I wondered if any wilderness would be more desolate than this!
And then I remembered another of the kind – the home I’d left behind.

These words of Mirza Ghalib remain etched on the dusty walls of the home he has left behind — known as Ghalib Memorial or more fondly as Ghalib ki Haveli. Indeed, the Urdu poet did leave behind a desolate home where the words of Ghalib lurk like an elegy. In Ballimaran lane of Chandi Chowk, one would almost miss the slender gates of the grand haveli as it lies cramped between tiny shops with vendors, passersby moving about in complete ignorance of its presence.

As one enters the haveli, the old Delhi chaos is easily forgotten and one steps into a different era. Ghalib’s famous quotes are etched on every wall of the poet’s haven, which is a 300-year-old Mughal-era structure with replicas of Ghalib and his wife Umrao Begum’s clothes adorned near his sculpture. The site, which got heritage status in 1997, is now under the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). Visitors are far and few, and obviously, it is not a popular tourist spot.

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Rudyard Kipling’s famous house in Mumbai, and the birthplace of Rabindranath Tagore, Jorasanko Thakur Bari in Kolkata, are more literary treasures of the country. A walk into the plush lanes of Mysuru may lead you to RK Narayan’s house — a two-storeyed beautiful and spacious building with a lush garden and a circular room at the top. Now a museum maintained by the Mysuru City Corporation, it was where the writer wrote some of his famous works. However, visitors are limited to those with a liking for cinema and literature.

The state and popularity of literary sites in India is very different from that in the West. The Anne Frank House is now a biographical museum preserved well in central Amsterdam and a popular tourist spot. William Shakespeare’s house, which is now owned by Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, is well maintained and another popular attraction for literature lovers. Charles Dickens’ Museum in London, where Oliver Twist was once written by him, is another such famous spot owned by The Dickens Fellowship. Similarly, author Jane Austen’s house is one of the most treasured literary spaces in the world. This is the house where Austen wrote six of her popular novels. It is now a museum in Hampshire celebrating her legacy. Mark Twain’s American High Gothic style house in Connecticut, home of the Bronte sisters in West Yorkshire, Ernest Hemingway’s abode near Havana, are all popular tourist destinations.

On the contrary, historic places and monuments find heavy footfalls in the country. Eshan Sharma, founder, Karwaan: The Heritage Explorative Initiative shares why. “The value bestowed on literary heritage is very less. We don’t celebrate our literature as it is celebrated in the West. Our regional literature is so vast that we don’t know about it. We have a couple of places that exist like Premchand’s haveli in Varanasi, but nobody goes there and most of them are in bad shape.

We have George Orwell’s house in Bihar but again it is not a popular tourist spot. In fact, some of the important literary places are completely missing. For instance, no one knows of Raja Harishchandra’s house. There are many great writers in Tamil, Telugu, or Bhojpuri literature but we have not preserved their spaces well. On the other hand, residences of politicians and political figures like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru have been preserved well.” He shares that they occasionally organise walks on the literary trails like that to Mirza Ghalib ki Haveli.