A country that learned to keep its rain
Many of the finest stepwells were built by women. Queens who lived behind purdah chose water as their public mark on the town, and the town remembered them by name. When you stand at the rim of one of these wells, try to picture it full of voices. Silence is the newest thing about it.
Nine dry months: most of Rajasthan receives its rain between July and September, and for the rest of the year a town lives on what it managed to store.
A falling water table: it rises after the monsoon and falls week by week through the dry season, until by May the water may be many metres down.
- Rains
- A short burst, July to September
- Built
- At least the 7th to the 19th century
- Deepest
- Up to thirteen storeys
- Builders
- Rulers, queens, merchants, village councils
- Region
- Rajasthan and Gujarat
- The simple idea: instead of lowering a bucket on a rope, build a staircase that follows the water down, so anyone, at any season, can walk to the edge and fill a pot.
- An extraordinary architecture: deep shafts lined with steps, landings, pillared galleries and shrines. Some are plain and practical, and a few feel like temples turned upside down and pressed into the earth.
- Water as merit: giving water was an act of punya, religious merit, which is why so many stepwells carry carved gods and the names of their donors.
- A social gift: women came at dawn and dusk with brass pots on their heads, away from the eyes of the household. News travelled, marriages were discussed and quarrels were settled.
- A rest stop: travellers on the old trade routes waited out the hottest hours in the cool galleries.
- Cooler below: the bottom of a deep stepwell can be several degrees cooler than the street, and on an April afternoon you can feel it on your skin.
- Queens remembered: in Bundi a queen gave the town Raniji ki Baori, and in Jodhpur a queen of Maharaja Abhay Singh is remembered in Toorji ka Jhalra.
- The grandest of all: the Rani ki Vav at Patan in Gujarat, built in the eleventh century by a queen in memory of a king.
Baori, kund, jhalra, johara: the words for water
- Baori
- A well you walk down into
- Kund
- A stepped tank open to the sky
- Jhalra
- A tank fed by seepage
- Johara
- A shallow reservoir of the open country
- Tanka
- A covered courtyard cistern
The baori, a well you walk into
Two parts: a deep shaft reaches down to the groundwater, and a long trench of steps leads to it, broken by landings and pillared pavilions that brace the side walls apart.
- Other names: also written bawdi or bavdi, and called a vav in Gujarat.
- A descent: the street noise fades, the sky shrinks to a rectangle and the light turns soft.
- The classic example: Raniji ki Baori in Bundi.
The kund, a stepped tank open to the sky
What it is: usually a square tank, stepped on three or four sides, that collects rainwater rather than reaching deep groundwater.
- Crossing flights: the steps are often laid in diagonal flights, so people can reach the water from any side whether the tank is brimming or nearly empty.
- From the rim: the effect is pure geometry.
- Perfect examples: Panna Meena ka Kund in Amer and Dabhai Kund in Bundi.
The jhalra, fed by seepage
What it is: a stepped tank dug below a lake or a slope, so water seeps in through the soil and rock as well as falling as rain.
- Why Jodhpur has several: the rocky slopes below Mehrangarh shed their water into the old city.
- The best known: Toorji ka Jhalra, where you can watch the level rise and fall with the seasons.
The johara and the talab, reservoirs of the open country
The johara: in the sandy north, with no rock to dig through, people built shallow reservoirs that gather rain from the land around them, lined with stone steps and pavilions.
- The talab and the sagar: larger tanks and lakes, often dammed across a valley.
- The tanka: in Thar villages, many houses have a covered underground cistern in the courtyard that fills from the roof.
- Spot them on the road: round white domes beside the houses on any drive across the desert.
The kuan of Shekhawati
Merchants' wells: in the painted towns of Shekhawati, the families who built frescoed havelis also gave their towns wells.
- How to recognise one: raised on a platform, with four tall pillars at the corners that once carried the pulleys.
- Where: on the edges of Mandawa, Nawalgarh and Fatehpur, like small temples, many with painted pavilions beside them.
- The lesson: the families who paid for murals paid for water first.
