Water structures and stepwells

Why so many water structures?

In most of India the year’s rain arrives in a few monsoon months. To have water in the dry season, people built structures to harvest, store and distribute it, from the humble village pond to the Grand Anicut on the Kaveri. Because India’s lands differ so much, from the Himalayan foothills and the Thar Desert to the Gangetic plains, the Western Ghats, the Deccan and the Northeast, these structures took many forms.

Harappan wells and reservoirs

The tradition goes back to the Harappans. Dholavira, in the dry Rann of Kachchh, had very large reservoirs inside its walls. Harappan builders also solved a hard problem: water seeping through the ground pushes on a well’s lining and can make it collapse inward. They lined wells with trapezium-shaped bricks, narrower on the inside of the ring, so that the pressure only pressed them tighter together, the way the stones of an arch hold each other up.

Shringaverpur

Shringaverpur in Uttar Pradesh is the Shringaverapura of the Ramayana, where Rama, Sita and Lakshmana crossed the Ganga as they left for exile. Excavations there uncovered a chain of large connected reservoirs, filled through a channel when the Ganga was in flood (dated to around the 1st century BCE to the 1st century CE). The first one or two tanks let the silt in the floodwater settle before it moved on, a fairly common design, though how the whole system worked is still being studied.

Stepwells

Wells took many forms, lined with bricks, with stone, or with rings of terracotta. In classical times Gujarat and Rajasthan developed stepwells, called vavs or baoris: long flights of steps lead down several storeys to the water. Many are engineering marvels and works of art at once. Rani ki Vav in Gujarat, of about 1063, has several pillared levels and hundreds of fine statues. Besides storing rainwater, a stepwell was a social place where people sat together in the cool and exchanged news.

How a stepwell works

Why build steps so deep? In the dry months the level of water underground falls, sometimes many metres. A stepwell follows it down: as the water sinks, people simply walk further down the flights of steps to reach it, and when the monsoon fills it again the lower levels disappear under water. The stone storeys, pillars and pavilions shade the water, so less of it evaporates in the heat, and the air near the bottom stays much cooler than at the surface. That is why a stepwell was a pleasant place to rest on a summer afternoon, and why so many were decorated like temples.

Temple tanks

Many temples had their own water tanks, pushkarinis, used for collecting water and for water-based rituals. Like stepwells, many are beautiful, with stairways on every side, as at Vijayanagara.

Saving them today

Many old water structures now suffer from dried-up sources, poor maintenance, pollution and waste dumping. Environmentalists, local people and NGOs sometimes work together to revive them, but much remains to be done; cleaning and reusing a local pond or stepwell keeps both water and heritage alive.

Read more in stupas, rock-cut caves and temples and forts, palaces, mosques and tombs, or see the chapter notes and the NCERT solutions.