Sethi House and the old houses of Peshawar

At a glance

• Sethi House stands in Mohallah Sethian, a lane of the walled city of Peshawar behind Bazar Kalan, on the road from Chowk Yadgar to Gor Khatri. [1, 3]

• It was the home of the Sethis, a merchant family who traded from Peshawar to Kabul, Bukhara and Russia. Sources give its date as 1882, 1884 or 1886. [1, 2, 4–7]

• Its carved doors and balconies, courtyard, mirrored reception rooms, painted ceilings and two-storey cellars are the plan of a rich Peshawar house of the late nineteenth century. [1, 3, 5]

• The provincial government bought one of the Sethi houses in 2006. Its lower floor was opened to visitors on 1 February 2013, and the archaeology department took over a second Sethi house in 2024. [5, 6, 10]

• By 2018 the archaeology department had listed 1,865 buildings of historical value in the walled city, and in 2024 it was in court over more than 200 houses to stop their demolition. [10, 16]

A lane behind Bazar Kalan

Faheem Sikandar, writing in Dawn in 2016, arrives at Bazar Kalan early in the morning, before the crowds. He passes the road up to the Gor Khatri hill and sees on his left "the famous and oft quoted Sethi Street or Sethi Mohallah in common parlance". [4] The walled city has changed since his childhood, he says, and the old houses have given way to "haphazard commercial outlets". [4]

A mohallah in Peshawar is a quarter, often a single lane, that keeps the name of its families or trades. The walled city is full of them. When Raverty, a British officer, counted the houses of Peshawar in 1850, he counted 7,306 houses inside the walls, 2,317 of them Hindu, Sikh or Khatri, and he noted where each trade lived. The master bricklayers lived mostly in the quarter he spells Ander-Share, Andar Shahr. [1] Dani, the Pakistani archaeologist whose 1969 book is still the standard guide to the city's monuments, quotes Raverty's account at length. [1] Raverty also tells of the rivalry between the people of Sir Asia and of the old grain market, Gunj-i-Kohnah. On the night of Shab-i-Barat they used to fight with fireworks, and on one occasion three men burnt to death. The Sikh governor Avitabile built a wall to keep the two apart. [1]

The Sethi houses stand in this city and nowhere else. For the larger story of Peshawar, see Peshawar: a short history; for the mosque of the same bazaar, the Mahabat Khan Mosque.

Who the Sethis were

Dani writes that the Sethis are the traditional business community of Peshawar. The word comes from the Sanskrit shreshthin, the head of a trading body. [1] In Peshawar, he says, they carried on the trade that passed from India to Afghanistan and Central Asia, and they issued hundis, bills of exchange payable in Afghanistan, "particularly to the British employees". [1] The family had come to Peshawar from Chamkani, a village a few miles east of the city, "about six generations ago". [1]

Chamkani is the village of Mian Umar Baba, a Naqshbandi Sufi (see Mian Umar Chamkani). Timur Khan, a Leiden researcher writing for the Oxus Society, says the Sethis pledged themselves to Ahmad Shah Durrani when he took Peshawar in 1747, that the Sufi of Chamkani was their patron and also Ahmad Shah's spiritual guide, and that Mian Shahab al-Din Sethi opened the family's first office in Kabul in 1779. [2] Their goods, he writes, were "karakul wool, copper, gold thread, skins, Russian crockery, dried fruit, and, especially tea and timber", sent to Iran, Central Asia and northern India. [2] Dawn's 2016 account gives silk, cloth, indigo and tea, with offices in Shanghai and Russia. [4] Khan adds that the family tradition places offices as far as Shanghai or Vladivostok. [2]

The accounts of where the family came from before Chamkani differ. The Express Tribune puts the family's arrival in Peshawar in the 1730s. [5] The Nation, in January 2026, says they were traders who migrated from Jhelum in the early nineteenth century, and APP says only that they came from the Punjab. [7, 8]

