Around 1805 a Man Began Building a Stepwell From the Stones of a Queen's. River Mud Saved What He Missed

Patan, Samvat 1862 (1805–06 CE): a new well from old stones

A man called Bahadur Singh Jaskaran begins a stepwell inside the city of Patan, in north Gujarat, in the time of the Gaikwad rulers of Baroda. Inscriptions on each side of its entrance will praise him as "a servant of Sri Lalaji". His son will finish it in Samvat 1868, 1811–12 CE, at a cost of 14,925 rupees.

The inscriptions do not say where the stone came from. A survey published in 1903 does. James Burgess and Henry Cousens of the Archaeological Survey of Western India called the well "an ordinary step well ... built of materials carried off from the old Rani Wav."

The Rani Wav, the Queen's Stepwell, lay in the fields north-west of the town. Of it, they wrote, "nothing of this is left except a huge pit, 285 feet in length, with a portion of the masonry of the well shaft at one end and the fragments of a pillar at the other." At the bottom, "there is still a pool of stagnant water." On the bank above it, someone had built "a common masonry structure ... for drawing up the water by the mot or leather bag to irrigate the adjoining field."

Today that pit is Rani-ki-Vav, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List on 22 June 2014. It is 70 metres long and 28 metres deep, built in seven levels, five of which survive. Between Bahadur Singh's quarrymen and the Archaeological Survey's spades, much of a lost building came back. The reason is mud.

At a glance

• 70 m long, 23 m wide, 28 m deep. The dimensions of Rani-ki-Vav in its UNESCO nomination; the well shaft narrows from 10 m across to 7 m at a depth of 30 m. (Nomination Dossier, ASI, January 2013, pp. 2|2 and 2|26)
• About 200 m. Where the water table around the stepwell now sits, by the dossier's own account; monsoon water seeps into the 28 m well and "quickly dissipates". (Nomination Dossier, p. 4|10)
• 1361 of the Vikrama era, about 1305 CE. When the Jain monk Merutunga finished the chronicle that says Queen Udayamati "caused to be made in Pattana a new reservoir". He wrote some 240 years after her husband's reign. (Tawney, The Prabandhacintamani, 1901, preface p. vii and p. 78)
• 292 carved pillars, 226 surviving. The stepped corridor's original count, against what is left after the floods, the quarrying and the clearance. (Nomination Dossier, p. 2|19; ICOMOS Evaluation No 922, 2014, p. 125)
• 1805–06 to 1811–12. The years Bahadur Singh's stepwell was built inside Patan from stone "carried off from the old Rani Wav". (Burgess and Cousens, Architectural Antiquities of Northern Gujarat, 1903, p. 52)
• About 19.5 m. The depth of Chand Baori at Abhaneri according to the Archaeological Survey of India, not the 30 m or "13 storeys" of popular captions. (ASI Jaipur Circle, "Chand Baori", archived 2016)
• 5,00,111 tankas. The cost of the Adalaj stepwell, in its own Sanskrit inscription, dated Samvat 1555 in the month of Magha. (Burgess, Photographs of Architecture and Scenery in Gujarat and Rajputana, 1874, text to Photograph III)

First, the words a beginner needs

Stepwell (Sanskrit vāpī, वापी; Gujarati vāv, વાવ; Hindi bāvaṛī or baori, बावड़ी). A well you can walk down into. A long flight of steps runs from ground level to the water, beside or into a vertical shaft. Rani-ki-Vav means "the Queen's stepwell".

Water table. The level below which the ground is soaked with water. Dig a hole deeper than the water table and water seeps in. The level is not fixed: it rises after the monsoon and falls through the dry months.

Well shaft. The vertical, round or octagonal hole at the far end of a stepwell. Water could be drawn up from the top with a rope and bucket, or reached at the bottom by the stairs.

Tank (kuṇḍa, कुण्ड). In a stepwell, a rectangular pool built in front of the shaft. At Rani-ki-Vav the dossier says it "was meant to receive overflow of water from the well."

