Rani ki Vav Explored | Painter Babu Rishabh
"I did not go to Rani ki Vav as a tourist. I went as a man trained to read symbols — and I returned slightly unsettled by what I read. Let me confess something first: I thought I understood Indian history. Years of writing, documenting spaces, decoding narratives — arrogance comes disguised as knowledge. But the moment I began descending into Rani ki Vav, history stopped behaving like a timeline. It became a confrontation. Because this is not a stepwell. It is a queen’s intellectual rebellion carved into the earth. Built in the 11th century by Queen Udayamati in memory of King Bhimdev I, Rani ki Vav quietly demolishes a myth we have comfortably repeated for centuries — that power, vision, and architectural authorship belonged primarily to men. Think about the audacity. While kingdoms were busy glorifying masculine victories through forts and towering temples, a widowed queen chose to build downward — into introspection, into water, into the subconscious of a civilization. Almost a...