Stepwells of India: Vavs, Baolis, Kunds and Tanks

Water architecture is the branch of Indian building art in which the structure goes down instead of up. In a land of seasonal rain, villages and towns stored the monsoon in stepwells, stepped tanks, reservoirs and temple ponds, and the craftsmen who carved temples carved these too, so a stepwell is often described as an inverted temple. The subject gives examiners exactly the kind of fact they like: a structure, its town, its state, its builder and its period. It also joins two chapters, art and culture on the one hand and water conservation on the other, so the same names are asked in both.

What a stepwell is, and what it is called

A stepwell is a well reached by a long flight of steps, so that water can be drawn by walking down to it whatever the level of the water table. The names change with the region: vav in Gujarat, baoli, bawdi or bawri in Rajasthan and the north, kund for a stepped square tank, and kalyani or pushkarni for the temple tank of Karnataka and the Deccan. Besides the water itself, a stepwell gave shade and cool air, a halting place on a trade route, and a social and ritual space, which is why so many were built by queens and merchants as works of merit. Sanskrit building texts classify a vav by the number of its entrances into the nanda, bhadra, jaya and vijaya types.

The famous stepwells

Tanks, reservoirs and temple ponds

Beside stepwells stand the larger works. The Great Bath of Mohenjo-daro is the earliest known public water structure in the subcontinent, and Dholavira in Kutch shows the most advanced Harappan water engineering, with a chain of rock-cut reservoirs and dams on seasonal streams. The Sudarshana lake near Girnar was dammed under Chandragupta Maurya and its embankment repaired by the Saka ruler Rudradaman, whose Junagadh rock inscription records the work. The Kallanai or Grand Anicut across the Kaveri, credited to the Chola king Karikala, is among the oldest water diversion structures still in use. The Pallavas and Cholas built great temple tanks, and the Hauz-i-Shamsi of Iltutmish and the Hauz-i-Alai of Alauddin Khalji, later repaired by Firoz Shah Tughlaq, supplied Delhi. The Upper Lake of Bhopal is ascribed to the Paramara king Bhoj, and sacred tanks such as the sarovar of the Golden Temple at Amritsar, Pushkar lake and the Mahamaham tank at Kumbakonam keep the tradition alive as places of pilgrimage.

Traditional water harvesting by region

• Rajasthan: tanka, an underground tank in the courtyard that stores roof rainwater; khadin, an embankment that holds runoff for cropping; johad and nadi, village ponds; jhalara, stepped tanks fed by seepage.
• Bihar: the ahar-pyne system, in which a pyne channel leads flood water to an ahar, a reservoir with embankments on three sides.
• Tamil Nadu: eri, the chain of village tanks, one of the oldest managed irrigation systems in the country; Karnataka has its kere tanks.
• Himachal Pradesh and Jammu: kuhl, a channel carrying glacier melt to fields; Ladakh has the zing, a tank that collects melt water.
• Meghalaya: bamboo drip irrigation, which carries spring water in split bamboo to betel and areca plots; Nagaland has the zabo system and Arunachal the Apatani wet rice and fish fields.
• Maharashtra has the phad system of diversion bandharas, Kerala the surangam tunnel well, and Kutch the virda, a shallow well dug in a depression.

Art and architecture of a stepwell

A vav usually runs on a long east-west axis with a stepped corridor, pavilion towers at intervals and a drawing well at the far end, so that as you descend you pass through storey after storey of carved pillars and brackets. Rani ki Vav is the model: seven levels, over four hundred principal sculptures, panels of the ten incarnations of Vishnu and the reclining Sheshashayi Vishnu, cut in the Maru-Gurjara style. Kunds, by contrast, are square or rectangular, with flights of steps on all sides in a diamond pattern, as at Modhera and Abhaneri. Temple kalyanis in the south are plain stone basins used for ritual bathing, their beauty coming from proportion rather than carving.

Exam point traps

Rani ki Vav is at Patan and Adalaj ni Vav at Adalaj, both in Gujarat, and only Rani ki Vav is a World Heritage Site and on the hundred rupee note. Chand Baori is in Rajasthan, not Gujarat, and its builder is King Chanda. Dholavira, not Mohenjo-daro, is the Harappan site famous for reservoirs, while Mohenjo-daro has the Great Bath. And the Junagadh rock inscription of Rudradaman is about the Sudarshana lake, which links this chapter with ancient history.