The Painted Towns of Shekhawati.

• Author: Bautze, Joachim K.

Shekhavati is an area of some 30,500 [km.sup.2] situated a few hours by car west of Delhi. The wall paintings found in that area cover mainly the mansions (havelis) of well-to-do businessmen, but also funerary pavilions (chatris), temples, and wells (baolis). The great majority of these paintings date from the second half of the nineteenth and the first quarter of the twentieth centuries, but there are also earlier examples. The paintings as such look attractive from a distance and have created a "wave" of independent publications, starting with Rajasthan, the Painted Walls of Shekhavati, by F. Wacziarg and A. Nath (1982), and, more recently, Shekhavati, Painted Townships, by K. Singh (New Delhi, 1995), and the lavishly produced Shekhawati, Rajasthan's Painted Homes, by P. Rakesh and K. Lewis (Delhi, 1995).

Cooper's new guide is printed in the same format as his earlier Rajasthan: The Guide to Painted Towns of Shekhawati (With Street Maps) (Churn, no date [1987, according to the book under review, p. 229]), but it contains many more photographs (compared to fifteen black-and-white illustrations in the earlier edition) and is more voluminous (only 128 pages in the first edition). The drawings in both works are more or less similar. The division of chapters largely follows the earlier edition as well: following an introduction to the history of the Shekhavati area (pp. 25-41), painted buildings (pp. 44-63), the painters (pp. 64-72), technique of the murals (pp. 73-79), their stylistic periods (pp. 80-88) and subjects (pp. 89-108), the towns are finally treated in alphabetic order (pp. 109-227). A bibliography (pp. 228-30) terminates the edition under review. In writing this book Cooper invested a lot of enthusiasm, paired with his personal feelings and experiences in the area ("I always feel a soft spot for this town for it was here, . . ., that I first came across the painted havelis" (p. 226). His text is so useful that parts of his earlier edition were even pirated by the "Government of India Tourist Department . . . this without acknowledgement, payment or permission," writes Cooper (p. 9). The text is, in fact, entertaining, as are most journalistic publications of this kind. The scholarly part of it, however, escapes criticism since the book is aimed more at the unexperienced tourist, with hints as to where to take off shoes, etc., than at the art-historian.

The reader has to rely fully on Cooper's sense for aesthetics when we read...