Imagine being inside a cavity forty feet deep in the earth! At that subterranean depth, the air feels humid. There are bats literally hanging around. Sunlight flits through from gaps above. And then you see a figure on one side. Sounds like something out of a sequel to "The Conjuring"? Except that this isn’t!
That’s what one feels like inside the carved depths of an ornate medieval stepwell in Gujarat. Called "vavs," stepwells appear across arid stretches of the coastal state. The world finally woke up to the magical, underground setting of these stepwells in 2013, when the Rani-ki-vav, in Patan, was accorded UNESCO World Heritage status.
The event brought tourists in large numbers to the banks of the Saraswati River, where the 11th century CE Rani-ki-Vav is located. But in the decade that has gone by, an opportunity to showcase the larger narrative around the state’s step-wells has been missed.