In a Punjabi village the haveli is not a palace. It is the cattle yard and working compound of a farming household, usually separate from the house, with stalls along one side, a store, the chaff cutter and the fodder heap.
The obra is the roofed byre inside it. The word is Punjabi and specific and does not translate into a single English one.
A family's standing was read off its haveli: how many cattle, whether the buffalo were tied under roof or in the open, whether there was a separate room for the tools.
Mechanisation emptied them. A tractor does not need a stall and a dairy of two buffaloes does not need a courtyard. Many havelis in emigrant villages are shut, and a number have collapsed.
In the towns, and in the merchant quarters of Batala, Sunam, Sirhind and Malerkotla, haveli does mean a large courtyard house, often with brickwork, wooden balconies and painted plaster, and those are being lost faster than anything else built in Punjab.
The dung was the other product. It was collected, dried into pathis against a wall and burned, so the haveli was the household's fuel yard as much as its byre.
It usually stood at the edge of the abadi, away from the houses, which is why the abandoned ones are the first thing a visitor sees on the way into a village and why that ground is the first to be sold when the village expands.
With the animals going and the land fragmenting, the havelis have been sold, built on or left standing empty, and the word has drifted toward its Urdu sense.