Ar. Afreen Fatima
School of Planning and Architecture, Bhopal, India
ar.fatima.afreen.phd@gmail.com
Ajay Khare
School of Planning and Architecture, Bhopal, India (Ministry of Education, Govt. of India)
ajaykhare@spabhopal.ac.in
Abstract
Water has always been a teacher, but most cities have forgotten how to listen. This sixty-minute panel for the Myths and Placemaking symposium examines Traditional Water Systems (TWS)—village tanks in Telangana, stepwells in Gujarat, and river ghats in Varanasi—as environments where cosmology, ecology, and sociality once intertwined to produce a resilient place. We argue that ritual practices did not merely ornament hydraulic works; they organized a public grammar through which communities perceived seasons, negotiated use, and reproduced ecological reciprocity over generations.
Across these landscapes, water shaped everyday life. Stepwells stored monsoon rain and staged rites of descent and return; tanks filled with floral offerings during Bathukamma, cleansing water while synchronizing agrarian calendars and women’s social labour; ghats inscribed cyclical time through ablutions, vows, and funerary transitions. Each well, tank, and ghat was thus a shared institution where planting, prayer, and pedagogy overlapped. Ritual, season, and care sustained a circle of reciprocity.
Today that circle is frayed. Dams interrupt flow regimes; pipes replace open wells; cadastral abstraction and managerial metrics emphasize litres and losses while occluding meaning and memory. Extraction outruns recharge, and renewal—once cyclical—becomes precarious. The question that echoes through the dry dust is pointed: Who are we without the gods, without the land, without water’s song? This is not only an ethical diminishment but an ontological shift. Ritual was never mere choreography; it coordinated address between human and more-than-human worlds. When this address collapses, place thins into space, kin into resource, and time into a continuous present optimized for throughput. The language of “inputs” and “sinks” clarifies certain mechanics while deranging relational imagination: companions become variables.
Beginning from this loss—and from the quiet truth that remembering is practical—the panel convenes voices from fieldwork, archives, and design studios to pose three questions:
- How did festivals and daily rites turn stone and soil into living calendars?
We analysed Kakatiya stepwells with sun-aligned stairs; tank networks whose rules mirrored cosmic order; and ritual cycles that coupled hydrologic timing with communal obligation. (Case study- Asthamukhi stepwell- NIZAMABAD- BRAHMOTSAV CELEBRATION)
- How did water bind to the community?
We foreground women’s embodied expertise in seasonality, purification, and social cohesion, reading songs and oral codes alongside epigraphy and plans to recover the tacit knowledge embedded in care work. (SURVEY -MENTIMETER IN PPT -TO COLLECT OPINION)
- How can such knowing inform urban design today—not as nostalgia but as an operative method in water-stressed cities?
We translate ritual logics into design heuristics: slow capture over rapid conveyance; shaded edges that lower evapotranspiration; floral and vegetal media as civic filtration; seasonal programming that re-socializes maintenance; and governance arrangements that align rights, duties, and festival calendars. (TACIT KNOWLEDGE SET TO CODIFIED KNOWLEDGE- USING KEYWORDS TO FORM BUBBLE DIAGRAMS)
Our central claim is epistemic: knowledge of water resides in two interlinked layers essential to design.
- Tacit knowledge (wide base): lived, affective, and intergenerational; often unrecorded yet foundational to practice and care.
- Codified knowledge (sharp apex): inscribed and formalized—solstice alignments, “fill-to-here” marks, transferable plans. Codification scales only when rooted in tacit grounds.
Figure 1: Relationship between tacit and explicit knowledge showing the predominance of tacit (80%) over explicit (20%) forms within knowledge systems.
Source: Botkin J., Seeley C. “The Knowledge Management Manifesto.” Knowledge Management Review, 2001.
Recognizing both layers yields more durable design. An urban rain garden succeeds when it emulates a tank’s slow filtration rather than a pipe’s fast drain. Campus and neighbourhood retrofits that borrow tank logics—graded catchments, shaded perimeters, communal thresholds—perform better when programmed with seasonal rituals that re-activate stewardship. Listening to tacit voices—elders, water-keepers, women—renders codified plans stronger, fairer, and longer-lived.
