Sidhpur: Streets of Pastel Havelis

You turn off a dusty main road in a small town in Patan district, and the street in front of you does not belong in north Gujarat. It is lined on both sides with three-storey houses painted lavender, mint green, powder blue and dusty pink, with wooden shutters, carved balconies, Corinthian pilasters, monograms above the doors and cast-iron railings. It looks like a film set for a Mediterranean port. Almost every house is locked.

This is Vohrawad, the Bohra quarter of Sidhpur, and it is one of the strangest and most beautiful urban landscapes in India. It was built between roughly the late nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth by Dawoodi Bohra merchants — a prosperous Shia Muslim trading community whose business took them to Bombay, Rangoon, Zanzibar and Europe — who came home and built houses in the styles they had seen abroad. Then, over a couple of generations, most of them moved away again.

Streets built by traders who travelled

The Dawoodi Bohras of Gujarat were, and are, a mercantile community with a strong tradition of long-distance trade, and by the late nineteenth century Sidhpur's Bohra families were doing well from business conducted far from home. What they built with the proceeds was not a set of grand individual mansions but something much more unusual: whole streets, planned as ensembles, with continuous facades, matching cornice lines and a shared architectural language applied house after house.

That language is a magpie's version of Europe. There are neoclassical pilasters and pediments, Venetian-influenced windows, Art Deco geometry on the later houses, wrought-iron balconies, coloured glass, and monogrammed plaques over the doors carrying the owner's initials. Inside — for the few houses you may be lucky enough to see — there are teak staircases, Burmese timber, Belgian mirrors, Minton tiles and European furniture, imported through the same trade routes that paid for the buildings.

The colours are the thing everyone remembers, and they are not accidental. The pastel palette runs down the whole street, house after house in lavender and mint and cream and pale blue, and the effect on a clear morning is genuinely disorienting. Whether the original scheme was quite this pastel or whether repainting over the decades has softened it is debated locally; either way, it is now part of the identity of the place.

Lavender, mint and powder-blue facades in a north Gujarat town — built by traders who had seen Europe.

A quarter with the lights off

The melancholy of Sidhpur is unavoidable and it is part of what makes it memorable. Trade moved on. Bohra families followed opportunity to Mumbai, to the Gulf, to Britain and North America, and the houses they built for a permanent homecoming became second homes, then occasional homes, then locked doors. Walk Vohrawad on an ordinary weekday and you may see almost nobody. Shutters are closed, paint is flaking in places, and some of the houses have plainly not been opened in years.

Whole streets built for a homecoming that never quite happened — the shutters are closed and the paint is going, and it is still the most beautiful street in north Gujarat

They are not abandoned, though, and it matters to understand that. Many are still owned, maintained at a distance and reopened when families return for weddings, for the community's religious calendar or for the annual gatherings that bring Bohras back to their ancestral towns. On those occasions the quarter fills up and the doors open. The rest of the time it is a residential neighbourhood on standby, and visitors should behave accordingly.

That means the basic manners of walking through somebody else's street: photograph the architecture freely, but do not photograph into windows or courtyards; do not push open gates; ask before pointing a camera at residents; and keep your voice down. If someone invites you in — which does happen, and is a real kindness — accept, take your shoes off, and do not photograph the interior without explicit permission. A local guide, easily arranged, makes all of this much smoother and dramatically improves what you understand about what you are looking at.

The rest of Sidhpur: a ruin and a sacred lake

Sidhpur was important long before the Bohras arrived, and the evidence is a wreck at the centre of town. Rudra Mahalaya was a colossal Shiva temple complex begun in the eleventh century and completed under Siddhraj Jaisinh, the Solanki king from whom the town takes its name. It was, by every account, one of the great buildings of medieval western India — multi-storeyed, ringed with subsidiary shrines, densely carved. It was largely destroyed in the fourteenth century, part of the site was converted into a mosque, and what stands now is a handful of pillars, fragments of a torana and some superb carved stone in the middle of a fenced enclosure.

Access to the Rudra Mahalaya site has been restricted for years because of a long-running legal and communal dispute over the ground, and you may or may not be able to enter; ask locally and accept the answer. Even from outside, the surviving fragments give a sense of the scale of what was lost. Nearby is Bindu Sarovar, one of the five sacred lakes of Hindu tradition and the one specifically associated with matru shraddha — the rites performed for a departed mother. Pilgrims come here for that purpose from across India, and the ghats and small shrines around the tank are quietly busy in a way the Bohra streets are not.

Getting there and doing it right

Sidhpur sits in Patan district, roughly 100 km north of Ahmedabad and about 25 km from Patan itself, on the road towards Ambaji and the Rajasthan border. It has a railway station on the Ahmedabad–Abu Road line, so trains are a real option, and buses run frequently from Mehsana, Patan and Ahmedabad. Most visitors, though, come by car as part of a north Gujarat loop.

That loop is the best way to do it. Sidhpur combines naturally with Patan for Rani ki Vav and patola weaving, Modhera for the Sun Temple, Vadnagar for its torana and excavations, and Taranga or Ambaji further north. Give Sidhpur two to three hours: an hour and a half walking Vohrawad slowly, half an hour at Bindu Sarovar, and whatever the Rudra Mahalaya situation allows. Morning light is much the best for the facades, and the cool months from October to March make walking the streets a pleasure rather than a chore. Accommodation in town is basic; most people sleep in Patan, Mehsana or Ahmedabad.

If you go

• Walk Vohrawad in the morning — low side light on the pastel facades is when the street looks the way you hoped it would.
• Treat it as a residential neighbourhood, not a monument: don't photograph into windows or courtyards, and ask before photographing people.
• Hire a local guide. It transforms what you understand about the houses, and opens the occasional door.
• Ask locally about access to the Rudra Mahalaya ruins, which has been restricted for years, and accept whatever answer you get.
• Combine Sidhpur with Patan, Modhera and Vadnagar into a north Gujarat day or two; sleep in Patan or Mehsana.

Sidhpur is the most surprising street in Gujarat: three-storey pastel houses with European pilasters and monogrammed doors, built by Bohra traders who had seen the world and wanted to bring some of it home, now standing largely shuttered in a small north Gujarat town. Add a colossal ruined Solanki temple and one of Hinduism's five sacred lakes within a few hundred metres, and you have a two-hour stop that will stay with you longer than most full days. Go in the morning, walk quietly, and take a guide.