What is the name of the 16th-century stepwell that the Archaeological Survey of India recently conserved in collaboration with the World Monuments Fund India?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, Rajon ki Baoli. This is the stepwell inside the Mehrauli Archaeological Park in south Delhi, and it satisfies both halves of the stem exactly. The date: it was commissioned in 1506 CE by Daulat Khan, an administrator of the Lodi dynasty, in the reign of Sikandar Lodi — the sixteenth century, and the last generation of Delhi Sultanate rule before Babur. The project: the Archaeological Survey of India announced on 16 May 2025, four months before this paper was set, that it had completed the conservation of the baoli in collaboration with World Monuments Fund India and the TCS Foundation, under WMF India's 'Historic Water Systems of India' initiative, which is itself aligned to the World Monuments Fund's Climate Heritage Initiative. The monument is on the ASI's list of Monuments of National Importance, registered as 'Rajon-ki-Bain with Mosque and Chhatri', reference N-DL-152. What the work involved is worth knowing, because it explains why a 500-year-old well became news: it was cleaned and desilted, connected to a proper drainage system, structurally repaired and had its water quality restored — fish were introduced to help keep the water healthy — with traditional lime plaster and lime mortar used throughout so that the Lodi-era character of the masonry survived the repair, and with local communities brought in through education and participatory conservation programmes. ASI's own description gives the scale: a four-tiered stepwell spread over 1,610 square metres, descending 13.4 metres, with a main tank measuring 23 by 10 metres at its base, its arched colonnades carrying stucco medallions in floral and geometric patterns. It is open to the public again. The name, incidentally, has nothing to do with any ruler: 'Rajon' comes from the raj-mistris, the masons who settled at the site in the early twentieth century.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Delhi's most famous stepwell, and therefore the option the item is built to draw — but it is the wrong monument on both of the stem's tests. It stands on Hailey Road near Connaught Place and Jantar Mantar, not in Mehrauli; it measures about 60 metres by 15 metres, with 108 steps and three visible levels; and no historical record names its builder, tradition merely crediting the Aggarwal community's legendary ancestor Agrasen, with the surviving fabric placed loosely in the Tughlaq–Lodi range rather than at a documented sixteenth-century commission. Decisively, it was not the monument in the ASI–World Monuments Fund India project. Its fame is cinematic rather than archaeological — PK, Sultan, Mom and Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna were all shot there — which is exactly why the name surfaces first from memory.  (c) No stepwell of this name figures in the ASI–World Monuments Fund India project, and none of Delhi's documented baolis carries it — the city's known survivors are Rajon ki Baoli and Gandhak ki Baoli in Mehrauli, Agrasen ki Baoli off Hailey Road, and the baolis inside the Red Fort and Purana Qila complexes. The option is built to sound right: 'bavdi', 'bawdi', 'baori', 'baoli' and 'vav' are all genuine regional words for the same stepped well, descended from the Sanskrit vapi, so an unfamiliar name from that family reads as plausible to anyone who knows the vocabulary but not the monument list.  (d) The stem is doubly specific — one sixteenth-century stepwell, one named collaboration between the ASI and World Monuments Fund India — and only Rajon ki Baoli satisfies both conditions. Agrasen ki Baoli fails the project test outright and has no securely documented sixteenth-century date, and the third name is not a monument in that project at all. With exactly one option true, this one cannot be. Note how BPSC uses the fourth option here: not to reward partial knowledge but to punish it, because the candidate who correctly recognises that both 'Agrasen' and 'Rajon' are real Delhi baolis is precisely the one tempted to combine them and lose 1/3 mark.

Concept: A baoli — bawdi in parts of the Deccan, vav or vavdi in Gujarat and Rajasthan, all descended from the Sanskrit vapi — is a well reached by a descending flight of steps, so that water can be drawn by hand at whatever level the water table happens to stand. That one design idea solves a problem an ordinary well cannot: in a monsoon climate the depth to water swings by many metres between the end of the rains and the end of summer, and a stepwell simply lets the drawer walk further down. Everything else follows from the steps. Because the shaft is deep, wide and shaded, air at the bottom stays markedly cooler than at the surface, so the baoli doubled as a place of rest, assembly and shelter for travellers; and because water in India was never purely utilitarian, the form attracted architecture — colonnaded galleries, arched niches, carved brackets and, in the grandest examples, sculpture on every tier. That is why stepwells cluster along old caravan routes and beside mosques, temples and tombs, and why Rajon ki Baoli sits within an enclosure that also holds a mosque and a chhatri tomb. The tradition runs from the reservoirs of Harappan Dholavira, through the Solanki masterpiece of Rani-ki-Vav at Patan (a UNESCO World Heritage property since 2014) and Chand Baori at Abhaneri, to the Sultanate baolis of Delhi. Bihar solved the same problem differently: the ahar-pyne system of the Magadh region, in which pynes divert hill streams into ahars, embanked catchment reservoirs. Piped supply made all of these redundant in the twentieth century; falling urban water tables are now making them useful again, which is precisely the premise of the Climate Heritage Initiative under which this restoration was funded.

State PCS 2025 Q18 — Art & Culture PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q18 — Art & Culture PYQ with Answer