Town Planning in Ancient India c16.25

c16.25

The massive architecture of the public buildings and their fascinating details of ornamental decorations bear eloquent testimony to the high level of artistic skill reached by the Indian schools of architecture as also it speaks of the affluent economic condition of the citizens, their happy life and jubilant nature. The Indian town-planners were alive to the importance of the public buildings. They were not constructed in a perfunctory fashion. Their civic utility is too great for such indifferent treatment. Art is nothing if not an expression of culture and a method of inculcating and propagating culture. These public buildings offered therefore one of the most effective means of educating the citizens, training their eyes, inspiring them with religious and national ideals. The bas-reliefs sculptured on the walls, aisles, cornices, corridors, ceilings, capitals, and domes of the public buildings and shrines, also on the colonnaded pillars give pictorial illustrations of the soul-stirring achievements of the religio-national heroes like Rāma, Buddha, Hanumāna, Kṛṣṇa, Viṣṇu, and of other divine or deified heroes. The fresco paintings on the walls exhibited brilliant portraits, group-pictures illustrating scenes depicted in the Epics, the Purāṇas, folk-lore and the like national literature. They blazoned forth and inculcated humanising and ennobling sentiments, in a pleasing manner, all bearing upon religious and national culture. A more pleasing and effective method than the one through art and æsthetics, of disseminating national culture, preserving and encouraging art, emphasising glory and fulness of civic life, cannot be concieved. Cities are thereby turned into great schools of nationalism, in its most liberal and comprehensive sense. India's cities, maṭhas, and caves possess such admirable specimens of sculpture and fresco paintings without number as no other nation does and they will ever continue to excite wonder and admiration of the world.