Pavilion (maṇḍapa, मण्डप). A pillared, roofed hall. A stepwell's pavilions are stacked storeys of pillars and beams that span the corridor, propping the side walls apart so the earth cannot push them in.

Storey or level. One floor of a pavilion. Rani-ki-Vav's four pavilions have two, four, six and seven storeys, getting taller as the corridor gets deeper.

Samvat (Vikrama era). The calendar of the Gujarat records in this story. It runs about 56 to 57 years ahead of the Common Era.

Prabandha. A Jain genre of historical anecdote. Merutunga's Prabandhacintāmaṇi means "Wishing-Stone of Narratives".

Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). The central government body that protects national monuments. It cleared Rani-ki-Vav and prepared its UNESCO nomination.

The claim we are testing

As it circulates: "Queen Udayamati built Rani-ki-Vav in memory of her husband, King Bhima. The Saraswati flooded it and it lay buried and perfectly preserved for 700 years until the ASI dug it out. Stepwells were natural air-conditioners. Chand Baori has 3,500 steps and 13 storeys and is 30 metres deep." Layer by layer:

1. Udayamati had a great stepwell built at Patan. True, as a 1305 record. A chronicle names her; a statue inscribed with her name came out of the silt in 1987–88.
2. "In memory of her husband." Not in the chronicle. Merutunga gives no year and no "memorial"; the dossier asserts it, citing one art historian's reading of the carvings.
3. "Buried and perfectly preserved for 700 years." Half true. The lower galleries survived under silt; the upper parts were stripped for stone from about 1805. The dossier gives four burial dates.
4. "Until the ASI dug it out." Slowly. Repairs in 1937–38, clearance from 1963–64, excavation in 1964–65, conservation finished in 2008.
5. Stepwells cooled the air. Plausible; not measured in anything we could open. The dossier cites a book, not a thermometer.
6. Chand Baori: 3,500 steps, 13 storeys, 30 m. Not what the ASI says: "about 19.5 m in depth", "ten landings", no step count.

The chronicle that names the queen

No foundation inscription naming the builder has been reported at Rani-ki-Vav. The name comes from a book.

Merutunga, a Jain monk of Vardhamanapura, today's Vadhvan, finished the Prabandhacintāmaṇi "in the year 1361 of the era of Vikramaditya", about 1305 CE, as C.H. Tawney notes in the preface to his 1901 English translation. One chapter runs through the kings of Gujarat. King Bhima, of the dynasty English writers call Solanki or Chaulukya, "began to reign in 1077 V.S. and reigned forty-two years, ten months, and nine days." Then one sentence, in the Sanskrit edited by Jinavijaya Muni:

श्रीउदयमतिनाम्न्या तद्राज्ञ्या श्रीपत्तने सहस्रलिङ्गसरोवरादप्यतिशायिनी नव्या वापी कारिता ।

Tawney's English: "His queen, named Udayamati, caused to be made in Pattana a new reservoir, surpassing even the Sahasralinga lake." The next sentence crowns her son Karna "in 1120 V.S.", about 1063–64 CE. In the dossier's dates, Bhima I reigned from about 1022 to 1064.

Three things matter. The word is vāpī, the Sanskrit for a stepwell; Tawney's "reservoir" is looser than the original. The verb is kāritā, "caused to be made": she paid, others built. And the comparison is odd. The Sahasralinga lake, the "tank of the thousand Saiva shrines" at Patan, is ascribed by Burgess and Cousens to Jayasimha Siddharaja, who reigned 1093–1143, two kings later. The UNESCO dossier dates it "about half a century after the Rani-ki-Vav".

So the attribution rests on a chronicle written about 240 years after the fact. In 1987–88, while desilting the stepwell, the ASI's Vadodara Circle recovered a marble sculpture of a seated woman under a parasol, with attendants. The dossier reads the base as "Maharajni Shri Udayamati", queen Shri Udayamati. It "establishes beyond doubt", the dossier says, "that it is a portrait of Queen Udayamati." It establishes that someone carved her, and that the carving was found here. It does not carry a date.