Their fortunes fell after 1917. The Express Tribune says the Sethis held Tsarist bonds, and that when the Bolsheviks repudiated them and brought in new currency the family lost both its Central Asian market and its savings. [5] Bakhtzada Khan of the provincial archaeology department told the Nation that the Sethis "were eventually compelled to sell their houses". [7]

When Sethi House was built

The date depends on who is asked. Dani gives the year as 1300 AH, AD 1882, and the builder as Haji Ahmad Gul. [1] The Express Tribune in 2013 also says 1882, but names Sethi Karim Bakhsh as the builder. [5] Dawn, reporting the reopening in February 2013, says the house was built in 1884. [6] The Nation gives 1886, adding that Karim Bakhash began it in 1835 and took nearly half a century to finish. [7, 9] The UNESCO tentative-list entry, filed by Pakistan in 2026, names it the Karim Buksh Sethi House and says only that it was built and extended in the nineteenth century. [3]

The sources agree on this much: the house that visitors enter now dates from the 1880s, and it is one of seven Sethi houses still standing. [5, 12] The archaeology officials who took the provincial minister round in January 2022 said the family built the seven in the nineteenth century. [12]

Doors, courtyards and cellars

Dani's description, published in 1969, is the plainest. A carved wooden doorway leads into a court where business was done, and a bent passage gives access to the interior. [1] The family rooms form round an open court of 32 by 30 feet, paved with bricks laid on edge, and arched carved wood on pillars runs round it. [1] The southern side was "the real gem". It had two levels of cellar (tahkhana), two upper storeys (bala-khana), and a hall (dalan) opening through a triple-arched entrance, with a painted ceiling and carved wooden pillars. On the second floor was a room called Shah Nasim, painted and set with cut glass in the walls. [1]

The cellars were part of how a house in Peshawar lived through summer. Raverty wrote in 1850 that better houses had tahkhanas where the women spent the whole day, in a season when the heat inside reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and that people slept on the roofs. [1] He also wrote that the upper floors had fronts of carved wood and open work that let in air and light while hiding the rooms from the street. [1] The UNESCO entry describes the same arrangement in Sethi House: ventilated basements, terraces, screened corridors, and separate areas for business and for the family, so that a merchant could keep an office beside his household and still keep it private. [3]

The Express Tribune adds the courtyard fountain, the balconies of the two upper floors opening on to the court, and a construction of wood with brick filling. [5] The architect Naeem Safi told it the design resembled old houses in Baghdad while the decoration came from Samarkand and Bukhara, with some Persian and Indian touches. [5] He named the crafts used in the cheenee khanas, the reception rooms where fine pieces are displayed, as aina-kari, manabat-kari and kashi-kari. [5] UNESCO calls the mirrored niches cheenidaan and the carved wooden ceilings tarseem bandi, and notes ledger marks still visible in the building. [3] The Nation says the red and green window glass was imported from Belgium and that angled wooden ventilators bring daylight into the basement, and quotes Gaffar Ali, a senior architect of the provincial works department, calling the house "a model of early green architecture". [7]

A study of 2010 quoted by the Express Tribune looked at the haveli of Allah Buksh Sethi and found that the shape, size and orientation of its courtyard affect the climate inside, and it concluded that updating the courtyard house was the answer to green architecture. [5] The family also built beyond the house itself: the UNESCO entry lists an office (daftar-khana), a guest house (mehman-khana), a mosque and service blocks among the Sethi compounds. [3]

Other old houses of the walled city

The Sethi houses are the best known of many. The archaeology department finished a three-year survey by 2018 and listed 1,865 buildings and structures of historical value in the walled city, many of them from the Sikh and British periods and six from the Mughal. [16]

In Mohallah Mehr Matho, a house of three floors burned down in November 2014 after a short circuit, at about half past three in the morning. Its owner, Rahmat Khan, watched his childhood home burn with other members of the family, and said the fire ran through all three floors in minutes because the house was built of deodar wood. [13] Most of the mohallah's Sikh-era havelis, the Express Tribune says, were left by Hindus and Sikhs at Partition and bought later by local families. [13] Khan said: "These buildings are the identity of the people of this city and they must be preserved for future generations". [13]

