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

Natural History, May, 2003 by Morna Livingston

India's Muslims were cosmopolitan people, more interested in politics, war, and trade than in agriculture; their soldiers operated under a mandate, amounting to a religious injunction, never to harm a stepwell, even in war. The Muslims brought to India the secular, social traditions of the hamam, or bathhouse, and the geometric, nonfigurative traditions of Islamic ornamentation. In 1411 the sultans established Ahmadabad as their first Indian capital; soon afterward they built a series of elegant stepwells nearby. Among them are Queen Rudabai's Stepwell at Adalaj and the Ambapur Stepwell at Budthal, the most majestic ever built.

It was only with the British rise to power in India in the early nineteenth century, that opposition to stepwells as key elements of the Indian water system emerged. To the British, stepwells were a sanitary disaster. The installation of rural taps became a top priority of the Raj. Not without reason, the British colonialists feared disease from the mixing of bathing and drinking water; moreover, the stepwells hosted a waterborne parasite, the guinea worm.

Postcolonial, independent India continued the British policy of promoting taps instead of stepwells. But to bring water to those taps, the Indian government embarked on the construction of gargantuan dams. Partly by accident and partly by design, those projects have helped cause the destruction of an important but unsung component of the medieval water system: the many thousands of earth-walled dams that slowed the monsoon runoff, protecting topsoil and giving rainwater time to seep into the ground and replenish the aquifers. As for the stepwells themselves, some became repositories for trash and old tires, a few became the basements of new buildings, others became latrines. In Mehmadabad, Gujarat, a large apartment block collapsed into a stepwell near the market. Yet scores of wells remain usable. Gujarat's stepwells rode out a magnitude 7.6 earthquake that struck the Indian state on January 26, 2001; their large, flat stones, superbly joined and weighted down by the stones above them, are hard to rock [see "Shaken to the Core," by Susan Hough and Roger Bilham, February 2003]. Much more destructive to the stepwells in the long run have been powerful pumps and increased irrigation, both of which can lower the water table until a stepwell no longer reaches it, or until salt, saltpeter, or petroleum contaminate the water, permanently ruining its taste. Today the once-wholesome water--proclaimed by some of the inscriptions in the stepwells to be "as sweet as milk"--is just a memory.

Nowadays the consensus is that, once upon a time, stepwells were a fine thing. Villagers still look upon them fondly, not as water wells but as open, public spaces. No longer interested in drinking from them or bathing in them, the villagers are repossessing and rehabilitating them as homes for Devi. They ornament the stepwell shrines to the goddess in much the same colorful way as they decorate their own homes for festivals, imbuing otherwise austere, monochrome stepwell entrances with a festival air.