Havelis of Old Delhi

The book focuses on the mansions built in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, of which in some cases, little remains beyond a pile of rubble, while in others, there is sufficient evidence of an indigenous architectural technique and the gracious lifestyle it once upheld. It was as far back as 1825 that Bishop Heber visited Delhi and remarked that the spider hangs her tapestry in the palace of the Caesars’. In June 1989, Varma and Shankar began their eighteen-month walk through those streets—past alleys, through doorways, up narrow staircases and down mildewed basements to produce this invaluable and enduring document of a lost era. Through them an entire period of recent Indian history, encapsulating feudal Nawabs and British Sahebs, comes alive. The text and photographs are not merely descriptive. Underlying them is a disturbing statement of India’s fast diminishing heritage.