For Indian monuments, history leans toward "peniplanation," the gradual leveling of structures by erosion and gravity. The longest building histories belong to temples in politically changing North India. But lately, farther west, a force of unexpected power has been enlisted by preservation. The result, when viewed beside the successes of formal conservation groups, has been striking, even if we accept a frustrating tendency of Indian buildings not to be preserved at all.

In recent years increasing numbers of the large west-Indian water-building, which have served as wells, baths, shade houses, and religious sites, are turning into temples. This is startling, because Hindu temples have been the precinct of high-caste Brahmins, while stepwells, although tey had shrines in them, have freely offered their water to cows, artisans and housewives in anoisy, social, busy way.

An ancient deity and her worship are burgeoning in the culture to produce this change. The deity is the Mother Goddess, well known throughout India and the ancient Near East. She has many names connected by the term Devi, and is addressed "Mataji," that is, mother, with the honorific ji added at the end.

This transfer of value to a popular building is a grassroots phenomenon. No elite planning or deliberations of the Archaeological Survey or Indian National Trust mar its simplicity. It is vibrant, underfunded, and non-"patron"-sponsored, and it bypasses the media. It is local, but symbolically it confronts organized preservation with the paradox of its grassrootedness. As Nezar AlSayyad pointed out, a strategically placed mosque can face up to a bulldozer, "demonstrate [ing] the power of religion as a counterforce to the ideology of modernism."

This paper will identify issues addressed in the newly forming "water temples" and look closely at Mata Bhavani, a Centrally Protected Stepwell in Ahmedabad that was recently reconsecrated to the Mother Goddess. The local players in the spontaneous drama of preservation are women, for whom the government's sanitary water taps did not meet ritual needs. Its backers are Brahmins, too numerous to be employed in temples, who sought new lines of work. With ritual, the local women built a bridge between the abandoned stepwell and the reincarnation of that space as an embryo temple. A pujari family then legitimized that link, bringing an advantage as custodians the government could not bring - the long time frame of Hinduism.

Low-cost, low-tech preservation, based on part of a building, begs all question of refinement, but it can keep the spirit of "place" alive. The stepwell becomes a large niche for Devi and an occupational niche for the pujari , who become the wells advocate. In its new, unofficial state as proto-temple, the building will be unceasingly added to by worshippers. Mata Bhavani's stepwell reflects the ambiguity and vitality inherent in successful methods of preservation that involve inalterable change.