Figure 2: The Bathukamma festival cycle depicting the ritual ecology of creation, celebration, immersion, and renewal—symbolizing women-led stewardship of water and floral resources in Telangana.
Image created by Afreen Fatima, 2025 (for educational and non-commercial use).
The Bathukamma festival, centered on a tiered floral arrangement that is cyclically created, worshipped, and immersed, materializes the hydrological and cosmological rhythms that undergird Telangana’s ritual ecology. The circular flow depicted in Figure 2 mirrors both ecological renewal and epistemic continuity—the seasonal cycle through which water, soil, and community are reciprocally bound (Sinha 1998; Shiva 2005). Women’s embodied participation in assembling and immersing Bathukamma functions as an act of environmental pedagogy, sustaining tacit hydrological knowledge about seasonal water purity, recharge timing, and plant phenology (Bell 1992; Strang 2004). As the flowers disintegrate in tanks, they release organic nutrients that symbolically and materially restore aquatic life, enacting what Eliade (1959) calls the “eternal return” of the sacred into the material world. The ritual thus operates as a living diagram of water’s cyclical ontology—an indigenous epistemology where the act of celebration itself performs ecological maintenance.
Empirical focus and methods
We present comparative readings of: (a) Kakatiya-period stepwells (orientation, stair geometry, pavilion thresholds, and solstitial light as time-keeping devices); (b) Bathukamma’s floral immersions as culturally legible filtration and aquifer recharge; and (c) tank federations where village rules nested with cosmic order. Methods include architectural documentation, seasonal mapping, close reading of inscriptions and song texts, and consent-based oral histories with women water-keepers. We specify what travels (recharge heuristics, shaded-edge microclimates, seasonal schedules) and what remains rooted (local deities, vows, kinship-encoded access).
Intended contribution
The panel reframes TWS as mytho-technical infrastructures—simultaneously spiritual and hydraulic—whose ritual grammars produced ecological function, social equity, and temporal orientation.
We propose a transferable set of design prompts from semi-arid cities: prioritize storm-to-storage pathways; valorise shaded, inhabitable edges; program seasonal repair festivals; adopt “fill-to-here” visual cues; and institutionalize water -heritage- anchors.
In doing so, we bridge heritage discourse with ecohydrology and urban resilience, offering a method to translate ritual memory into contemporary planning without romantic erasure of difference.
Session format (60 minutes).
- 5 min—Framing (Fatima): ritual calendars as hydro-social infrastructure
- 15 min—Case 1 (Fatima): Bathukamma and women’s tacit hydrologies
- 15 min—Case 2 (Khare): sacred ecologies and stepwell architectures
- 15 min—Case 3 (Murthy): oral traditions, inscriptions, and rule-of-use
- 10 min—Synthesis and audience dialogue: from memory to method
By treating ritual not as relic but as relational technology, the panel offers a vocabulary and toolkit for designing with water under climatic uncertainty—recovering the architecture of return where land, people, and gods once met in durable reciprocity.
Participants
- Convener / Moderator Afreen Fatima — PhD Scholar (Cultural Landscapes & Ritual Hydrology), School of Planning and Architecture, Bhopal
- Presenter 1 Afreen Fatima — “Bathukamma and the Feminine Cosmos: Ritualizing Water in Telangana”
- Presenter 2 Prof. (Dr.) Ajay Khare — “Sacred Ecologies and Traditional Water Systems in Indian Cultural Landscapes”
- Presenter 3 G. S. V. Suryanarayana Murthy — “Oral Traditions and Hydrological Memory in Deccan Placemaking”
References
- Adam, Barbara. Timescapes of Modernity: The Environment and Invisible Hazards. London: Routledge, 1998.
- Bell, Catherine. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
- Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959.
- Gies, Erica. Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge—Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022.
- Linton, Jamie. “Is the Hydrologic Cycle Sustainable?” Hydrological Processes 22 (2008): 1–12.
- Shiva, Vandana. Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability and Peace. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005.
- Sinha, Amita. Cultural Landscapes in India: Forms, Meanings and Process. New Delhi: Routledge, 2019.Strang, Veronica. The Meaning of Water. Oxford: Berg, 2004.
