In the desert, painted onto once-great — and now, mostly abandoned — houses, is dazzling proof of the Indian state's opulent history.
.... “Generations upon generations,” the Swiss artist Alice Boner once wrote of a pair of vessels that she felt embodied the spirit of Indian craftsmanship, “of artists and users must have pooled their experience to achieve objects of this kind. An analysis of the parts which compose them does not solve the mystery of their being.” This is true of the havelis, too. The artists — artisans, really — who created them took as their subjects everything from the lives of the gods to the arrival of the Europeans. ....