Photo 1000/18(1923)

Genre: Architectural Photography

Reproduced in collotype in Burgess, 'Archaeological Survey of Western India', IX, plate 3 and described, pp. 37-38. Showing the overgrown remains of the step-well.

Cousens' progress report for the Archaeological Survey of Western India for December 1889 to February 1890 notes that, 'We now entered His Highness the Gaikwad's territory, and, as Patan lay in our way, we halted there from 23rd January to 12th February [1890] and added a few more drawings and photographs to those already made there in January 1887. Its remains of old work are so scattered about the town and for miles around, that it is no easy matter to come to them all in one short visit. Very little now remains in situ, and the dismantled materials of the scores of fine old temples that once adorned this old city are scattered far and wide. Mosques, tombs, tanks and wells, with the modern walls, have made a clean sweep of almost all, and it is sad to see the use to which some of these richly sculptured fragments have been degraded. The celebrated Rani Vav, a step-well said to have been constructed by Udayamati, the Queen of Bhima Deva Solanki, King of Patan, in the eleventh century, is now represented by a small portion of its bracketted main shaft at one end and part of a single standing column at the other extremity, the intervening space being a vast pit from which pillars, beams, and step-slabs have been rifled, to build, it is said, some eighty years ago, Bahadur Singh's step-well in the town...'