The great stepwells, place by place
- Most dramatic
- Chand Baori, Abhaneri
- Distance
- About 95 km east of Jaipur
- Bundi
- More than fifty stepwells and tanks
- Best hour
- First two hours after sunrise
- UNESCO
- Rani ki Vav, Patan, Gujarat
Chand Baori, Abhaneri
Where: about 95 kilometres east of Jaipur, in a farming village of Dausa district. It is the most dramatic stepwell in India.
Date: historians date it on style to roughly 800 to 900 CE, in the age of the Gurjara-Pratiharas. Local tradition credits a Raja Chand.
- The numbers: square and narrowing as it descends, with about 3,500 steps on three sides in small double flights over thirteen storeys, falling about 30 metres to the water.
- The fourth side: it rises in tiers of pillared galleries.
- From the rim: you can no longer walk down, and the view from above is the best one anyway, because the geometry only makes sense from there.
- Walk the verandah: carved stones from the Harshat Mata temple next door lie at knee height.
Panna Meena ka Kund, Amer
Where and when: below Amber Fort in the lanes of the old town, usually dated to the sixteenth century.
The puzzle: its crossing staircases make such a pattern that our grandmother said you could never climb back up by the stair you came down.
- A whole valley's system: Jaigarh's tanks on the ridge, the Sagar reservoir in the hills and Maota Lake below the palace.
- Today: the steps are often roped off to protect them.
- When to come: mid-morning, straight after the fort, while the light still slants across one wall.
Raniji ki Baori and the stepwells of Bundi
A town of wells: Bundi has more than fifty stepwells and tanks in and around its old streets, and only a handful are maintained.
The finest: Raniji ki Baori, built in 1699 by Rani Nathavati, a queen of Rao Raja Anirudh Singh.
- The descent: about 46 metres down a long, narrow flight, each stage framed by a carved torana arch, with stone elephants on the walls and panels of Vishnu's avatars near the entrance.
- Nagar Sagar Kund: twin tanks in the bazaar, where women still fill pots in the morning.
- Dabhai Kund: a great inverted pyramid. A morning walking from one well to the next is one of our favourite days in Rajasthan.
Toorji ka Jhalra, Jodhpur
Built: around 1740, credited to Rani Tanwarji, a queen of Maharaja Abhay Singh.
Where: in the old city, between the clock tower and Mehrangarh, in rose-red stone.
- Lost and found: by the early 2000s it was buried under silt and rubbish. A restoration in the 2010s cleared it by hand and uncovered carved elephants, lions and cows most of Jodhpur had never seen.
- Come before nine: the square now has cafes, and early on it belongs to the neighbourhood again.
- Look up: from the lower steps you can see the fort above the rim.
Sethani ka Johara, Churu
Where: a few kilometres west of Churu on the Ratangarh road.
- Built in a famine: a merchant's widow built it during the terrible famine of 1899, which people here still call the chhappaniya akal, the famine of the year fifty-six in the old calendar.
- Relief work: building it gave work and wages to the starving.
- At the last light: its stone steps and domed sandstone pavilions stand in open sandy country, and the water turns gold. Stop on the way back from the dunes.
The tanks of the forts
Water first: every great fort was a water project before anything else.
Jaigarh: above Amer, it collected rain from its courtyards into vast underground tanks.
- Chittorgarh: its Gaumukh Kund is fed by a spring that flows from a stone cow's mouth.
- Kumbhalgarh: it fell only once, and it fell for lack of water.
- Ask your guide: to show you the channels at each fort. Our page on forts and palaces will make more sense afterwards.
Neemrana, on the road from Delhi
- The well few guests see: a deep, many-levelled baori in the village below the Neemrana Fort-Palace.
- When to go: if you spend your first night out of Delhi at the fort, walk down early in the morning before driving on to Alwar or Jaipur.
Delhi, Ahmedabad and Patan, beyond Rajasthan
Delhi: Agrasen ki Baoli hides among the office towers of Connaught Place, and Rajon ki Baoli, a deep Lodi-period stepwell, stands in the Mehrauli Archaeological Park.
