Stepwell at Adalaj, General View (Photo Credit: Samir Pathak)
Riyaz Latif
I
n all its fluid articulacy, it is water that shapes the soul of the stepwell¹. Water from which all sprouts into existence; water, not crystalline as in a Norwegian fjord, but dark green, mysterious, veiled in a mossy patina to guard its occult depths. Water rears the seed of creative splendor and configures the stepwell around its fluid frame. It becomes the profound axis, the primal cause for the functional and structural corporeality of the stepwell to evolve around it. In its deep liquid stillness, it absorbs celestial constellations (rather than mirroring them), and becomes the generative agent in imparting a legible face to the immediate architectural elements that embrace it.
Water is, therefore, raison d’être of the stepwell, and it is from this liquid core that the stepwell stems forth. Proceeding on a linear axis from the watery subterranean center, it rises, generating a series of ordered spaces, surfaces and platforms, until it arrests its ascension as it surfaces on the ground. Conversely, we could proceed from the ground, down into the stepwell’s descending form; this would call for a sojourn through its well-articulated entrance-frames, steps, platforms, and landings – all richly adorned elements indulgent in a procession towards the water at the core, the primal cause of these elements’ presence.
Stepwell at Adalaj, View of octagonal core with water reservoir at center (Photo Credit: Samir Pathak)
At an imaginary stratum therefore, a stepwell becomes an arena for resolution of two diametrically opposite forces of architectural progression – one, from its fluid core, rising in a structured linearity to earth’s surface; the other, more efficacious, entering the ground as it sequentially orders a series of spaces down towards the fluid encirclement of its figurative axis. A stepwell, it would appear, beckons us from ostensibly two different worlds at the same time.
These two worlds, two edges, two hypothetical progressions, chart between them a spatially ordered repose whose visage is continually formed through its requisite descent into the ground. The canonic presence of water in the stepwell makes this descent imperative, and in a substantial measure, makes the structure relinquish its façade in the formal sense of the word. Let us remind ourselves: a stepwell is a subterranean structure; it becomes manifest by receding into the earth’s mass. It uses earth as fortification to buffer itself from the facile inequities of the external. But as it retreats into the earth, it concurrently unfolds a legible lexicon of architecture – a sonorous arrangement of stone-steps, ornate sandstone columns, carved niches, and platforms – and acquires a distinctive spatial as well as elemental compositeness. For its part, in a majestic act of generosity, earth makes way to shelter and nurture the multifarious architectural configurations which gently proceed towards its womb. Let us say, the stepwell, in gratitude, gathers and wraps the pristine aura of the earth around itself. It acknowledges earth’s subtle rising in the elements out of which it is composed, circuitously resounding Heidegger’s solemn proclamation: “Earth is that whence the arising brings back and shelters everything that arises without violation. In things that arise, earth is present as a sheltering agent.”2 In the framework of such a formulation, the subterranean water-structure and earth harmonize their corporeal cadences.
This formulation also bears within itself a deep silence – a silence which resonates with the distinctive élan of this spatial ensemble. Sounds sweep through intersecting frames forged by lintels and columns, gain a hushed gravitas, and as in all transcendent spaces and structures, enter into an enduring introspection. Thereby, they enact dissolution of their being into nonexistence. In a stepwell, all sounds attain a mystical valence; they transfigure themselves into occult solitudes. A stepwell, as it descends towards water, accompanied by the perpetuating circles of solitude, revels in an intimate communion with the netherworld. It reflects the inherent urge of the earth to attract things to its core, and simulates this urge in the intonations of its architectural organization.
Here, if we pause and draw into our musings the constitution of the architectural elements in a stepwell, we find ourselves agreeably amidst the lyrical simplicity of their composition. It is the resolute forthrightness of their expression that moves us. It is the composite visual crescendo that builds up from the interplay of rudimentary rectangular frames that reaches out to us. Reduced to its bare elemental essentials, a stepwell constitutes merely a series of steps, interspersed with columns, landings, platforms and galleries, leading down to the well. Yet, the poesy here lies in the deliberation while being led to the core. It is the involuntary ritual of a balanced concealing and revealing of the architectural elements during the descent that conjures up the arresting mystique of the stepwell. The unwitting ritual of the descent, in retrospect, stirs many associations. Water with an almost imperceptible ripple of numinous sanctity, the presence of a rudimentary shrine next to it, the garb adorned by proximate spatial forms animated by the otherworldly diaphanous light on their being, and steps and platforms leading to water connoting different planes of existence (or attainments) – all these serve to enhance and embellish one’s experiential tryst with the stepwell. To belabor the rhetoric, there is a lingering air of all parts journeying towards the ultimate Whole. In such an experiential reverie, diverging flows of time are neutralized; there is a repose where all elements announce eternity, and a permeating timelessness in conferred upon the stepwell. The descent into the stepwell, thus, is a nuanced ceremony of perception for us to acknowledge the balance between the ornate simplicity of its physical being and the ineffability of the experience that it precipitates.
