow ochres, lamp black, white lime and precious indigo.
The method: painters scratched the outline into damp plaster, filled it in and polished the finished wall with smooth stones until it shone.
Built to last: these have lasted remarkably well.
Facts to know
- Early colours
- Ochres, lamp black, lime, indigo
- True fresco
- Early 19th century, wet plaster
- Later work
- Dry plaster, chemical colours
- Painters
- Chejaras, the masons' caste
- Craft ended
- Within a generation of the 1930s
- Later work: from the late nineteenth century, often on dry plaster with imported chemical colours, brighter, harsher and faster to fade.
- Date a wall: once you know the difference, you can tell the age from across the lane.
- Over the gate: Ganesh, the remover of obstacles, who must bless every doorway.
- On the facade: processions of elephants and horses, the merchant's claim to the status of a Rajput.
- Krishna everywhere: stealing butter, dancing with the gopis or lifting a mountain on his finger.
- Dhola and Maru: the folk lovers ride their camel across many walls.
- From about 1900: trains with every carriage drawn, motor cars, gramophones, bicycles, telephones, aeroplanes and Englishmen in top hats.
- Painted from postcards: these were the wonders sons saw in Calcutta, drawn by painters who had never left Shekhawati, from postcards and labels.
- The painters: mostly chejaras, the masons' caste, who built the havelis and decorated them. A few signed their work, and some painter families were famous.
- The end: when merchants stopped commissioning work in the 1930s, the craft died within a generation. Our guide to Shekhawati frescoes goes deeper.
Where to stay in Mandawa
Mandawa's great luxury is waking up inside a fort, then climbing to the ramparts to watch the town light its first stoves.
Castle Mandawa
The address in Shekhawati: the 1755 fort of Thakur Nawal Singh.
No two rooms alike: spread through towers, courtyards and old apartments.
- What's there: painted rooms, old family portraits, a pool and terraces on the bastions for sunrise and sunset.
- Ask for: a tower room or one opening onto the ramparts.
- The evening to remember: dinner in the courtyard with folk musicians.
Desert Resort Mandawa
- Same family, different stay: a village of mud-plastered cottages on the dunes just outside town, painted inside with folk motifs.
- Why choose it: quieter than the castle, with space, calm and sundowners on the dunes. Drive into the old town for the havelis.
Staying in a haveli
Restored merchant homes: several havelis are now small hotels, among them the Hotel Mandawa Haveli, an 1890 house with paintings across two floors and a rooftop restaurant.
- The trade-off: simpler than the castle, but you sleep inside a painted mansion.
- Compare them: our guides to luxury hotels in Mandawa and Shekhawati havelis to stay in.
What Mandawa eats
Shekhawati is a vegetarian, millet-and-ghee country. The merchant families who built these havelis kept strict kitchens, and their food is still the food of the town.
Millet country: in winter every kitchen runs on bajra, pearl millet, which grows in sand when nothing else will.
Bajra rotis: thick and nutty, eaten with white butter, jaggery and a fiery garlic chutney.
Ker sangri: dried desert berries and beans with spices, made her own way by every Shekhawati grandmother. Our ker sangri explainer tells why it became a delicacy.
- Kadhi: the yoghurt curry, thinner and sharper here than in Jaipur.
- Gatte: gram-flour dumplings in spiced gravy, at almost every meal.
- Sweets: bazaar halwais fry jalebis in the morning, and in winter there are sesame and jaggery sweets and slow-cooked rabri.
- Marwari thali: many haveli hotels cook one on request.
- A wedding feast: the castle can arrange dinner in the style of a merchant's wedding, seated on the floor and eaten from leaf plates.
- Cook with a family: sessions with local family cooks show why so little meat appears on a Marwari table.
- For meat-eaters: the castle keeps the Rajput side alive, with laal maas and game-style curries. Ask the day before so it can be cooked slowly.
- Across the state: our Rajasthan food guide lists the dishes to look for in each region.
When to come, and the festivals
Shekhawati sits on the edge of the Thar, so its seasons are extreme. The light in December is the reason photographers come back.
November to February: warm, dry days and soft light, perfect for reading frescoes.
Cold nights: December and January can be close to freezing, so bring a warm layer for courtyard dinners.
Facts to know
- Best season
- November to February
- Coldest nights
- December and January, near freezing
- Hot months
- April to June, above 45°C
- Monsoon
- July to September, short and patchy
- March: still pleasant, with the festival of colour.
- April to June: temperatures pass 45°C. We only come then for guests who want the town to themselves at dawn and dusk.
- The monsoon: short and patchy, but it turns the fields green and the sand a deep amber.
The Shekhawati Festival, late winter
- Across the painted towns: folk music, camel and horse events, village sports and haveli tours each winter.
- Low-key: compared with the big desert festivals, and all the better for it.
Holi, in March
- Wonderful and loud: in the weeks before, men gather at night to beat the large chang drums and sing.
- Our plan on the day: inside the castle walls in the morning, out in the afternoon when things calm down.
Gangaur and Teej
The most beautiful days: the women's festivals.
