Almost everywhere in the world, the built environment meets the water with a hard, almost defensive edge, even in a city like Venice.
But the Indian subcontinent has a wonderfully open relationship with water.
In India, at any ghat, we see steps that meet the water, descend beneath it and let it wash over them. This does not feel like a boundary, rather a fluid meeting point where our clearly defined world encounters and intermingles with a more mysterious and formless state. Architecture becomes amphibian.
India’s stepwells reflect this open relationship.
In most places in the world, a well is a relatively narrow shaft in the ground through which water is drawn up to the surface.
A stepwell is instead far more than just a conduit: it is a space that we can enter and occupy, in which the water draws us down to its edge. It spatialises the water below ground that we need to live, and its beautiful architecture asks us to consider what this means to us.
My photographs of India’s stepwells attempt to give a record of these extraordinary ambiances.
They contemplate what the wells have become and suggest what they might have once meant to their original users, for whom these structures were at once functional, social, and spiritual. And in doing so, my pictures also suggest what we might make of stepwells in the future, as our changing environment forces us to reckon with our own choices.
Stepwells create a unique relationship with the subterranean, a dimension that otherwise generally feels claustrophobic. We can always see the sky above us and hear daily life happening above ground. We are merely placed at a remove from this plane of our existence as we descend into the calm, cool and quiet of the space to reach the water, the well’s beauty lulling us into a meditative state.
Descending into a stepwell is a truly immersive event, something that becomes all the more apparent when we re-emerge from its depths. The color of the sandstone changes from blue-gray back to more of a red-yellow, the temperature rises again, and the shouts of children we left playing above ground become louder once more.
That is when we realise that we have not been cut off from life. We have instead journeyed to its source, and this sense of connection helps bring us closer to it. The ordinary process of fetching water, thus, becomes an extraordinary perceptual experience; it is transformative, metaphysical, a kind of darshan.
Stepwells are heavily connoted as female spaces in several ways. The ground, and the water within it, are usually considered to be female in most cultures. Many wells are dedicated to female deities. Women were traditionally its primary users, and in many cases, their builders. In this way too, stepwells ask us to reflect on our origins. Descending into a well and coming back out of it often feels like being born again.
Whether in terms of their ability to collect water amidst a growing scarcity of this resource, offer thermal shelter from temperatures approaching the unlivable, or provide a gathering space amidst an overly congested public sphere, stepwells hold many lessons for our future, ones that we ignore to our detriment in every sense.
All photographs by Claudio Cambon.
Claudio Cambon has worked as a documentary photographer for over 30 years, and for more than 25 of them in the Indian subcontinent.
His new book is To Reach the Source: The Stepwells of India, ORO Editions (2025).
