Paliwal villages: Kuldhara & Khaba

The Paliwal villages around Jaisalmer are remarkably urban. Indeed it may be more correct to call them towns, since, though they now appear to have contained no more than a few score houses, they may once have been surrounded by more ephemeral ‘suburbs’, which have since disappeared. What remains is one hundred or more villages; coherent, ordered settlements of stone buildings. The street arrangement gives a very agreeable sense of enclosure, contrasting with occasional open spaces centered on a ‘piyas’. This is an ornamental feature consisting of a pyramidal structure of delicately carved stone erected over a square stone cell, where it is customary for a Brahman to give drinking water to visitors. Another feature of these open spaces is the low stone table which probably served as a sitting and meeting place in the cool evenings. The temples, occurring in the street without any strongly marked centrality, were modest buildings, though somewhat more monumental than the neighbouring houses.

Unfortunately, this highly enterprising community of the Paliwal Brahmans had to flee the desert at rather short notice, sometime prior to the year 1820. Salim Singh, the Prime Minister to Maharawal Mulraj, wielded enormous power and chose not to tolerate the prosperity of the Paliwals. He, therefore, created very difficult conditions for them to continue to live in the region. Several of these villages lie in a state of ruin even today. In many ways the houses in a Paliwal village could be compared to more evolved urban houses, to an extent, to the houses of modern day towns; except that they were mostly single storeyed. The street pattern was like a grid with straight, wide streets to which the houses were directly connected. This permitted a garage for the carts; a covered space in a part of the frontage of the house. The remains of these Paliwal settlements, ruined as they are, still demonstrate the very high level of urbanism that existed in the desert centuries ago. Highly evolved forms of house, temples, stepwells, and other structures clearly indicate the long period of development of these forms. The genesis of these could be traced back to, perhaps, the Harrappan settlements