Journey
Solanki / Chaulukya Gujarat
Gujarat under the Solankis built for water as seriously as for worship, and the two are the same craft: a stepwell is an inverted temple, seven storeys of carved wall going down instead of a tower going up. Jain merchant money and a Shaiva court paid for it side by side.
Stops (9)
- Jayasiṃha Siddharāja · Jayasiṃha Siddharāja — the high point
The ruler under whom Gujarat reached its widest reach, who rebuilt the Rudra Mahalaya and the Sahasralinga tank at Patan and had Hemachandra write a Sanskrit and Prakrit grammar for the kingdom — commissioned, tradition says, because Gujarat had had to borrow one from Malwa.
- Modhera Sun Temple · Modhera — the sun temple and its tank
An early eleventh-century Surya temple with a stepped tank in front of it larger than the temple, lined with a hundred and eight small shrines on its descending terraces. The sanctum was aligned so that the equinox sun reached the image, and the tank is where the whole Gujarat habit of monumental water architecture begins.
- The vāv · The vāv
Gujarat's answer to a falling water table: a stepped corridor descending four to seven storeys to a well, with pavilion landings and walls carved as densely as a temple's. Cool at the bottom, usable in the dry season, and a place for women to gather — and unusually often commissioned by women, which the inscriptions record.
- Rani ki Vav, Patan · Rāṇī kī Vāv — the deepest of them
Udayamati's stepwell at Patan of about 1063, seven storeys down, with more than five hundred major sculptures on its walls including a full set of Vishnu's avatars. It silted over completely, was excavated in the 1960s, and its carving is therefore unweathered — which is why it looks newer than anything of its age.
- Kumārapāla · Kumārapāla — the Jain king
Jayasimha's successor, who took Hemachandra as his adviser, banned animal slaughter across Gujarat and endowed Jain temples including the Ajitanatha at Taranga — becoming the standard example in Jain literature of a ruler brought to the dharma, though how far he converted is argued and he endowed Shaiva shrines too.
- Tāraṅga Jain temple · Tāraṅga — the Jain temple on the hill
Kumarapala's Ajitanatha temple of about 1165, the largest single Solanki Jain shrine and one of very few that came through the Gujarat sultanate intact — a tall shikhara over a colossal white marble image, on a hill that also carries Digambara shrines and rock-cut niches read as Buddhist Tara figures.
- Dilwāra Jain temples, Mount Ābū · Dilwāra — the marble
Five temples at Mount Abu of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, built by Solanki-period ministers and merchants, whose ceilings and pillars are carved thin enough to be translucent. The Vimal Vasahi and the Luna Vasahi were paid for by Vimal Shah and by Vastupala and Tejpala — officers of state, not kings.
- Adālaj Vāv · Adālaj — the well of 1499
Rudabai's stepwell, five storeys on an octagonal plan, carved with Islamic geometry and Hindu and Jain motifs in the same walls, and built after her husband was killed. The Sanskrit inscription records the sultan's offer of marriage and her refusal of it; the air at the bottom is several degrees cooler than the surface.
- Dādā Harīr Vāv, Ahmedabad · Dādā Harīr — the same year, twenty kilometres away
A five-storey well at Asarwa built in 1499 by Dhai Harir, a superintendent of the women's apartments in Mahmud Begada's household, with inscriptions in Sanskrit and Arabic giving the cost and the date twice. Two wells of one year, both commissioned by women, one a Hindu queen and one a Muslim officer.