Why a well needs a staircase

A dug well is a hole down to the water table; you lower a bucket on a rope. A stepwell is a far bigger hole, so it must buy something a bucket cannot. It buys two things. First, people can walk down to the water, fill a pot and carry it up, with no rope, no pulley and no bullock. Burgess, writing in 1874 on the page about Adalaj, described a wav as two parts: "a well, often octagonal, from which the water is drawn up in skins, by bullocks" and "a wide staircase by which the women descend to the level of the water, there to fill their water-pots."

Second, the water is not always at the same depth. After the monsoon it stands high; by the hot months it has sunk. A stair simply ends wherever the water is. Burgess saw this at Adalaj: the stair descends "down through the three galleries; the water standing in the cold season about the level of the platform or floor of the last."

That is why stepwells are deepest at the well end and stepped like a ramp. At Rani-ki-Vav the floor of the third pavilion is about 22 m below ground; the tank in front of the well, 9.5 by 9.4 m, sits at 23 m; the shaft reaches 30 m. When water rose, the dossier says, it was let "through openings into the lowest storeys of the fourth pavilion."

The hardest part was not the steps. It was keeping 28 metres of sandy earth from falling in on them. The dossier reconstructs the method, by its own account an inference from what traditional well-diggers described: dig a round pit and four parallel trenches to 4 metres; repeat, deeper each time; clear the earth left between the trenches and build walls 2 metres wide along the north and south faces. Then build the stone galleries back up from the bottom. The pillared pavilions are struts as much as decoration: they hold the two long walls apart. Where the pressure was greatest, the builders went further. In the fourth pavilion they "reduced" the distance between pillars, added "buttresses of greater sections" and "cross-walls", and filled the gaps between pillars in the lowest storeys with carved walls. Horizontal and vertical members were pinned with dowels of rosewood and semal wood; the kerb stones of the shaft were held with iron clamps, still in place.

Did it really work like an air-conditioner?

Tours of Rani-ki-Vav say the stepwell was cool. The dossier gives the mechanism. Overhanging brackets and pavilion roofs "cast over-lapping shadows that would effectively maintain a lower temperature within the well-cavity than what prevailed over ground." The divided corridor "channelized hot air into the moisture laden well-cavity", where it "would cool, become heavier and gradually collect as a moisture-film over the surface of the stored ground water."

Look at what supports that paragraph. Its only citation is Morna Livingston's 2002 book Steps to Water. It reports no temperature measured at Rani-ki-Vav. A 2024 paper by Samirsinh Parmar and Debi Prasad Mishra, "Passive cooling techniques in medieval Indian stepwells", addresses exactly this, but we could read only its abstract, so we print none of its numbers.

The physics is not in doubt: shade cools, and so does evaporating water. A deep, shaded, wet hole in a hot plain should be cooler than the plain. How much cooler at Rani-ki-Vav, the documents we opened do not say.

The flood that buried it — on four different dates

The UNESCO story says the Saraswati river flooded the stepwell and its silt preserved it. The source is the dossier, which cannot agree with itself on when.

The executive summary: the Vav "remained buried for nearly 6 centuries." Section 2.b: the flood came "in the end of 13th century." A footnote on the first pavilion: "the flooding and silting of the Saraswati River in the 14th century CE." The disaster section: "Sometime at the turn of the 14th century." And a footnote in section 3: "The structure was buried for a period of 2 centuries." The ICOMOS evaluators, who advise UNESCO, summarising India's case, wrote "almost seven centuries." Six centuries to 1964 puts the burial near 1364. Seven puts it near 1264. Two centuries is a different story altogether.

