Town Planning in Ancient India c3.3

c3.3

Rather, this is the utmost that we may do to them in return for the inestimable services which they have thereby rendered to us simply out of love. I do not know whether I shall be instrumental to adulterating and profaning its religious sanctity and obligatoriness when I make bold to interpret this scriptural injunction as an essentially Hindu method of preserving the lore and culture of the ancient savant seers and providing for their transmission to posterity, perpetuation and promulgation. It is the bounden duty, therefore, of every Indian, specially of a Hindu, to rescue from oblivion, from the ravages of time and tyrants, the sciences which our ancesters, thousand years ago, knew, the culture which they evolved, the practices which they observed, and the achievements which they made in the social and political fields. We must know and spread what they knew and thought, said and wrote, attained and accomplished. It is by such action that we shall be able to discharge ourselves in some measure from obligations to them and prove ourselves as their worthy descendants. We shall be justified in declaring ourselves as their true heirs not as much by pointing to the movables and immovables inherited as pre-eminently by our acquisition and realisation in life of their culture and wisdom which constitutes our true heritage and patrimony. It is by *kshema* (preservation and consolidation of what one possesses) that India can be qualified for *yoga* (fresh acquisition). Her glorious Past must be resuscitated and rehabilitated in her Present that a far more glorious Future may blossom out of it. Thus will her life be flowing, undammed and unchoked, rupturously from times immemorial to æons immortal. It is this spirit which has always inspired this humble worker in his exploration into a hitherto neglected field of Indian Śilpa, some results of which he has essayed to shapen, systematise, and embody in the following pages.