Town Planning in Ancient India c14.1

c14.1

In ancient towns, the importance of centres from the standpoint of citizenship and public life could not be overestimated. "So much more of that life was carried out in the open air, so much more of the intercourse and exchange of ideas was effected by speech in the market place, in the days when the printing and the newspaper were unknown, that it is very difficult for us who gather the news of all the world at our breakfast table and transact the main part of our business by letter or by telephone to realise, for instance, the importance of the agora in the life of a Greek city or of the forum in that of the Roman town."¹ This pregnant remark of Mr. Unwin aptly applies also to the pillared pavilion in the centre, the council-tree, the temple, or the royal palace so conspicuously bossed up in ancient Indian towns. It was their remarkably distinctive characteristic that in the central place of the town or village were grouped the shrine of the presiding deity, the royal house, the court, the council, the quarters of the ministers and the commanders of the army, the treasury and other important public buildings. Though this centralisation of public buildings was the outcome less of any town-planning principle than of the socio-political philosophy and the circumstances that were upperhand at the time, yet their indirect effect upon the plan of the towns or the villages was singularly happy. The effect of public buildings is lost if they are scattered indiscriminately throughout the city. Not only is public life disintegrated in some measure, but dissipation of corporate life and waste of useful time and energy on the part of the citizens are its inevitable consequences. On the other hand, an overzealous desire to concentrate civic life in the heart of the town, causing a sort of atrophy and stagnation in other quarters is too palpably suicidal to require any special comment. Subsidiary centres of public life, ensuring facilities for proper exercise of corporate functions in the different wards, should therefore be provided for in the city. It cannot be gainsaid that the town-plans elaborated in the Silpa Sastras and in the actual illustrations we come across in the old towns existing to this day, as well as in literature studded with pen-pictures of ancient towns, both these principal and secondary centres are found to have been carefully organised. Every Indo-Aryan city comprised many centres and enclosed places; they were their lungs and afforded open spaces of free and pure breathing, relieving the stuffy and congested life of the citizens. The following lines give succinct sketches of some of them.