Delhi Heritage Top 10 series is a comprehensive guide to Delhi's heritage icons and architectural gems. The first volume in the series delves into the fascinating history and the great significance of forgotten, subterranean, man-made water structures, commonly known as baolis or stepwells. The book walks us through the top ten baolis, with two special mentions. Besides giving a vivid description of the functioning and revival of the baolis, the book also focuses on the social importance of each structure. The work is an outcome of a five-year-long research from various archives, and contains historic as well as modern photographs along with architectural drawings.
Vikramjit Singh Rooprai is a heritage activist and an educator. In 2009, he started exploring Delhi's monuments to promote the rich heritage of India. He has established Heritage Labs in schools where he encourages students and mentors to develop a new way of looking at our past. On social media channels, he is better known by his handle
All ancient civilizations, those that graduated from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture, had developed methods of harnessing water for agriculture and for daily consumption. Each civilization adapted to the peculiarities of their climatic conditions, the terrain they inhabited, the seasonality of precipitation, and developed techniques that were best suited to their conditions.
In different parts of the world from the heights of Andes where the Incas lived to southern Mexico, Guatemala, Northern Belize, and Western Honduras inhabited by the Mayas, from the flood-prone plains of the Nile in Egypt to the lands inhabited by the Assyrians, the Sumerians, the Romans, the Chinese, and other ancient civilizations, there were as many solutions to problems of seasonal plenty and scarcity, even excess and flooding, or paucity and absence of water that were unique to each society.
In India, during the times about which we do not know enough, there were those who settled in the Indus Valley and whose settlements gradually grew into towns and cities. It were these people who developed a network of drains, some open while some underground, to carry water to all parts of the city. They also built large public baths, and we are still trying to understand how the entire system worked.
The inheritors of these great cultures keep talking about their rich ancient civilizations, and how advanced were their techniques of urban planning, and it is the same with us. Whenever we participate in international colloquia on hydrology and on water management, we never tire of preening ourselves before the world community, telling them about the underground network of drains and the great baths and the hydrants, the remains of which can be seen even now. We try to present these as unique, and this we do because we have convinced ourselves that we are the fountainhead of all knowledge. It does not occur to us that each great civilization, some as old as ours, and a few even older, had found their own methods of solving the most crucial problem of human existence-water management.
Boasting about a past-partly understood, partly misunderstood, and mostly imagined-is the foundation upon which the edifice of the nation state is constructed. Despite the phenomenal diversity-climatic, cultural, social, and historical-that has informed these myriad ideas of a glorious past, there is one similarity that cuts across all, and that is our refusal to learn anything from this fantastic past, especially when it comes to practices that help sustainable living.
We are creating newer and newer methods to exhaust our resources, ones that we do not have the mechanisms to regenerate. And one of these resources is water. The speed with which we are consuming, polluting, wasting, and destroying this one resource that every civilization had learnt to conserve makes one wonder if we can actually claim to be more civilized than all earlier civilizations.
The slim volume Delhi Heritage Top 10 Baolis put together by Vikramjit Singh Rooprai, a young heritage enthusiast and photographer, looks at stepwells and their importance in meeting the water requirements of the residents of the capitals that rose and fell in what is now the national capital territory of Delhi, and also of the villages that have existed in this region much before the capitals came up.
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