Kapurai Vav, Vadodara: Reviving a 250-Year-Old Stepwell on the Old Dabhoi Trade Road

Location: Kapurai village, Vadodara–Dabhoi road, Gujarat
Attributed to: Merchants of the route
Age (local account): c. 250 years
Likely period: c. 1770s
Status: Ongoing, unlisted, no protection
Our work: Phase 1 clearing, in progress
Support: Vadodara fire service

Kapurai Vav has no inscription and appears in no survey. What it does have is a location on a working trade road, and a village that remembers being founded after it. In Kapurai, the village grew up around the water, not the other way round. Team Ramdoot Restores is now clearing it, and the work is in progress.

The monument

The vav stands on the old road from Vadodara to Dabhoi. Dabhoi, medieval Darbhavati, was fortified by the Solanki king Siddhraj Jaisinh between 1093 and 1143 as a frontier town holding the trade routes east of the capital. By the middle of the eighteenth century, under the Gaekwads, it had become one of the region’s significant trade centres.

That is the road this stepwell was built to serve, and roughly the period local testimony places it in: about two hundred and fifty years old, so around the 1770s.

Structurally sound, biologically closed

On arrival, a single arched corridor stepped down to the shaft, its water surface sealed under hyacinth, with the brick and dressed stone still sound above the waterline. The masonry is in better condition than at any of our completed sites.

The problem here was the water body: a sealed hyacinth mat, algae, litter, and domestic waste tipped straight in. Vegetation and saplings were rooting into the joints, threatening to move stone.

Cut, hauled and carried up the steps

Vegetation was cut and lifted out by hand. Volunteers cut back growth from the parapet, and inside the structure, silt and growth were collected in tubs and carried up the steps by hand. The Vadodara fire service brought a tender to help move the hyacinth mat, the one part of the job volunteers could not do unaided.