Place · stepwell · India

Rani ki Vav, Patan

Function

Water & infrastructure

Patron dynasty

Solanki / Chaulukya

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

23.859, 72.102

Worth knowing

It appears on the hundred-rupee note. Silt from a change in the Saraswati's course buried it for centuries, which is exactly why its sculpture is so sharp: it was protected from the weather and from iconoclasm alike.

Connections (7)

• Solanki GujaratSidhpur

  Patan was the Solanki capital and Sidhpur its second great site, with Siddharāja Jayasimha's Rudra Mahālaya a short way up the Saraswatī. The dynasty's works — Modherā, the stepwell, the Rudra Mahālaya, the Jain temples of Tāranga — sit inside a ninety-kilometre triangle of northern Gujarat. Siddharāja's Rudra Mahālaya was demolished under Alauddin Khalji and part of its material reused in a mosque on the same platform, so the two buildings now stand inside each other.

• Contemporary capital withModhera Sun Temple

  Solanki Gujarat built the sun temple at Modherā about 1026 and the stepwell at Patan about 1063 — two generations, one royal house, one masons' vocabulary. Both organise a building around water: Modherā with a terraced kunda in front of the shrine, Patan by sinking the shrine into the well itself.

• Architectural modelChand Baori, Abhaneri

  Two solutions to the same problem of getting a population down to falling groundwater and back up carrying it. Patan answers with a long processional descent lined in sculpture; Abhaneri with a pure geometry of some three and a half thousand steps in a double helix. One is a temple underground, the other a machine.

• PatronageUdayamatī

  Udayamatī commissioned Rāni-kī-Vāv about 1063 as a memorial to her husband Bhīma I, and the Prabandha-Chintāmani names her, which makes it one of very few great Indian monuments whose woman patron is documented rather than inferred from the building. It is also a memorial in the form of a public utility: seven storeys of sculpture around a working well, so mourning and water-carrying happened in the same structure.

• Architectural modelAdālaj Vāv

  Four hundred and thirty years separate Rani ki Vav from Adalaj, and the form is unchanged while the ornament has been completely rebuilt: Patan's walls carry Vishnu's avatars and apsaras in the Solanki manner, Adalaj's carry Islamic geometric panels, arabesque and trees in the Gujarat sultanate manner, on the same plan and to the same depth. The stepwell is the clearest single demonstration that a building type can outlive the religion of the people who commission it.

• AnalogueKiradu temples

  Kiradu's five temples stand alone in the Barmer scrub with no settlement at all, and Rani ki Vav at Patan was silted over and dug out in the 1980s. Both are eleventh and twelfth-century work of the first quality that lost its audience: one abandoned by a shifting water table and thirteenth-century raids, the other buried by the Saraswati. Neither is on anybody's route.

• Dynastic founding ofAhmedabad / Karnāvatī / Āshāval

  Patan, the Solanki capital Anhilwara, is where the Karnāvatī story begins. Karṇadeva I of Anhilwara campaigned east across the Sabarmati in the eleventh century, defeated the Bhil chieftain of Āshāval and founded Karnāvatī on the river's east bank as a Solanki outpost. Solanki rule from Patan held until the thirteenth century, after which the Vāghelas of Dholka took the city. The site that Sultan Ahmed Shah refounded in 1411 was therefore already an old urban layer twice renamed, and Ahmedabad's walled core overlies the Solanki plan of Karnāvatī.

On these journeys

• Nagara temple cities
• UNESCO World Heritage — cultural
• Solanki / Chaulukya Gujarat
• Stepwells & water architecture

Sources

Rani-ki-Vav — UNESCO

• Wikipedia