Manasara Series (I. A Dictionary of Hindu Architecture; II. Indian Architecture according to Manasara-Shilpashastra; III. Manasara on Architecture and Sculpture: Sanskrit Text; IV. Architecture of Manasara: Translation; V. Architecture of Manasara: Illustrations; VI. Hindu Architecture in India and Abroad; VII. An Encyclopaedia of Hindu Architecture) v6.c40.s6.24

v6.c40.s6.24

The cultural achievements of the Indians revealed at Mohenjodaro, Harappa, and other places in Sindh and Baluchistan can now be more confidently compared with those disclosed by the Vedas, not only with a view to revising the old notions that the Vedic Indians did not know the use of writing, but also with a view to understanding the casual references to the villages, towns, forts and cities with hundred enclosures or fortifications, stone houses, carved stones and brick edifices. For if the Indus peoples were the earlier residents, it will be curious to imagine that the later and highly cultured Vedic ‘Aryans themselves were still in the village state and that their society was in other respects correspondingly primitive.’¹ Vedic Indians must have been aware of the art of building, illustrated in Mohenjo-daro. In that case one can hardly persuade oneself to believe that it was mere imagination when told that a Vedic sovereign ‘sits down in his substantial and elegant hall built with a thousand pillars . . . residential palaces being vast, comprehensive and thousand-doored.’² Thus one can hardly share the obstinacy of the archaeologist when the latter expresses, in the absence of archaeological remains, his doubt about the Vedic forts being no more than ‘simple earthworks, surrounded by palisades or rough stone-walls.’