Announcing yourself to the street leading to the ancient stepwell called ‘Toorji ka Jhalra’ in the city of Jodhpur, you find yourself being overlooked by those intricately carved red sandstone ‘Jharokhas’ and there is a stark play of light & shadows of those intertwined creepers and icicles of stone. As you walk past in this lane, you might be able to step in shades of history, pondering with pleasure and the only thing that pulls you out of that zone are these vehicles zipping past and you’re trying to keep a safe distance from them with your neck straining to capture every corner detail.
In past, you can imagine this lane to be calmer, people strolling and greeting those acquaintances who’ve just stepped outside their home to start their day and our bovine companions occupying a shaded ground on the advent of this summer day. As we walk past, we notice a series of cafes & some premium branded showrooms on the ground level and some handpicked Indian tourists sipping their first cup of coffee, enjoying this off tourist season.
We climb the threshold of this stepwell and move forward to peek at the base of the structure and it takes a while get yourself aware of the scale of this structure. In this moment, snap and we imagine the local ladies starting their day with drawing water and chit-chatting as a part of their daily chores. Even the echoes of their voices could be heard as we talk to each other about the cleanliness of this place and surroundings. This place has been recently cleaned and restored with the help of local municipal body & JDH Urban Regeneration Project under the aegis of His Highness Gaj Singhji, probably in the year 2016-17.
The main pavilion on one side of the baoli is imagined to be resting / meeting place for the elite for taking a relief from the scorching sun, now over our head as we spend some time on the steps watching the kids take a dive into the green layer below. The structure is supported by a gateway arch below almost submerged into the water with some carved brackets supporting the balcony.
The layered stone has started to come off at places, which might have embraced the touch of those footsteps but it all gives a beautiful backdrop to the whole sense of this place where we feel an experience of space, time & essence. As Juhani Pallasmaa mentioned "we live in a mental world, where the self and the physical world mutually define one another in a mutually intertwining process", it is this dimension of time that we yearn to experience which relates us to a time and space continuity.
Our mind and eyes have already traversed through the history of time but we are still present in this moment, where the red sandstone lies beneath us carved by those several hands and same Sun shining above our heads.
It is also of the consciousness merging into this softening boundary of the world and the distant horizon of your own existence. The shadows of these steps have diminished and now only the flowers of grand gateway are blooming with its might, narrating it's grand wealth of emotions it has witnessed.
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