Of a subterranean stunner

Rajasthan stepwell

What folly it would have been had we not taken the 100-km diversion to visit Chand Baori (stepwell) in Rajasthan, one of the most overlooked landmarks in India.

Tucked away in a dusty nondescript village called Abhaneri, Chand Baori is India’s deepest and oldest baori. From the road, it looked like ruins, and we feared all that we’d see would be a bunch of rocks.

As we got off the taxi, and were stretching our legs, an old man walked up to us, straightening his pink-and-orange turban, and said through his droopy moustache: “You know, sahebji, this baori was built by ghosts.”

“By ghosts?” “Yes... thousands of years ago.” But we suspected this tourist-savvy guide was embellishing a local myth.

Named after King Chand of the Nikumbha dynasty, its 1,000-year-old design was to conserve as much water as possible. Baoris were unique constructions that combined form with function that addressed the problem of water supply in this arid region by not only storing water in a well, but also making it accessible as people could go down its steps. If there were rains, the locals could get at the clean, fresh groundwater by going down just a few steps. In times of scarcity, they could reach it by descending more levels of steps.

This post-Gupta or early-medieval structure is vast with stepped passages leading to the water via several storeys built from stone-supported pillars to create covered pavilions that sheltered visitors from the scorching desert sun. It had been constructed to provide water, but it also served as a sheltered space for people to socialise.

This square structure, 13 storeys deep, has the design and ornamentation in two sections ­— the upper one influenced by Islam, and the lower one influenced by Hinduism. We had brushed aside that ghost story as we had already read Morna Livingston in her book Steps to Water, where she notes that this is a building with extensive additions, making it a fine example of two classical styles of architecture.

Chand Baori was refurbished over the centuries. Mughals built the upper storeys as a palace in the 18th century, and added a four-sided arcade which closes the well. A terrace above the arcade offers a view of the Hershat Mata Temple nearby, and farmland to the south and east. On three sides there are steps, and the fourth side has portions built one on top of another with niches that have beautiful sculptures and religious carvings.

We had to use wide-angle lenses to get the double flight of 3,500 narrow steps arranged in perfect symmetry. The large mouth of the well functioned as a rain-catching funnel and contributed to the water seeping in from the porous rock at the bottom. It was a dependable water source for centuries, but on our day, at 20-metres deep, there was only a murky green puddle. Morna Livingston points out the spatial compactness of the stair triangles that run parallel to the step well’s edge. “The rise to run of each flight,” she says, “adds no more than 18 inches (45 cm) of width to eight feet (2.4 metres) of drop, making it an extremely sharp descent. The well is so steep that the top of the stair triangle seen from the pond’s brim, alternately hide and reveal people going down from above.”

Intricate decorative sculptures embellish this step well.

Hollywood has featured Chand Baori in the movies The Fall (2006) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012).

We made our way back to our taxi and found the moustachioed man grinning... “The air at the bottom is five or six degrees cooler,” he said. A hundred feet below, the air may indeed have been cooler. Maybe his ghost did it.