People began constructing stepwells in western India in around 650 AD. They were intended primarily as a source of clean water but also served as gathering places, temples and refuges from the heat. They could be as simple as a spiraling staircase down to a round pool of water in the center, or a busy maze of stairs and columns with the complexity of a sketch by M.C. Escher.
image: https://public-media.smithsonianmag.com/filer/f7/6b/f76b3edc-f728-4019-91c3-126172be261e/stepwellsp40-v2.jpg
While Hindu in origin, the value of stepwells was grasped by Muslim rulers of the Mughal empire beginning in the early 1500's. Some Hindu religious inscriptions where defaced, but they allowed construction to continue and even built their own wherever they went.
When the British occupied India (succeeding the Mughals) they considered stepwells unsanitary and set about creating new sources of water. Drilled and bored wells became common, along with pumps and pipes that made stepwells obsolete. The vast majority of Indian stepwells fell into disuse. The last one was built in 1903.
In areas without consistent, coordinated trash removal, many disused stepwells became handy pits into which garbage was (and still is) thrown. Some have been claimed by wasps, rats, snakes, turtles, fish and mongooses.
“[From the photos,] you can't tell how decrepit and rundown and remote and dangerous a lot of these stepwells are,” Lautman says. “I was going into these things by myself and pushing myself to slide down on my butt down a thousand years of garbage, asking myself, 'why are you doing this?' [...] This is not for the faint of heart. Anyone who is afraid of heights or bugs or snakes or just the incredible filth, anybody who doesn't like any of that is going to have a hard time.”
This is architecture that is both ubiquitous and invisible. There are hundreds – perhaps over a thousand – stepwells in India and Pakistan. But Lautman often found that people who lived mere blocks away from a stepwell had no idea that it existed. She has helpfully included GPS coordinates for every well described in her book. (An online, collaborative atlas can also be found here.) A few stepwells, including Rani-ki-Vav (the Queen’s Stepwell) at Patan, Gujarat, have been well-preserved and are known tourist destinations, but most are obscure and difficult for travelers to find.
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