- Gangaur, March or April: women and girls carry clay images of the goddess Gauri through the lanes, singing.
- Teej, in the monsoon: swings tied to trees and new leheriya saris.
Getting to Mandawa and around the painted towns
Mandawa is a road journey, and a good one. The drive from Jaipur passes millet fields, camel carts and village wells that are worth stopping for.
From Jaipur: through Sikar and Fatehpur, or via Nawalgarh.
From Delhi: via the highways through Haryana and Jhunjhunu. We often break the journey at Neemrana Fort Palace.
Facts to know
- From Jaipur
- About 170 km, four hours
- From Delhi
- Five to six hours
- To Bikaner
- Three and a half to four hours
- Fatehpur
- About 20 km
- Nawalgarh
- About 30 km
- Nearest stations
- Jhunjhunu and Nawalgarh
- Towards the desert: Bikaner lies to the west, making Mandawa a natural stop between Jaipur or Delhi and the desert.
- By train: possible, but most guests arrive with their chauffeur from Jaipur or Delhi.
- In town, walk: the lanes are narrow and sandy, and the best havelis are close together.
- The outer lanes: a camel cart or a tuk-tuk is fun for an hour.
- Neighbours: Fatehpur and Nawalgarh are close, and Churu is about an hour away.
- One loop: our Painted Towns of Shekhawati journey links them unhurriedly.
The towns around Mandawa
Mandawa is a hub, not a full stop. Within an hour of the castle gate lie a dozen painted towns, each built by different families with different tastes.
Nawalgarh, the museum town
Same founder: Thakur Nawal Singh, who built Mandawa's castle, founded Nawalgarh.
- Bigger and busier: with the region's two best restored havelis open as museums.
- Our advice: if you add one town to Mandawa, make it this one.
Fatehpur, the oldest of them
- Twenty minutes south: Fatehpur was a Muslim Kaimkhani capital three centuries before Mandawa's castle.
- A French painter: restored one of its havelis, and her story is one of the best in Shekhawati.
Dundlod and Mukundgarh
- Two small thikanas: Shekhawat noble estates, each with a fort and a cluster of havelis.
- Quiet: you may be the only visitors of the day.
Jhunjhunu
- The district town: the seat from which Shardul Singh's family spread across the region.
- Worth a morning: busier and less pretty than Mandawa, but its stepwells, Khetri Mahal and merchant havelis show how the region was governed.
Two days in Mandawa
Two nights let you see the famous havelis early, spend an afternoon in a neighbouring town, and still have time to do nothing on the castle ramparts.
Day one, the famous loop
Lunchtime: arrive from Jaipur and rest.
- At four: walk out with your guide to the Jhunjhunwala golden room, the Murmuria haveli and the Ladia murals.
- Sunset: end at the Harlalka well.
- Dinner: in the castle courtyard with music.
Day two, the quiet lanes and a neighbour
Sunrise: tea on the ramparts.
- Before the buses: the outer lanes and the Newatia and Chokhani havelis.
- After lunch: Fatehpur for the Le Prince haveli, or Nawalgarh for the Podar museum.
- Sundowner: on the dunes at the Desert Resort.
With a third night
Add a day: for Nawalgarh, Dundlod and Mukundgarh.
- Or move on: to Alsisar for a night in a fort-palace.
- Longer plans: our Mandawa itinerary guide.
Who Mandawa suits, and how long to give it
Mandawa rewards people who like to stand still in front of a wall. It frustrates people who only want to tick off a famous name.
Lovers of art and history: a whole town of painted walls, from early true frescoes to aeroplanes and telephones.
Photographers: the soft December light is the reason they come back, and the dunes add a sunset.
Facts to know
- One night
- The famous loop and the castle
- Two nights
- Quiet lanes and a neighbouring town
- Three nights
- Dundlod, Mukundgarh or Alsisar
- Avoid
- The havelis between ten and two
- Travellers on the move: Mandawa sits naturally between Jaipur or Delhi and the desert at Bikaner.
- Readers of family stories: the merchant houses behind India's great industrial names began in lanes like these.
- Less suited to: anyone who dislikes crowds and can only visit at midday, when the tour buses are in.
- Not a polished museum: much of the painting is fading and many havelis are locked. That decay is part of the honesty of the place.
- Don't rush it: a single afternoon shows you the famous loop. The outer lanes, where you are alone with the walls, need a second morning.
What we tell friends before Mandawa
These are the small things that turn a stop into a good stay.
Go out early: the famous havelis are packed with day-trippers between ten and two, and the light is better before and after.
Book a guide in advance: licensed local guides know which caretakers have the keys, and they won't steer you to shops.
- Carry small notes: many havelis ask a small fee or welcome a tip for the caretaker, which keeps the doors open.
- Ask before photographing: families still live in many of these courtyards.
- Be kind about the decay: many owners live in Mumbai or Kolkata, and restoring a shared family property is hard. Admire, and don't lecture.
- Read up first: our best time to visit Mandawa guide and the Shekhawati region page make every wall richer.
Local tip
Bring a torch, or use your phone light. The best paintings are often under dark arches and in the corners of ceilings.
