Indrabaug: The Ancestral Wadi of Vasavad

A Garden on the Riverbank

Every family of stature in Saurashtra had its wadi — a private estate on the outskirts of the village, part orchard, part farm, part retreat. For the Desai Talukdars of Vasavad, that place was Indrabaug: a sprawling ancestral garden situated right on the banks of the river, its main entrance opening onto the water's edge. The wadi served as the family's agricultural heartland and, more intimately, as the place where generations came to simply be together.

But in the daily language of the family and the village, Indrabaug was rarely called by its formal name. It was known, with the warm familiarity that only local usage can bestow, as Fulwadi — literally, the “flower garden” or “fruit garden.” The name tells you everything about what grew there and what it meant to those who tended it.

The Back Entrance

The photograph above shows the rear entrance to the wadi — a quieter, more private approach than the main gate on the riverbank. A narrow earthen path leads to the arched iron gate, flanked by sturdy stone pillars topped with ornamental finials. On either side, dense cactus hedging — the traditional boundary marker of Saurashtra's estates — stands thick and impenetrable, a living wall that has guarded the property for generations. Beyond the gate, mature trees rise against the open sky, their branches spreading over what was once one of the most productive orchards in Vasavad.

This was the entrance the family used when arriving from the village — the path walked by children running ahead of their elders, eager to reach the orchards and the animals that waited inside. While the main entrance on the river was the formal approach, this back gate was the family's own door — well-worn, familiar, and deeply personal.

A Farm Rich in Fruit and Harvest

Indrabaug was not merely ornamental. It was a working farm — rich, productive land that the Talukdar family cultivated with care. The wadi was abundant with fruit trees: mangoes that ripened golden in the Saurashtra summer, chiku (sapodilla) with their sandy-sweet flesh, jambu (rose apple), sitaphal (custard apple), and rows of papaya and guava. Lemon and lime trees punctuated the boundaries, their sharp fragrance cutting through the warm air.

Beyond the orchards, the family grew vegetables in neat, irrigated plots — brinjal, okra, turia (ridge gourd), valor (broad beans), and the leafy greens that formed the backbone of a Gujarati kitchen. The river alongside the wadi ensured a reliable water supply, and the fertile alluvial soil yielded generously. In a time before refrigerated supply chains, a family's wadi was its pantry. The freshest produce in the Talukdar's household came not from any market, but from Fulwadi — carried back to the Delo each morning by workers who had tended the land since dawn.

The Anaj Ghar: Storing the Harvest

Within the walls of Indrabaug stood the anaj ghar — the grain storage building. This solidly built structure, with its double-tiered tiled roof and latticed arched window, was where the estate's harvested grains were stored and safeguarded. The thick stone foundation kept moisture at bay, while the latticed openings allowed air to circulate through the stored grain, preventing rot in the humid pre-monsoon months.

By the time the photographs on this page were taken in the late 1990s, the anaj ghar was no longer functional. Its walls had begun to crack, the plaster peeling away to reveal the brickwork beneath. The tiled roof, though still standing, showed the wear of decades without repair. Vegetation had begun to reclaim the foundation. Yet even in its decline, the building spoke of an earlier time when Indrabaug was a self-sufficient estate — growing, harvesting, and storing its own grain within its own walls.

Cattle, Animals, and the Rhythm of the Land

The wadi was also home to the family's livestock. Cattle grazed in the shade of the mango trees. Goats roamed the periphery. Horses — a necessity for any Talukdar household — were stabled here during certain seasons. The presence of animals gave Indrabaug a rhythm that was older than any clock: the lowing of cows at dusk, the shuffle of hooves on packed earth, the sharp call of a rooster before first light.

For the children of the family, the wadi was an endless source of fascination. There were always new calves to name, goat kids to chase, and the quiet pleasure of sitting beside the cattle at twilight, watching the world slow down. It was, in the truest sense, a place where the next generation learned the texture of rural life — the life that sustained them, even as modernity began to reshape the world outside.

The Kuvo: Where Summers Were Spent

Perhaps no feature of Indrabaug lives more vividly in family memory than the kuvo — the well. In the relentless heat of a Saurashtra summer, when temperatures climb past forty degrees and the earth cracks beneath your feet, the kuvo offered the deepest, most immediate relief: a plunge into cool groundwater, surrounded by the stone walls of a well that had been dug generations before you were born.

