“If only haveli walls could talk, what fascinating stories they would tell, having witnessed many generations of children growing up and daughters getting married and leaving their familiar surroundings forever.” This is how Randhawa, using a portrait taken from his family archives, explains the extraordinary gathering of Sikh men, most of them armed with guns, at his grandfather Charan Singh Sidhu’s home in Bidowali in Punjab in 1923 for a family wedding. The bride is, of course, not in the picture, but Randhawa’s mother is visible as a babe in arms at the back.
It is her sister who will be married. The bridegroom is a young boy seated next to Randhawa’s grandfather, looking very composed considering that he had been pulled out of school for the betrothal. Randhawa’s mother lived to be 101 and passed away in 2022.
The haveli now lies deserted as the whirligig of change has swept through its courtyard and scattered the successive generations of the family into different parts of the country. The image also suggests a rough time frame for the patchwork quilt of images that Randhawa has collected during his travels through the subcontinent, and he manages to include a number of references from the distant past. In a chapter on stepwells and hammams (bath houses), for instance, he includes the photograph of a stepwell excavated at Dholavira in Gujarat which links it to the Harappan age.
In highlighting the panoramic view of the Ajanta caves of western India , he touc.