- Adalaj: half an hour north of Ahmedabad, begun in the late fifteenth century by Rana Veer Singh and completed under Sultan Mahmud Begada.
- Rani ki Vav: at Patan, about three hours north of Ahmedabad, a UNESCO World Heritage Site whose walls carry hundreds of carved figures.
- Relatives, richly dressed: if you have seen Abhaneri and Bundi, Gujarat's wells will feel like family.
How the stepwells fell silent, and how some came back
Taps and hand pumps: piped water reached most Rajasthani towns in the twentieth century. It was a blessing, and nobody who has carried water up a hundred steps would wish it away.
A lost purpose: without people using and cleaning them, the stepwells silted up. Some were locked, some collapsed and some became open dumps.
Lost knowledge: the old skill of maintaining them faded with the families who had done it.
- The hidden cost: stepwells did not only store water, they recharged it. Rain from streets and roofs found its way into the ground through them.
- Falling water tables: as the wells fell out of use, and as borewells pumped deeper, the water table in many towns dropped. Older people in Bundi and Jodhpur can tell you which wells ran dry in which year.
- The tide turns: in the past few decades architects and photographers began to see stepwells as some of the most extraordinary structures in the country.
- Who restores them: the Archaeological Survey of India, state departments, trusts and private owners have cleaned and restored a number of them, and some towns now talk of their wells in terms of water as much as tourism.
- Uneven work: some restorations have their critics, but a visit today is part of this story of loss and repair.
- Read more: our journal piece on the stepwells of Rajasthan tells the longer history, and our page on sustainable travel explains how we visit with care.
How we arrange a day among the stepwells
Part of a longer day: most guests see stepwells this way. Abhaneri turns the long drive between Jaipur and Agra into one of the best days of a journey.
Bundi is the exception: there the stepwells are the reason to stay two nights.
- Abhaneri
- On the Jaipur to Agra drive
- Panna Meena
- Straight after Amber Fort
- Toorji ka Jhalra
- Ten minutes' walk from the clock tower
- Bundi
- Two nights; a whole morning on foot
- Our guides: local and paid properly by us, so they never steer you to shops.
- At Abhaneri: they read the carved fragments in the verandah with you, panel by panel.
- In Bundi: they know who keeps the keys to the smaller baoris and which ones are safe to enter.
- In Jodhpur: they grew up in the lanes around the jhalra and can tell you what it looked like before the restoration.
A water morning in Bundi
First light: Raniji ki Baori.
- Then: a walk through the blue lanes to Nagar Sagar Kund while the women are filling pots, and a drive out to Dabhai Kund.
- To finish: chai on a rooftop at Nawal Sagar.
- With a second morning: the smaller baoris and the cenotaph of eighty-four pillars. Our Bundi itinerary has the full plan.
Abhaneri on the road to Agra
Timing: leave Jaipur after an early breakfast and reach the village while the light is still low, then continue to Fatehpur Sikri and Agra.
- On our journeys: it sits naturally on our classic Golden Triangle.
- Read the route: our journal describes the whole Agra to Jaipur via Abhaneri drive.
With a photographer
Timed for shadow: we bring serious photographers to each stepwell at the hour when the shadows cut the steps most sharply.
- Permissions: arranged in advance where a site requires them for professional work.
- A journey built on light: our photographer's Rajasthan.
Breakfast at the rim
- In Jodhpur: we sometimes arrange breakfast on a rooftop looking over the jhalra and up to the fort, after an early walk through the lanes.
- A quiet start: before Mehrangarh opens. Our heritage walks often begin here.
The right hour and the right season
The hour beats the month: in the first two hours after sunrise one wall is in shadow and the opposite wall glows, so the full depth of the pattern reads clearly.
Late morning: the sun is overhead, the shadows flatten and the steps lose their drama. That is also when the coaches arrive.
- Best hour
- First two hours after sunrise
- Second window
- Late afternoon
- Highest water
- September and October
- Comfortable season
- October to March
- Hot months
- April and May, often above 40°C
- Late afternoon: the second window, especially at Raniji ki Baori, where low light slants down the length of the well and picks out one arch after another.