Swimming in the kuvo was not a formal affair. It was spontaneous, joyful, and thoroughly unglamorous — children leaping in with whoops of delight, the older members of the family lowering themselves more carefully, the water dark and cool against skin that had been baking under the Gujarat sun. The echo of laughter off the stone walls. The slap of wet feet on the surrounding ledge. These were the sounds of Fulwadi in summer.

The kuvo also served a practical purpose. Even though the river flowed alongside the wadi, the well provided reliable groundwater that fed irrigation channels to the orchards and vegetable plots during the long dry months before the monsoon. Every drop was precious — drawn by hand or by bullock-powered pulley, distributed with the careful economy of people who understood that water was the difference between abundance and dust.

More Than a Farm: The Family's Retreat

Indrabaug was, above all, a place of escape. The Delo — the Talukdar's fortified residence in the heart of Vasavad — was the seat of authority, the place where governance happened, where disputes were settled and dignitaries received. It was formal, heavy with duty. The wadi, by contrast, was where the family could shed the weight of their position and simply live.

Here, the Talukdar could walk among his own trees, inspect the fruit with a farmer's practiced eye, and discuss the season's yield with the workers who knew the land as well as he did. Here, the women of the household could gather in the shade of the orchard, away from the more structured life of the Delo. Here, children ran wild — climbing trees, feeding animals, swimming in the kuvo, and returning home in the evening with dirt-stained clothes and stories that would be retold for decades.

The name Indrabaug itself carries a suggestion of paradise — Indra being the king of the gods in Hindu tradition, and baug (or bagh) meaning a garden. Whether the name was chosen with that allusion in mind or simply carried forward from an earlier time, it suited the place. For the family that knew it best, Indrabaug was indeed their own small paradise: a walled garden on the riverbank where the noise of the world fell away and the oldest pleasures — shade, water, fruit, the company of animals, the laughter of children — remained.

The Legacy of Fulwadi

Today, the landscape of Saurashtra has changed. The wadis that once defined rural estates have been divided, sold, or built upon. The rhythms of agrarian life that sustained families for centuries have given way to new economies and new aspirations. Many ancestral gardens exist now only in memory and in the stories told by those who knew them.

But the memory of Indrabaug — of Fulwadi — endures in the Desai family. It endures in the taste of a mango that reminds someone of a tree they once climbed. In the sight of a well that recalls the shock of cold water on a blazing afternoon. In the sound of cattle that echoes something deeper than nostalgia — something that speaks to the land itself, and to the family's bond with it.

Indrabaug was not merely property. It was identity. It was where the Talukdars of Vasavad were not rulers, but farmers. Not administrators, but parents. Not public figures, but a family, gathered in their own garden on the riverbank, living the life that the land provided.

Phoolwadi Today: A New Chapter

The story of Indrabaug did not end with the dispersal of the Desai family from Vasavad. In early 1991, just months before his passing in October of that year, Shri Indrashankar Prabhashankar Desai (Lalbhai) made a decision that transformed the garden's purpose while honouring its memory: he chose to transfer the wadi on token value to the Rajkot Diocese Trust, a charitable arm of the Syro-Malabar Catholic Eparchy of Rajkot, which serves the Saurashtra and Kutch regions.

On this land, the trust established Pratiksha Bhavan— a residential home for underprivileged and unsupported girl children, run by the Devpriya Charitable Trust. The institution provides free education up to the 12th standard, along with complete lodging, boarding, and medical services, with a capacity of more than 50 girls at any given time. The mission is simple and profound: to give vulnerable girls the foundation of education, safety, and dignity that circumstances had denied them.

In a gesture of respect towards the royal family, the trust retained the name Phoolwadifor the property — the same name by which generations of Vasavad's people had known the Desai family's ancestral garden. The mangoes and chiku trees remain, their shade still falling on the same earth. But alongside them now grow new flowers — little ones, phoolin the truest sense — the girls of Pratiksha Bhavan, blooming where the garden has always nurtured life.

The place where the Talukdar's children once climbed mango trees and swam in the kuvo now echoes with a different kind of laughter — that of dozens of girls who have found, within these walls, the chance to learn, to grow, and to imagine a life beyond the circumstances they were born into.

That Shri Lalbhai chose to part with his ancestral wadi — not for commercial gain but for the welfare of children who needed it most — speaks to the values that the Desai family carried forward from Vasavad: a sense of responsibility to the community that extended beyond their own lineage, and a belief that land is best used when it serves those who have the least.

Fulwadi. The garden where rank gave way to earth, where the simplest pleasures were the ones remembered longest — and where, today, a new generation of daughters finds the home that every child deserves.