Bowers Museum invites you to a live presentation, Subterranean Ghosts: India’s Vanishing Stepwells with Victoria Lautman followed by Q&A.

Journalist Victoria Lautman has spent years documenting hundreds of the little-known underground edifices and her landmark book, The Vanishing Stepwells of India, was first published in 2017

India’s palaces, forts, temples, and tombs are on every tourist itinerary and in every guidebook. But the country’s magnificent subterranean stepwells remain largely unknown both within and outside the country. These unique water-harvesting structures - marvels of architecture, engineering, and art - proliferated throughout the subcontinent for over a millennium, but eventually faded into oblivion by the 19th century.