Journey
Stepwells & water architecture
Western India's water table is deep and its rain is seasonal, so the well had to be walked into rather than drawn from. The stepwell is the architectural answer: a descending corridor of galleries that stays cool, holds a crowd, and becomes a building in its own right rather than a hole with a rope over it.
Stops (5)
- Rani ki Vav, Patan · Rāni-kī-Vāv — the inverted temple
Commissioned by Udayamatī at Patan about 1063 as a memorial to Bhīma I, seven storeys deep with more than five hundred principal sculptures, mostly Vishnu's avatars, lining the descent. The Saraswatī silted it over within a few centuries, which is why the carving was almost unweathered when it was excavated in the 1980s. It is on the hundred-rupee note.
- Adālaj Vāv · Adalaj — after the sultanate
Built in 1499 by Mahmud Begada to finish a well begun by a Hindu king, with the same plan and the same descent but Islamic geometric ornament beside Hindu motifs. An inscription records that the queen Rudadevi drowned herself in it rather than marry the sultan who had completed her husband's commission.
- Chand Baori, Abhaneri · Chānd Baori — geometry instead of sculpture
Thirteen storeys and roughly three and a half thousand steps in a double-helix descent at Abhaneri, built from the ninth century beside the Harshat Mātā temple whose ruined nāgara sculpture shares its masons. It is about twenty degrees cooler at the bottom than at the top, which is much of what it was for.
- Khooni Bhandara, Burhanpur · Khooni Bhandara — the other hydraulic tradition
Burhanpur's underground waterworks are a qanat: tunnels cut nearly level for kilometres to draw water sideways out of the hillside by gravity, a Persian technique brought by a Mughal engineer in 1615. Parts of the system still supply the town. The stepwell makes architecture of the work; the qanat hides it entirely.
- Dādā Harīr Vāv, Ahmedabad · Dādā Harīr Vāv — the well of 1499
A five-storey stepwell at Asarwa in Ahmedabad built by Dhai Harir, a superintendent of the women's apartments in Mahmud Begada's household, with an octagonal shaft, spiral stairs and inscriptions in both Sanskrit and Arabic giving the cost and the date. Adalaj was built the same year twenty kilometres away, also by a woman.