Then there is the river. The dossier says the Saraswati "has dried up", and it speaks of a "geo-tectonic change" behind its "disappearance". But its own risk section records that "the last recorded flood in the region was in the late 1970s." And in 1903 Burgess and Cousens described the river at Patan as running: near the Sahasralinga lake, "the river on the north is now cutting round" an old shrine. This Saraswati is not the great lost river of the Vedas. It is a river of north Gujarat that flows past Siddhapur, "seventeen miles farther up the Sarasvati river than Anahilavada-pattana". Its name, Burgess and Cousens wrote, "was perhaps transplanted from northern India."

None of this undoes the flood. Something filled the lower stepwell with silt; the ASI's desilting entries run from 1972–73 to 1992–93. What the record does not support is a single neat date, or a single event.

The man who quarried it, and the mud that stopped him

In 1903 Burgess and Cousens wrote that apart from the shaft and one pillar "every stone of the walls and pillars has been dug out and carried off." Colonel James Tod's account, they noted, indicated that the materials went into "a new well in the modern city". Local report, "thirty years ago", named it Bahadur Singh's. Comparing their photograph with Arthur Malet's drawing in Tod's Travels in Western India, they judged there had been "no great change in the condition of this ruin during the last seventy or eighty years — or, perhaps, since its spoliation in 1805." The last standing pillar was being lost too: "As late as 1887 a short upper shaft with a fragment of a cornice surmounted the capital, but in 1890 this had been thrown down."

So the upper storeys went into a plain town well. What saved the rest was depth: the quarrymen took what they could reach, and below lay galleries packed with silt under a pool of standing water. In 1937–38 a repair team found that "the columns and other material were removed from this stepwell some years ago, mostly leaving behind the back portion of the stepped well." In 1964–65 an ASI team under R. Subrahmanyam "carried out a small-scale excavation to the south" and, in the words of Indian Archaeology — A Review quoted in the dossier, exposed "the lowest sculptured gallery having deep niches", with figures "either dancing or playing on musical instruments."

ICOMOS describes what is left. The first pavilion keeps "only 12 plinths of former pillars" on its lower storey; the second, its lowest storey; the third, three storeys of six; the fourth, five of seven. Of more than 800 sculpted panels, "approximately 400 survive." The losses run from the top, the survivals from the bottom.

Seventy years of clearing, then a list

The clearance, as the dossier tabulates it from the ASI's annual reports, was slow. The stepwell was declared protected in 1936. In 1937–38 its stripped sides were "turned into turfed slopes". The ASI cleared the passage to the shaft in 1963–64 and excavated in 1964–65. Through the 1970s fallen walls were reset; one season's work "was held up due to the flooding of the well by rain water." In 1987–88 the "remaining portion of the main shaft of the vav was de-silted" and the Udayamati figure came up. ICOMOS says conservation "works were completed in 2008."

Some carvings "could not be attributed to a specific location on site" and went to a museum. Missing walls were rebuilt in plain stone, which ICOMOS judged "can be easily distinguished from the historic elements."

On 26 January 2001 the Bhuj earthquake, centred 260 km to the west, cracked the upper entrance wall; the cracks were grouted. The World Heritage Centre received India's nomination on 31 January 2013. The committee met in Doha and inscribed Rani-ki-Vav on Sunday 22 June 2014.

One detail is easy to miss. India asked for listing under criterion (iii), as testimony to "a cultural tradition". ICOMOS refused: "the building of subterranean stepwells cannot be considered a cultural tradition or civilization as required by criterion (iii)". It recommended criterion (iv) instead, as "an outstanding example of a type of building, architectural or technological ensemble". UNESCO listed it under (i) and (iv): a masterpiece, and a piece of technology. It also accepted what the State Party could not change: "Rani-ki-Vav cannot retain authenticity in use and function as a result of the altered ground water levels."

Adalaj, 1499: a stepwell that tells you its own date

Rani-ki-Vav's builder comes from a chronicle. Adalaj speaks for itself. Twelve miles north of Ahmedabad, in the village of Adalaj, a Sanskrit inscription sits in a niche in the upper gallery. In 1874 Burgess printed an outline translation prepared by the Sanskrit scholar R.G. Bhandarkar:

"Samvat 1555 (a.d. 1498), month of Magha, Mahmud Padshah being king. ... Virasinha's queen, whose name is Rujha, has constructed this well. It is dedicated at this time — when the sun is in the north, the month is Magha, the bright half ... the 5th day, the day of the week, Wednesday ..."

