Why this heritage portal exists — and the journey behind it
Why This Exists
This portal is the work of a grandson of the last constitutionally recognised ruler of Vasavad — someone who grew up walking through the rooms of a royal house that was slowly falling silent, and who understood, even as a child, that if no one wrote it down, all of it would disappear.
There are no public records of Vasavad's princely history. No museum, no archive, no institutional memory. The government gazette entries confirm that a ruler existed and a privy purse was paid — but they say nothing of the people, the house, the Wadi, the well where children learned to swim, or the tile in the floor that sounded hollow when you knocked on it in just the right way. Those memories lived only in the people who carried them. And those people are passing.
This project exists because heritage that is not preserved is heritage that is lost. Not gradually, not gently — but completely and irreversibly. If not for this effort, much of what you find on this portal would already be gone.
The Seeds of This Project
Long before the domain was registered or a single document was scanned
A Child in the Royal House
The interest did not begin with a decision to build a website. It began in childhood — walking through the rooms of the family's royal house in Vasavad with an elder uncle, who would pause at each doorway and explain what it had once held. This was the room where decisions were made. This was the home court. This was the guest house. This was where the babies were born — every child in the family, going back generations, had been born in that one particular room, delivered by home nursing in an era before hospitals reached small villages. And this was where the children were schooled — home-tutored in the royal household before formal schooling became the norm.
One memory stands out with particular clarity: a tile on the floor that looked no different from any other, but when you knocked on it in a particular way, it gave a hollow sound. There was a method to open it — and beneath it lay a storage space for valuables. In earlier times, the royal family served as the de facto bank of the locality. Villagers would entrust their valuables to the Talukdar's household for safekeeping. That hidden tile was not a relic of fiction — it was the lived architecture of trust between a ruler and his people.
Living through those moments was exciting then, and is exciting now. Every room had a story. Every wall carried a memory that someone could still narrate — if you were there to listen.
Indra Baug — The Royal Wadi
The family's Wadi — Indra Baug, also known more popularly as Chikuwadi and Fulwadi — was not merely a garden or an orchard. It was the family's living estate, the place where grandparents stayed, where grain was stored, where swings hung from old trees, and where peacocks walked the pathways. Visiting the Wadi with grandparents, parents, uncles, and aunts — hearing them describe how they had lived there, how they had played, where they had sat in the evenings — was to experience heritage not as history but as atmosphere.
The Wadi had a kuwo (well) and a hoj — a large fountain or reservoir — and a storage house for grain. The creator of this project's father once mentioned, with matter-of-fact casualness, that he had learned to swim by jumping directly into the hoj. No formal training, no swimming pool — in a small village in Saurashtra, there was no such thing. You simply jumped in. This was entirely normal for his generation and probably for every generation before.
One memory from the Wadi carries a weight that the others do not. The eldest child of the family — an elder sister of the creator's father, named Rudra Desai — drowned in the Wadi fountain at a very young age. The fountain was otherwise shallow and considered safe. Learning of this loss, years later in childhood, was a first encounter with the reality that heritage is not only pride and grandeur — it also carries grief, and the quiet tragedies that families fold into their private memory.
The Letting Go
When minds and hearts were divided
When the House and the Wadi Could No Longer Wait
The royal house in Vasavad had been unoccupied for a couple of decades. It was wearing out, walls were falling, and the neighbours were raising concerns. The family had to confront a question that no one wanted to answer: what do you do with a house that holds all your memories but can no longer stand?
Multiple trips were made. All the siblings — the six children of the last ruler — would go together, walk through the house, knock on the walls and pillars to check if they were still strong. Minds and hearts were divided. The house was not a building — it was the physical container of everything the family had been. But time does not negotiate.
When the decision was finally taken, an uncle brought along his camera and a cameraman to photograph every room, every corridor, every corner — the last visual record of the house before it passed out of the family's hands. A child followed him step by step, hand on hip, watching everything he photographed — and raising his own hands to frame an imaginary camera, taking pictures of those places in a camera that existed only in his mind. That child would, decades later, build this portal.
One particular memory from those final visits: a guest room on the first floor, on the opposite side of the house, that had been sealed for years. When the door was opened, fifty to a hundred bats came flying out. The room smelled of abandonment. But for a child, it was fascinating — the first real encounter with bats, hanging upside down in what had once been a room where guests of the Talukdar were received.
