Town Planning in Ancient India c11.58

c11.58

The present town of Srirangam gives us the best clue to the mode of evolution and expansion of Indo-Aryan cities. The history of its development cannot be better depicted than in the words of Prof. Patrick Geddes, the famous town-planner of modern times :—“Here in ancient days there was a local shrine, central to the island and its villages. Some thoughtful teacher at one time, some saintly soul at another, became an influence extending beyond the island and pilgrims began to come. A little temple was raised to include the shrine and its court would be inhabited by its holy man doubtless with his disciples. Outside these gather more dwellings; first the huts of sanyasins, later more permanent, and increasingly of Brāhmaṇ character. Granaries are needed, and arise first as round huts of the old type still common as dwellings in Madras, and surviving as corn-stores in Bengal villages, though they are superseded as dwellings by rectangular plans. The whole area becomes included within a larger wall with a southward gateway,—(on the third wall from the centre). Within the enclosure and outside it also, further developments proceeded, both material and spiritual, as of increasing granaries and additional shrines. Outside arise new dwellings of large magnitude and space; in time these likewise became spiritualised in property and use; and at length transformed as well. New shrines thus appear, and here also, though probably far later, the north-east space becomes the hall of a thousand columns. The new rectangular wall is more carefully oriented than its predecessors; three gateway Gopuras are built, the largest to the eastward. There is now a clearer differentiation of temple and town, of sacred and secular; for a new street is kept clear all round the wall presumably as a Car-street, and with house-lots opposite. These are to-day of very varying breadth, suggesting that those now narrow may have arisen by division. Another wall again was raised to surround this clear rectangle of dwellings facing the Car-street next the temple wall; and this is given four gateways towards the cardinal points but these were comparatively small, in subordination to those within, and on three sides of the previous temple enclosures. But outside this a new town-extension is provided. This is again a rectangular street system parallel to the last with a fresh Car-street, and new houses on either hand and lots less deep. Evidently with city growth caste distinctions and wealth requirements being more emphasised, the lower and poorer castes are kept outside the larger gateways of this wall; and their houses cluster specially to the south and east, but not to the less spacious west. These poorer dwellings spread and subdivide from these gates on either hand, in lots of small and irregular size, and with a norrow lane running obliquely north by east, from near the east Gopuram.