Burgess summarised the rest: after a description of the well and verses praising the queen, "the expense is stated at 5,00,111 tankas, or over five lakhs."

The 1874 text subtracts 57 and gives 1498. But Magha falls in January or February, so a dedication in Magha of 1555 lands early in 1499 by our calendar. That is where the usual date comes from. One complication: when Burgess reprinted the inscription in 1905, his text reads "Samvat 1558 (A.D. 1502)". Same niche, same author, three years apart in the date. Without a photograph of the stone we cannot say which figure the stone carries.

The builder was Ruda or Rujha, queen of Virasimha, a Vaghela chief whose lineage the inscription traces from a king Mokala of "Dandahi". "Mahmud Padshah" is the reigning Sultan of Gujarat, named as the formula for the date. The queen's name survives in the stepwell's other name, Rudabai's stepwell, which the ICOMOS evaluation uses.

Adalaj shows how much design changed in four centuries. Rani-ki-Vav has one entrance; Adalaj is entered from three sides onto a square platform, with the stair running north to the well. Its measurements, from Burgess's 1905 survey: 251 feet, about 76.5 metres, from the back of the shaft to the south end; a shaft 17 feet across; a reservoir "fully 53 feet", about 16 metres, deep. "The descents of the stairs are gentle," Burgess wrote, "every fifth step being of double breadth, and the height of the galleries from floor to floor is about 11 feet 6 inches."

Chand Baori: the most photographed stepwell, and the numbers nobody cites

The most photographed stepwell is probably Chand Baori at Abhaneri, in Dausa district of Rajasthan, with three walls of zig-zagging double flights. The captions are confident: 3,500 steps, 13 storeys, 30 metres deep.

The ASI's own page for the monument, archived in 2016, says something more modest. Named "after Raja Chanda, a Rajput ruler of the eighth century A.D., this grand baori has imposing design and dimensions (about 19.5 m in depth). It has been provided with double flights of steps on each of its ten landings on the three sides. The fourth northern side consists of a multi-storeyed corridor supported on pillars and two projecting niche-shrines". It was declared protected by a notification of 28 November 1951.

So the depth is about 19.5 metres, not 30. The ASI counts ten landings, not 13 storeys. It gives no count of steps at all. We found no document that did. The eighth-century date rests, on the ASI's page, on the name of Raja Chanda; the page cites no inscription. Nineteen and a half metres, about six storeys of a modern building, does not need inflating.

Read the actual document

श्रीउदयमतिनाम्न्या तद्राज्ञ्या श्रीपत्तने सहस्रलिङ्गसरोवरादप्यतिशायिनी नव्या वापी कारिता । "His queen, named Udayamati, caused to be made in Pattana a new reservoir, surpassing even the Sahasralinga lake." — Merutunga, Prabandhacintāmaṇi (c. 1305), ed. Jinavijaya Muni, Singhi Jain Series 1, p. 54, §81; trans. C.H. Tawney (1901), p. 78

In plain words: "By his queen, named Śrī Udayamati, in Śrī Pattana, a new vāpī, surpassing even the Sahasraliṅga lake, was caused to be made." The queen causes; others dig. Pattana is Anahilavada-Pattana, today's Patan. The printed edition also carries, in square brackets, a phrase calling her a daughter of "Naravahana Khangara". The editor set it apart, and we do not rely on it.

What the sentence does not say matters as much. It gives no year, though it sits between the end of Bhima's reign and Karna's coronation in 1120 V.S. It does not say "memorial" or "in memory of her husband". It gives no size and no cost. The dossier's "memorial" is an interpretation; the chronicle does not supply it.

