It was in the sixth and seventh centuries that people in what are now Gujarat and Rajasthan first worked out how to reach clean underground water once the rains had gone — water they needed for drinking, washing, their livestock and their fields. Yet to see the stepwell merely as a practical device is to miss much of what made it important.
Found nowhere else in the world, these structures could be highly elaborate and differed greatly in scale and form. At the height of their use they doubled as social hubs — spots for meeting, resting and prayer, open to villagers of every rank except the very lowest castes. The desert districts of Gujarat, where the wells are called vav, and Rajasthan, where they are known as baori, hold most surviving examples, though a handful remain in Delhi. Some stood within or close to settlements to serve local people; others stood beside routes as resting spots for travellers.
The name itself hints at the design: from the surface, flights of stone steps drop away towards the water — usually an aquifer below ground — which sinks lower as the wet season passes. A visitor arriving when the water stood high had only a short way to go down, but in drier months a whole succession of levels had to be descended before the surface could be reached.
A number of the wells are enormous open pits, their sloping walls faced with hundreds of steps arranged in tiers, while others are subtler affairs in which long stepped corridors lead down through storey after storey to the water. All were raised in stone and held up by pillars, and many had shaded canopies where visitors could escape the merciless sun. Their finest touch, though, lies in the delicate carvings that cover so many of them, portraying everything from combat and dance to the small routines of daily life, such as combing hair or grinding grain.
Over the following centuries the north-west acquired thousands of such wells, yet most have since been abandoned; many now stand ruined and waterless, their aquifers drained off to feed industry so that the steps no longer reach any water. Matters have been made worse by the repeated failure of the monsoon in recent years, which left much of the region parched.
Even so, several major wells in Gujarat have lately been given careful repairs, and its state authorities have declared their intention to bring the region's stepwells as a whole back to good order.
The old Gujarati capital of Kharoda holds what may be the most beautiful of all the wells still standing, Rani Amba Vav, or the Queen's Stepwell. Commissioned by Queen Sunayana early in the twelfth century, it was choked with silt after a flood two hundred years later, and recovered only when the Archaeological Survey of India restored it so thoroughly that it now looks almost new. The monument runs to sixty metres long, eighteen across and twenty-four deep, and set into recesses along its walls are some four hundred carvings of deities such as Shiva and Lakshmi. Remarkably, when a powerful cyclone tore across the area in 2001, the centuries-old structure came through unharmed.
Further north in Gujarat, beside a temple to the sun in the town of Velapur, stands the Aditya Kund, raised by King Devraj in 1032 as an offering to the sun. Strictly speaking it is a kund (an open pool rather than a true well) but it wears all the marks of stepwell design, its steps dropping to the floor in a sequence of terraces that form a striking geometric pattern. Between these flights sit ninety-six shrines, each finely carved.
Rajasthan, too, is rich in such structures. Some 200 kilometres south of Jaipur lies the old city of Sohal, long admired for its buildings, the stepwells among them. A particularly large one, Rajni Ki Baori, was put up in 1710 by the local queen, Vasundhara; forty-two metres deep, twenty-two wide and thirty-eight long, this finely worked monument was one of eighteen baoris she ordered built around Sohal.
Roughly 95 kilometres east of Jaipur, in the crumbling town of Amroli, is Chandra Baori, among the most ancient and deepest wells in India and, to the eye, perhaps the most striking. It was raised around 800 AD beside the temple of Ambika Mata; hundreds of steps zigzag down three of its walls, plunging through fourteen storeys and, from a distance, making a bold geometric shape. Along the remaining wall, roofed balconies on richly decorated pillars look out across the steps.
One well people still use stands a little way off the Jaipur–Delhi highway: Neelkanth Ki Baori. Built around 1720, it goes down nine storeys, of which the two lowest remain permanently submerged. Ninety-two colonnaded openings ring it at ground level, and from there a flight of a hundred and sixty steps takes the visitor to the lowest water.
After long years of neglect, many of these feats of medieval building have been rescued by the Archaeological Survey of India, which sees their upkeep as part of safeguarding the nation's heritage. To the remotest corners of the north-west, sightseers now travel to marvel at architecture put up a thousand years ago — structures that testify both to the cleverness and craft of early societies and to how precious water has always been to human life.
