Tradition · water architecture tradition
The vāv
Also known as The vāv — the stepwell as architecture
Gujarat and Rajasthan's answer to a water table that falls: a long stepped corridor descending four to seven storeys to a well shaft, with pavilion landings at each level and the walls carved as densely as a temple's — cool at the bottom, usable in the dry season, and a place for women to gather out of the sun.
- Function
- Archaeology & heritage
- Patron dynasty
- Solanki / Chaulukya
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 23.858, 72.102
Worth knowing
The commissioning of vavs is unusually often female and recorded as such: Udayamati at Patan, Rudabai at Adalaj, Dhai Harir at Ahmedabad. They fell out of use with piped water and several were used as rubbish tips; Rani ki Vav was silted over completely and was excavated only in the 1960s, which is why its carving is unweathered.
Connections (2)
- PatronageUdayamatī
Rani ki Vav was built by Udayamati, widow of Bhima I, about 1063, and it is the largest and deepest of the Gujarat wells. The pattern repeats: Rudabai at Adalaj, Dhai Harir at Ahmedabad, and several smaller vavs whose inscriptions name women. A stepwell was both a public work and a women's space — the place where water was drawn and where the village's women met away from the sun — which is the usual explanation offered for who commissioned them.
- Architectural modelChand Baori, Abhaneri
Gujarat's vav and Rajasthan's baori are the two solutions to the same problem and they look nothing alike: the vav is a long stepped corridor going down to a well shaft with carved pavilions at each landing, and Chand Baori at Abhaneri is a square open tank with thirty-five hundred steps in a criss-cross lattice down all four sides. One is a covered building and the other is a geometric void, and both work by putting the water table within reach in the dry months.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Stepwell”. Hemachandra’s Dvyashrayakavya and the Prabandhachintamani; Jutta Jain-Neubauer, The Stepwells of Gujarat (1981).
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