On another visit, the uncle brought a metal detector — to check whether the walls or pillars concealed anything of value, as was common practice in earlier times when wealth was hidden within the architecture itself for protection. The detector never sounded. But the image of that search — the quiet hope that the house might still yield one more secret — left an inseparable mark on a child's imagination.
The house was eventually sold. The Wadi was largely sold. The memories, however, lived ever through.
The Long Road to This Portal
From a child's still-roll camera to a digital heritage archive
Twelve Years on the Calendar
The determination to preserve this history came early — but the means did not. In the earliest days, the only tool available was a father's still-roll camera, lovingly lent each time it was asked for. In an era before smartphones and digital storage, cameras ran on film rolls — limited, expensive, and irreplaceable. Every photograph was a deliberate act. Early pictures were taken of the Wadi's kuwo, the storage house, the hoj, the walkways where peacocks roamed.
The formal effort began around 2013, with the systematic collection of photographs, documents, and oral accounts from family members. The domain name was registered in 2014. But life intervened — as it does — and there were years of inactivity, patches where the project lay dormant while its creator navigated his own life.
Today, in 2026, the portal has finally reached a level of substantive content. It has taken twelve to thirteen years on the calendar — not of continuous effort, but of persistent intent. The gap between the first impulse and the finished work is, in its own way, a testament to the nature of heritage preservation: it is not a weekend project. It is a commitment that outlasts convenience.
The People Who Made This Possible
Heritage is not preserved alone
A Family's Collective Effort
No single person could have built this. The portal draws from the collected memories, photographs, documents, and oral histories of many family members — each of whom preserved something that would otherwise have been lost.
Vyomeshbhai
A meticulous record-keeper who preserved decades of family documents, photographs, and historical notations in physical files and scanned copies. His systematic preservation of government correspondence, constitutional recognition documents, and family records forms the documentary backbone of this portal. Like father, like son — or perhaps, like son, like father.
Kumarbhai
The elder son of the last ruler, whose vast library of photographs, his authored work Bhagavad Gitanu Swarup Chintan, and his lifelong dedication to preserving the family's intellectual and spiritual heritage constitute a significant treasure. With the help of his son Manishbhai, these materials have been contributed to this portal.
Stories by Pravinaben, Kokilaben, Pratibhaben, Poornimaben
The vivid storytelling of Pravinaben, Kokilaben, Pratibhaben, and Poornimaben about life in Vasavad — and the memories shared by Priyavadanbhai, Girishbhai, and Shirishbhai — the sights, sounds, routines, and rituals of an era now passed — shaped the very vision and visualisation behind this project. Their deeply personal recollections of growing up in the royal household, of the Wadi, of the village and its people, became the emotional blueprint from which this portal was imagined. Without their stories, there would be facts but no feeling.
The Next Generation
So many conversations with Yogeshbhai, Manishbhai, Sandipbhai, Bhavikbhai, and Chiragbhai would begin with the same Gujarati phrase — “અમે વાસાવડ જતાતા ને ત્યારે આઉ કરતા” — “When we used to go to Vasavad, we would do this…” Those words, spoken casually over chai or during family gatherings, were windows into a world that was slipping away. Similarly, conversations with Shilaben, Bhairaviben, and Dyutiben about their own experiences and memories of Vasavad added textures and dimensions that no document could capture. Each of these voices contributed a thread to the fabric of this project.
And Everyone Else
Countless other family members and people connected to Vasavad who have preserved photographs, memories, and oral histories across the decades. Their contributions — sometimes a single photograph, sometimes a vivid recollection shared at a family gathering — are the threads from which this tapestry is woven.
A Request to You
This portal contains what one family has been able to gather. But Vasavad's heritage belongs to everyone who has lived it. There are certainly family members and connected people of Vasavad who possess photographs, documents, stories, and memories that are more detailed, more vivid, or simply different from what is recorded here.
If you have anything — a photograph, a letter, a story told to you by a grandparent, a memory of the village as it once was — please contribute it. Every piece of information that reaches this portal is a piece of heritage saved from disappearing. Nothing is too small. Nothing is insignificant.
“We are all born for a reason, and we will all pass. What we leave behind is a legacy.”
This portal is our last memory of royalty — preserved so that the generations to come may know who we are, where we came from, and what it meant to carry a name that once governed a village, served its people, and shaped its story.
The child who once walked behind his uncle with an imaginary camera, and who grew up to build this portal, prefers to remain anonymous. The heritage speaks for itself.
