Temples for water: the stepwells of western India were a magnificent architectural solution to the seasonality of the water supply

In the heat of the day men rested in the cool pavilions of stepwells, but women were the ones most deeply associated with water. Throughout the region they collected water in a lhota, a round-bottomed, short-necked jar with a wide lip that kept the liquid from spilling. They carried the jar, often for long distances, atop a cloth ring that cushioned their heads. (Even today, when most villages have communal water taps, the water must still be carried home.)

But going to the well was not simply an onerous task. Often it was the lone independent activity young women were permitted, and so in fact it was a welcome respite. (To this day in much of India, when a bride moves into the home of her husband's family, she does a good deal of the work.) At least at the stepwell she could laugh and joke and splash with other young women who were equally isolated by the strict patriarchy that prevailed in much of South Asia.

Women also frequented stepwells as an indirect consequence of a Hindu doctrine holding married women solely responsible for the gender of their children. As is still the case today, women remained low in the family hierarchy until they gave birth to a boy, and so even unmarried gifts performed rituals intended to make them mothers of men.

For both girls and women embedded in this set of beliefs, one of the few comforting acts was to beg for help from the mother goddess, Devi, who lived in every stepwell. They could worship Devi by bathing--for water is believed to be one of the forms the goddess takes--or by invoking her name while pouring water over their heads. Not surprisingly, then, most stepwells included shrines to Devi, adorned with garlands of fresh flowers, strips of silk, oil lamps, incense, jewelry, and vermilion pigment. Women even sprinkled milk on the walls around the shrine and on the parapet surrounding the top of the well--in hopes that their symbolic act would bring them plenty of good breast milk for their children [see photograph at top of page 56]. The mother goddess is central to women's lives, and the term Mata, or Mother, figures in the names of perhaps a third of the stepwells--Mata Bhavani, Matri Mata, Bhadrakali Mata.

Women born into the lower castes, however, were excluded from the stepwells. Traditionally, all low-caste individuals would have obtained drinking water from muddy pools near the boundary of a village--unless someone from a higher caste drew it for them as an act of charity. Such restrictions on access to a nominally public water source throw into sharp relief the age-old contradictions between the demands of doctrine and the necessities of life.

Religious differences--generally such an explosive and destructive issue--played a creative role in the development of the stepwell. Beginning in the mid-eighth century, Muslims began to wrest control of various Hindu kingdoms through many small conquests. By the end of the twelfth century, Muslim sultans had come to ascendancy in Gujarat, marking the onset of many centuries of Islamic power in the region--and the end of the glory days of the Hindu stepwell. By the early fifteenth century India's medieval Hindu kingdoms had largely dissolved. Yet the stepwell itself lived on.