In Muhallah Shaikh ul Islam, in the Ganj quarter, a house carries a Persian plaque dated 1890 and belonged to the family of Yahya Khan, later president of Pakistan. [14] Its present owner, Qadir Muhammad Khan, said his father bought it in 1970 for 25,000 rupees, that the inner rooms were already pulled down and that relic hunters had offered large sums for the carved door. [14] A relative of the family, Sardar Mehmood Ahmad Khan, said the street was once the administrative centre of the walled city, that its residents were descended from Iranians settled there to run it, and that the old stable had been turned into a hujra. [14] That is the family's account of the street.

Not every house is lost to neglect. The house in Dhaki Munawar Shah where the film actor Raj Kapoor was born was partly pulled down by its owner on a Saturday in January 2016, with the top floor of its four storeys gone before archaeology officials arrived. [15] Officials said the owner claimed a notice from the municipal authorities telling him to pull it down. The area councillor, Mian Zulfiqar, said the building was dangerous after the recent earthquakes and added that the archaeology directorate "woke up only when it heard about demolition". [15] The Sarhad Conservation Network, a Peshawar heritage group, said the demolition of the 98-year-old building had shocked the city's civil society. [15] In October 2018 the directorate asked the police to register a case against a man who had pulled down two floors of a Sikh-era house in Mohallah Mughlaan near Gor Khatri, after he had applied for permission to repair it. [16]

Ali Jan gave one explanation in Dawn in 2021. Until 1979, he wrote, the walled city was "a cultural hub" where the gentle Hindko culture thrived. After millions of Afghan refugees came and wartime money followed, he says, the newly rich, among them tribal buyers and families returned from Dubai, bought houses of architectural merit, pulled them down for plazas and displaced the families who had kept the old culture. [17] That is one writer's account of the cause. The city wall has been lost in the same way. A resident named Aftab told Dawn in 2012 that it was sad "to see the wall vanish and the city deface due to encroachments and commercial plazas". [18]

Buying, restoring and opening the house

The Express Tribune says the provincial government of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal bought one of the Sethi mansions in 2006 and handed it to the archaeology department for conservation. [5] APP reports that the house had suffered from neglect, seepage and unsuitable additions, and Bakhtzada Khan told it that the government bought the house in 2006 and the department converted it into a museum in 2010. [8] Dawn dates the opening later. On 1 February 2013 the provincial minister for archaeology, Syed Aqil Shah, inaugurated the renovated house and declared its lower portion open to visitors, with Ghulam Dastagir Sethi of the family among those present. [6]

The restoration formed part of the Cultural Heritage Trail, which renovated a stretch of about 500 metres from Ghanta Ghar to Gor Khatri and improved about 85 buildings. [7, 8] At the opening the minister promised that the street from the main road would be developed and the whole Sethi Mohallah made a hub for visitors. [6]

In May 2024 a second house, the haveli of Mian Abdul Karim Sethi, was handed to the archaeology department by its owner, Suhail Sethi, under a memorandum of understanding. [10] The Sarhad Conservation Network acted as go-between. [11] The house is to be run jointly as a museum of the Sethi family's life, with household things set out as they were, and visitors' fees shared 80 per cent to the family and 20 per cent to upkeep. [10] The director of archaeology, Dr Abdul Samad, said the department was then in litigation with owners to prevent the demolition of more than 200 houses and buildings. [10] The department has "no financial interest" in the arrangement, he added. [11]

In 2026 Pakistan's delegation to UNESCO placed Sethi House on its tentative list for World Heritage. [3] The entry says the house shows the cultural exchange between South Asia, Central Asia and Persia and is a surviving example of the merchant haveli. [3] A tentative listing is the first step in a nomination and does not itself confer status.