Stepwell at Adalaj, The Play of Frames (Photo Credit: Samir Pathak)
A stepwell also enters into an experiential discourse with us through a play of its frames. At an elementary material level, its structure is delineated through a well-defined, refined arrangement of columns, colonnades, lintels, landings and steps; all these configure abundant frames for us to partake of a performance – a continual alternation of frames as our vision roves in the stepwell. Again, the involuntary ritual of concealing and revealing is enacted through the frames as our descent into the stepwell progresses. This visual-experiential stratagem, inadvertently bequeathed to us, lays out a distinctive vocabulary of perception. In fact, this play of frames is a perceptional idiom recurrently deployed by the stepwell. We shift, and the frames shift in turn, spawning a new visual reality each time.
The architectural frames in the stepwell are profoundly unassuming in themselves. However, their ordered abundance as well as the permutations and combinations of their arrangements generate a range of graphic spatial experiences varied in their intricacy. But ironically, they feign to enunciate the architectural vistas that elude them. Even when rendered dense with spatial as well as material articulations, they embody the momentariness of things. In the visual shifts, they subtly allude to the transience of experience. They arrest rich vistas within their outlines to ultimately expose the impossibility of containing anything at all. They fervently assert forms to proclaim a negation of all forms. In this play of the ephemeral, we can feel the distant reverberations of Rilke’s elegiac incantations brushing against the adorned surfaces of the stepwell:
But we, when moved by deep feeling, evaporate; we
breathe ourselves out and away; from moment to moment
our emotion grows fainter, like perfume. Though someone may tell us:
“Yes, you’ve entered my bloodstream, the room, the whole springtime
is filled with you…” – what does it matter? he can’t contain us,
we vanish inside him and around him. And those who are beautiful,
oh who can retain them? Appearance ceaselessly rises
in their face, and is gone…3
The momentariness of things notwithstanding, a stepwell nonetheless forges a vibrant visuality for us through a profuse drama of frames. All the elements of a stepwell, in their structured constitution, embalm on their being a theatrical aura. At repose in a detached dignity, with memories of some ancient performance, they come alive in the theatrical recurrence of their ornate visuality. Again, columns, landings, projections, niches and carvings are inert in themselves. It is only through the shifting progressions of our eye that they are animated into a rhythmic recurrence, a composite visual performance of intersecting frames. They demand a mild disordering of our vision so that it is extended beyond the realm of a bound rationality. This bespeaks an act of anointing architecture with an occult rhythm, for in a stepwell, spaces acquire the visage of the ineffable. In its ornate solitude, a stepwell is a subterranean theater of transient forms.
All things considered, a stepwell signifies the apotheosis of a reservoir. It manifests itself in a morphological frame to enshrine the enigmatic primacy of water. The mystique of light that washes the carved surfaces, the various associations harbored in the smell of the moist sandstone, a stimulating coolness caressing the skin in the subterranean depth – they all stand in attendance to the sublimity of that architectonic procession into the ground which is the stepwell. A stepwell crafts music out of its singular spatial-visual arrangements; it extracts harmonies out of its tangible and intangible elements, and weaves them into a structured spatiality to make the melody consummate. A stepwell resounds as a symphonic act of attaining the firmament through an ornate descent into the earth.
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Notes [1] Stepwells are subterranean water structures – vavs, baulis and so on – dot the Indian terrain (especially western India) quite prolifically. The premodern vavs (stepwells) in Gujarat, however, are distinctive for their spatial, functional as well as ornamental refinement. In ruminating on these structures here, the prime specimen at the fore is the exquisite stepwell at Adalaj (ca. 1499), in close proximity to Ahmadabad. [2] Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought (Harper & Row Publishers, 1971), p. 42. [3] Rainer Maria Rilke, “Second Elegy,” in Selected Poetry, trans. Stephen Mitchell (Picador Classics, 1982), p. 157.
Riyaz Latif is a bilingual poet and translator. He teaches art history at FLAME University, Pune, India.
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