Water Archives: Women

We have all looked at the endless images of women standing in lines with pots and buckets in hands, waiting for their fill of water for the day. This image is a mainstay of our times, and every season, as soon as the summer heat shoots up, so do instances of water shortage. What we see is common, typical, and traditional — as men go out of their domestic domains to work, women step out to fulfil their equally arduous domestic duties. Made several times difficult due to climate change, industrial use, table depletion, pollution, over-population, and misadministration — water, and its absence, percolates in all pores of our daily lives. 

While in cities, we get a quicker response and sprightly reporting about water crises which are resolved by allocation of municipal tankers. Life during water shortage in rural India, especially in the arid heat of Western India is vastly different.

Women line up, but not in front of routinely dispensed water tankers. They set out from their homes, travel long distances on foot, bearing their pots and urns back and forth to collect water that would sustain their families. Development in rural areas is uneven, and most times people living in these places either do not have modern-day public works or their functioning is mired by a number of issues. People remain dependent on traditional water systems, and in using them, affirm long-standing social traditions. Among these traditions are the gender roles designated to women. 

While we are accustomed to the notion of labour of women in the sense that they are more domesticated, the reality of these circumstances underline the actual work that domestic management is. It has been long argued by second-wave feminists since the 1960s that the labour of women is not inferior to that of men — it is simply unrecognised and unpaid. Just through the example of what procuring water entails alerts us to this fact. 

Water is procured either from naturally occurring sources such as lakes, ponds, rivers or from traditional water systems such as local stepwells or reservoirs. At times, in case a modern-day water reservoir is within proximity, it becomes the source of water. Women, and often children, travel to these and gather water with which they return home. This is a regular ritual in their lives. It is both time-consuming and physically exerting, and pinches away the time that they would get free from their daily work in the house or at the farm. 

Not only do women perform the traditional role of collecting water for drinking and consumption, they are also required to manage it. As they perform most of the domestic duties, they ensure an economical usage of water. Thus, what we consider a lesson in resource management and awareness, is something that is felt by these people at a very immediate level. Wastage of water materialises in harder labour the very next day. In this way, we can think of these households as microcosms of efficient resource management. 

The central sustaining role of water, as observed in the previous article in this series, has always been interlaced with religious and socio-cultural significance. As women traditionally procure and maintain water for their own families and communities, it becomes their prerogative to maintain whatever form of water resource they draw from. Thus, traditional water systems are not only just worshipped, but their worship has a gendered aspect, where rituals specific to village communities and ethnic groups incorporate the act of women worshipping the body of water and men, at times providing their labour to clean them. In absence of formal water management bodies that function and represent their interests adequately, ritual and tradition open up pathways to ensure that their access to water is perpetuated. 

In fact, many of the smaller stepwells of baolis are built to replicate grander projects.

Most of these grand projects functioned as subterranean temples, and would sometimes be accompanied by carved sculptures of male and female deities they would be dedicated to. The spiritual core of the bawli was thus culturally established and reproduced in the minor ones. In the case of Rani ki Vav — which means the Queen’s stepwell — religion, gender, and water resources come together in the most grandiose manner. The stepwell was commissioned by the queen Udayamati in 1060 CE in commemoration of her dead spouse, a rare instance in history of architectural commissions by women in pre-modern India. Another prominent stepwell commissioned by a queen in the Rudabai ki Vav, also known as Adalaj Stepwell. Located in Gujarat, it too was built as an act of commemoration of the king and employed artistic embellishments to what is functionally a utilitarian structure. 

The sculptures on these stepwells reveal that they were used as spaces specifically for worship of fertility goddesses, and not some the male gods. Depicted alongside images of deities are frieze panels that illustrate scenes from everyday lives of people. Evidently, these spaces were conceived with a resonant symbolism that revolved around typically feminine themes — domesticity, land and earth, and fertility. In addition to providing water, these spaces thus facilitated the worship of the feminine. Frequented largely by women, this allowed for identification and self-attachment. Just like how a religious text is supposed to guide in person in matters of moral, ethical, and spiritual concerns; spaces such as these offered a possibility to create a spiritual bond with the feminine ideal in the form of the goddess, and to venerate and emulate her example.