Mandawa: The forgotten Open-Air Art Gallery of Rajasthan

Words & Photography: Mohit Sharma // Additional Photography: Ujjwal

In the heart of Shekhawati, Mandawa unfolds like a living museum of art and memory. Once a thriving stop on the Silk Route, this region saw wealthy merchant families compete in grandeur, commissioning havelis adorned with intricate frescoes and murals. These mansions weren’t just homes, but canvases — painted with tales of gods, daily life, and even the first glimpses of modernity like trains and gramophones.

The first time I entered Mandawa, it felt less like arriving in a town and more like stepping into a painted dream. The desert air was sharp, the lanes narrow, and yet everywhere I looked the walls came alive — a horse with wings, gods mid-dance, a train chugging across plaster. In Rajasthan, where kings built forts and merchants built palaces, Mandawa became something else altogether: a canvas.

I remember craning my neck in front of the grand Jhunjhunwala Haveli. A winged horse soared across the façade, its cracked colours glowing faintly under the late afternoon sun. Above it, Victorian gentlemen in frock coats rubbed shoulders with Krishna and Ganesha. If you could read a wall, Mandawa was a book — each page a blend of devotion, aspiration, and imagination.

“Think of it as India’s open-air art gallery,” smiled Vikram Singh, my guide for the day, whose family has lived here for generations. “These frescoes were never just decoration. They were ambition painted in colour — a merchant showing the world he had arrived.”

Stories on the Walls

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Marwari merchants of Shekhawati grew wealthy as their businesses spread across Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras. Their fortunes travelled home, and in Mandawa, their pride took form in paint. The walls of their havelis became storyboards of progress.

On one façade, a steam train thundered across British India. On another, the Wright Brothers’ flying machine shared space with Radha waiting in the moonlight. In yet another, a gramophone spun silently beside Krishna’s flute. It was as if modernity and mythology had struck a truce on the walls of Mandawa.

I laughed when Vikram pointed out a mural of a shiny new car inside a haveli courtyard. “This was probably Rajasthan’s first showroom,” he said. “Except you could never drive it.”

Between Glory and Decay

Walking through Mandawa feels like wandering in a paradox. Children play cricket in the shade of frescoed balconies where angels, though faded, still fly. Old men sip tea at walls that once blazed with indigo and saffron pigments. Some havelis have been restored and turned into boutique stays — like Durga’s own Dera Mandawa, where I spent the night — while others lean precariously, their locked doors guarding artwork that refuses to vanish.

In one haveli, I found Radha hidden in a peeling corner, her gaze eternal despite the cracks. In another, a British officer rode an elephant with a moustache so exaggerated it bordered on satire. Every lane, every courtyard whispered forgotten lives into the present.

More Than a Museum

What makes Mandawa remarkable is that it is not a museum. It is too alive, too imperfect, too inhabited for that. You can touch the flaking paint with your fingertips, smell cumin and turmeric rising from kitchens, and hear the squeak of a bicycle passing a mural of flying gods. Unlike a gallery where silence is imposed, Mandawa hums with sound. The art belongs to everyone — the hotelier who restores a haveli, the cowherd leading his animals past a fresco, the child chalking hopscotch squares under a mural of deities in flight.

As art critic Aman Nath once wrote in The Hindu:

“Shekhawati’s frescoes are democracy painted on plaster. They were never hidden away in palaces but splashed across the lanes, belonging as much to the passerby as to the patron.”

Holding On to Beauty

That evening, as the desert sky deepened into indigo, I sat on a terrace at my hotel watching the havelis below glow softly in lamplight. The frescoes shimmered faintly, as if still holding their last breath of day.

Vikram’s words came back to me: “These walls remind us that beauty is not permanent. But it is stubborn. It clings on, no matter the centuries.” Mandawa is indeed an open-air art gallery. Its admission ticket is curiosity. Its walls do not ask you to be quiet — they ask you to step closer, to listen, and to let the colours tell their stories.

Yet, many of these once-grand havelis now stand in forgotten silence — their frescoes fading, their walls weathered by time. In Mandawa and across Shekhawati, they remain like open history books, waiting for someone to turn the pages again. To walk through them is to trace the dreams of merchants, the strokes of artists, and the passage of centuries. Perhaps the most powerful way to honour them is not just to admire their beauty, but to explore them in our own way — to let their stories stir questions within us about what we choose to preserve, and what we allow to fade.

If you are planning your art journey to Mandawa;

Best Time to Visit
October–March, when the desert air is crisp and the colours glow brighter.
How to explore:
On foot. Mandawa is best discovered slowly, wall by wall, lane by lane. A guide can help decode its layers of history.
Don’t miss:
The murals of the Goenka, Jhunjhunwala, and Murmuria havelis — each a chapter in Mandawa’spainted anthology.

This is an excerpt from the field notes of the Immerse India team’s 2022 journey to Mandawa, shared as part of our Immersive Experiences Series.

Words & Photography: Mohit Sharma

Additional Photography: Amanda. F