The strongest case for the other side

On the builder, the chronicle does not stand alone. The dossier points to masons' marks cut on pedestals and steps, "palaeographically ... dated to the eleventh century onwards in Gujarat", matching marks on securely dated buildings. Burgess and Cousens, with no interest in a UNESCO bid, matched the last standing pillar's style to the columns of Vimala Sa's Jain temple on Mount Abu, "erected in A.D. 1032, during the same reign", and concluded: "In the absence of conflicting evidence, then, its traditional date may be accepted." And a portrait of the queen, labelled with her name, was found inside the well.

On the burial, ICOMOS took the view that the flood was the stepwell's luck, not its loss: "it caused the flooding and silting of the architectural structure which allowed for its exceptional preservation over seven centuries." The quarrying is real. But it took what quarrymen could reach from above. The deep sculpted walls of the fourth pavilion, which make Rani-ki-Vav unique, lay below that reach, under silt.

On Chand Baori, double flights on ten landings on three sides add up to a great many steps, and we found no published count either way. A popular figure is not false merely because the ASI did not print it.

What we could not prove

• A construction date for Rani-ki-Vav. No foundation inscription has been reported. The 1987–88 Udayamati sculpture is described by the dossier as 48 cm tall, while the ASI's 1987–88 report, as the dossier quotes it, gives 42 × 28 × 6 cm; the dossier also says five marble sculptures recovered from the silt "were perhaps of a later date", without saying whether the Udayamati figure is one of them. We could not see the figure, or read its base, ourselves.
• The four burial dates. We could not find, in the documents we opened, the geological evidence behind the "geo-tectonic change" or a dated flood deposit.
• The cooling effect, in degrees. The Parmar and Mishra paper (2024) is open access, but its publisher's site put up a bot-check we did not bypass; we read only the abstract.
• The two standard books. Jutta Jain-Neubauer's The Stepwells of Gujarat (1981) and Morna Livingston's Steps to Water (2002) were not available to us; we cite neither for a fact.
• The ASI's annual reports. We read the 1937–2008 entries only as the dossier quotes them; the scanned 1964–65 volume we found was unreadable.
• Adalaj: 1555 or 1558? Burgess printed both, in 1874 and 1905. We have not seen a photograph of the inscription.
• Chand Baori's 3,500 steps and 13 storeys. We found no published count, by the ASI or anyone else, and no inscription dating the stepwell.

Why it still matters today

Rani-ki-Vav was built to reach water within 30 metres of the surface. The dossier says that water is now around 200 metres down. The building did not fail; the ground under it changed. Its original function, ICOMOS wrote, "can no longer be experienced today."

Stepwells were never a mystery technology. They were a sound answer to water that rose and fell with the monsoon in a dry land. They needed strong retaining walls and someone willing to pay for a public good; at Adalaj the inscription recorded that cost to the last tanka. When the water table was in reach, a staircase was enough. When it fell beyond reach, no staircase could follow. It is a lesson about groundwater more than about stone.

The second lesson is about stories. The popular one is tidy: one queen, one date, one flood, one rescue. The record is messier. None of that makes the stepwell less remarkable.

Verdict

What the documents prove: by 1305 a great stepwell at Patan was attributed to Udayamati, queen of Bhima I; a portrait inscribed with her name was found inside it; its style and masons' marks fit the eleventh century. Its upper parts were quarried for Bahadur Singh's well from about 1805; its lower parts survived under silt. It was cleared and conserved between 1937 and 2008 and listed by UNESCO in 2014. Adalaj carries its own dated Sanskrit inscription naming Queen Ruda and a cost of 5,00,111 tankas. The ASI gives Chand Baori a depth of about 19.5 metres and ten landings.

What they do not prove: a construction year for Rani-ki-Vav, that it was built "in memory of" Bhima, a single date for its burial, a measured cooling effect, or the 3,500 steps, 13 storeys and 30 metres of Chand Baori.

My judgment: the Queen's Stepwell does not need its legend. A building that is half a quarried ruin and half a time capsule, kept by the same silt that buried it, is a better story than "perfectly preserved". It is also the true one.