Last updated: October 2026 · Method: compiled from public listings and traveller reports; treat figures as planning aids, not quotations.
From the early twentieth century, Shekhawati’s painters added the modern world to walls that had carried only gods and court processions: locomotives, motorcars, gramophones, telephones and even aeroplanes appear on mansion facades.
Shekhawati’s 20th-century walls show the innovation approach at its strangest, with locomotives and gramophones appearing on mansion facades.
- The motifs copy what merchants saw in Bombay: locomotives, motorcars and gramophones.
- The religious mix: Christian and mythological scenes side by side.
- The meaning: a proudly modern merchant, displaying the wealth pattern.
The motifs are dated by their subjects, which makes them useful. A train on a dado band dates the wall to a world that knew railways; a gramophone or an aeroplane narrows it further, and the published surveys use exactly these images as timestamps for the walls’ later layers. The content mixes oddly by modern eyes: Christian missionary scenes sit beside Krishna cycles, and portraits of merchants in western dress flank the old durbar processions. The meaning is the key to reading them: a proudly up-to-date merchant, displaying what he had seen in Bombay and Calcutta and what his money could now buy.