- October to March: soft light and cool mornings, the comfortable season for walking between wells. In December and January you'll want a shawl at dawn.
- September and October: just after the monsoon, the water stands highest and the lower flights disappear beneath it, as the builders meant.
- April and May: the water is low, the descent long and the heat serious, often above 40°C, so we come only in the first hour after opening.
- The monsoon, July to September: a gamble we love. After good rain Panna Meena fills with green water, the hills turn green and the whole valley makes sense.
- Monsoon care: steps can be slippery and some lower stages close. Our guide to the best time to visit Rajasthan has the month-by-month picture.
Who will love the stepwells
Architects, designers and photographers
The geometry: the obvious draw.
- The engineering: just as interesting, from how the crossing flights spread the load of the earth to how the pavilions brace the walls and the depth follows the water table.
- Read first: our guide to reading Rajasthani architecture, and our photography tips for lenses and angles.
Families with children
A puzzle to solve: count the triangles at Panna Meena, hunt for the elephants in Raniji ki Baori and the lions in Toorji ka Jhalra, and feel the temperature drop on the steps.
- Short visits: which helps.
- Hold small hands: many stepwells have no railings. Our guide to travelling with children has more.
Travellers curious about water and ecology
- How desert cities survived: stepwells explain it better than any museum.
- Pair them with: the lakes of Udaipur, the khejri trees of the Bishnoi villages and a conversation with a farming family about the rains.
Who may be disappointed
A short, hot stop: if you want grand interiors, shade and a full sightseeing day, a stepwell is an open-air visit, and many have no cafe and little shelter.
- Steep steps: without rails they can be daunting, though the view from the rim is usually the best one.
- Repeat visitors: after Chand Baori the smaller wells can seem modest. We suggest seeing each for what it is.
How to visit a stepwell well
Respect barriers: Chand Baori and often Panna Meena are closed to walkers on the steps, and the lowest stages of Raniji ki Baori are sometimes shut. The rules protect the stone and you.
Wear shoes with grip: old steps are polished smooth by centuries of bare feet, and the lower ones can be wet.
Keep children close: many stepwells have no railings, and the drops are deep.
- Footwear
- Shoes with grip
- Children
- Keep close; few railings
- Photographs
- Ask first; shoots need permission
- Drones
- We don't fly them
- Water is sacred: if local people remove their shoes on the upper steps, do the same, and leave niches and shrines as you find them.
- Nothing in the water: no coins, flowers or food. Towns are working hard to keep their stepwells clean.
- Ask before photographing: especially women filling pots at the working tanks in Bundi. Most will say yes if asked.
- Professional shoots: these usually need permission, and we arrange it in advance. We don't fly drones over stepwells.
- Unofficial tours: decline politely at the gate. We send guides who know the site.
- Limited mobility: most stepwells can be enjoyed from the rim, where the classic view is. Read our guide to accessible travel.
Stepwells on a longer journey
Near Jaipur: Abhaneri sits on the road between Jaipur and Agra, and Panna Meena below Amber Fort.
Jodhpur: Toorji ka Jhalra belongs to any stay in Jodhpur.
Bundi: our offbeat Rajasthan journey links it with Chittorgarh and Dungarpur.
- Jaipur side
- Abhaneri and Panna Meena
- Jodhpur
- Toorji ka Jhalra
- Bundi
- Offbeat Rajasthan journey
- Gujarat
- Adalaj and Rani ki Vav
- Churu and Shekhawati: the wells fit our painted towns of Shekhawati.
- Gujarat: Adalaj and Rani ki Vav belong to Mount Abu and Gujarat's heritage.
- Stay in Bundi: the family-run havelis put you a short walk from Raniji ki Baori.
- Stay in Jodhpur: RAAS Jodhpur is a few minutes from Toorji ka Jhalra.
- Stay in Jaipur: The Raj Palace and Samode Haveli sit on the Amer side of the city.
- Then tell us: which wells you want to see, and we will plan the days so you reach each one fresh, in good light, with someone beside you who can make the stones speak.