Rani ki Vav: The Queen's Stepwell

Almost every great building is meant to be looked up at. Rani ki Vav is meant to be walked down into. From the edge you see a rectangle in the ground and the top of a stone stair; then you descend, and the walls rise around you tier by tier, each one denser with sculpture than the last, until you are seven storeys below the fields of north Gujarat standing at the mouth of a well, surrounded by several hundred carved gods. It is one of the most astonishing pieces of architecture in India and it is essentially invisible until you are inside it.

The Queen's Stepwell at Patan was built in the eleventh century, buried by the silt of a shifting river for centuries, dug out again in the twentieth, and made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2014. If you have a hundred-rupee note in your pocket, you are carrying a picture of it. And yet on an ordinary winter weekday morning you can walk down through it in something close to solitude.

What a stepwell is for

Gujarat and Rajasthan get their water in a few violent months and then go without for the rest of the year. The stepwell — vav in Gujarati, baori elsewhere — was the region's answer: not a well you lower a bucket into, but a well you walk into, with a long descending stair that reaches the water at whatever level it happens to be. As the water table fell through the dry season, you simply went down further. Hundreds were built across the region, and they were social as much as practical — cool, shaded, and often the only comfortable public space in a hot landscape.

Rani ki Vav is the most elaborate ever built. It runs roughly 65 metres long and descends through seven levels of pavilions and galleries to a stepped well shaft at the far end. The whole thing is inverted architecture: pillars, brackets, beams, friezes and figurative panels arranged as though for a temple, but going down into the ground rather than up into the air. Air stays cool as you descend, sound changes, and the light drops away in stages.

It was commissioned, according to an inscription, by Queen Udayamati of the Chaulukya dynasty, in memory of her husband King Bhimdev I, around the second half of the eleventh century. That makes it a memorial as well as a waterwork — which goes some way to explaining why its builders lavished this much sculpture on something whose primary job was to be a hole for water.

Seven storeys of sculpture descending into the ground — a building designed to be entered downwards.

Several hundred gods on the way down

The sculpture is the reason Rani ki Vav is in a different category from every other stepwell. There are somewhere over five hundred principal figures and many more minor ones, arranged across the tiers in an organised iconographic programme rather than as decoration. The dominant theme is Vishnu: the ten avatars appear, along with Vishnu reclining, Vishnu as Vamana and Narasimha and Kalki, and a great deal of associated Vaishnava imagery. Shiva, Brahma, Ganesha, Surya, Bhairava and Mahishasuramardini all feature.

Over five hundred principal sculptures, arranged as a religious programme rather than decoration — you descend through it like a text

Alongside the gods run registers of apsaras and nagakanyas — celestial women and serpent maidens — engaged in the small human business of everyday life: applying kohl, dressing hair, looking in a mirror, playing with a child, holding a scorpion. These are the panels people photograph most, and rightly. They are unusually tender, unusually observed, and their state of preservation is remarkable given the building's history. Because the vav was buried, its sculpture escaped both weathering and iconoclasm, which is why it is far crisper than most eleventh-century carving in India.

There is one more layer that most visitors miss. Near the bottom, beyond the well shaft, a gate is said to have led to a tunnel running towards Sidhpur — an escape route in times of trouble. It is now blocked, and how much of the story is fact and how much folklore is unclear, but standing at the lowest level looking at the dark opening, it is easy to believe.

Buried, forgotten, found

The Saraswati river, which watered this part of Gujarat, shifted and flooded, and over the centuries Rani ki Vav filled with silt. By the medieval period it was largely buried — mentioned occasionally in texts, its upper structure ruined, the rest simply gone from view. That burial destroyed the pavilions at the top and it also, paradoxically, saved everything below. Sediment sealed the sculpture away from rain, sun and the periodic destruction that fell on temples across the region.

The Archaeological Survey of India excavated and cleared it through the twentieth century, with the major work completed in the 1980s, and what emerged was a building in far better condition than anyone had reason to expect. UNESCO inscribed it in 2014, praising it as the apogee of stepwell design and craftsmanship. In 2016 it was declared India's cleanest iconic place, a modest-sounding honour that anyone who has visited a major Indian monument will recognise as genuine praise.

Patan, Modhera and how to do it

Patan is about 125 km from Ahmedabad, a comfortable two and a half hours by road, and roughly 55 km from Mehsana. Almost everyone visits as part of a day or overnight loop that also takes in the Sun Temple at Modhera, about 35 km away — an eleventh-century Solanki temple with a stepped tank, aligned so that the equinox sun strikes the sanctum. The two buildings are contemporaries, products of the same dynasty and the same extraordinary burst of building, and seeing them on the same day is one of the best things you can do in Gujarat.

Patan itself is worth more than a car park. It was the Chaulukya capital, and it remains the home of Patola weaving — double-ikat silk saris of such difficulty that a single piece can take months and cost a small fortune. The Patan Patola Heritage museum and a handful of weaving families will show you the process. Add the Sahastralinga Talav, a ruined eleventh-century water tank, and the old town's Jain temples, and Patan justifies a night rather than a stop. Come between October and March, arrive early, and go down slowly.

If you go

• Arrive at opening time. Low morning light reaches down the tiers, and you may have the lower levels to yourself.
• Descend slowly and look at the side galleries, not just the central axis — the apsara and nagakanya panels are the best carving.
• Pair it with the Sun Temple at Modhera, 35 km away. Same dynasty, same century, and the two together make the trip.
• Give Patan a night and visit a Patola weaving family — the double-ikat silk here is among the most difficult textile work in the world.
• Come October to March; the stepwell stays cool but Patan's afternoons in April and May are punishing.

Rani ki Vav is the finest stepwell ever built and, because it goes downwards, one of the few great monuments that gives away nothing until you are inside it. Buried by a river for centuries and therefore preserved from everything that damaged its contemporaries, it holds five hundred sculptures of remarkable delicacy seven storeys below the fields of north Gujarat. Go early, take it slowly, pair it with Modhera, and stay long enough in Patan to watch someone weave a patola.