Town Planning in Ancient India c6.12

c6.12

I must confess that the meaning of the foregoing proposition is not quite clear. The instancing of Calcutta is surely not happy, for Calcutta was the outcome of deliberate efforts of the East India Company. It is true no doubt that many towns were established by agglutinating several adjoining villages. But Sir Henry Maine seems to be considering the unconscious growth of villages into towns. If so, then he has partially failed to indicate the motive power that worked from within to 'civilise' the rural areas. Residential villages can by no means develop, of their own accord, into towns, for they lack the centrifugal impetus. In the United Provinces and the Punjab it is still to be observed that a village is only a hamlet, called ‘muhallā’, a juxtaposition of several huts surrounded by a wall. Round about it is the vast expanse of paddy field. It is impossible for such a hamlet to develop into a town. It is the market places surrounded by many such hamlets,—(for it is natural that hamlets should be laid out in the vicinity of a market for the many advantages which it affords or that many hamlets should organise a market in their centre)—that were the Indian towns in embryo. The word ‘vahū-grāmīya-vyavahāra-sthānam’ clearly establishes it. The ancient renowned town of Saptagrāma, (literally, a town consisting of seven villages), was an important emporium where merchants from remote realms gathered together for traffic. The small subdivisional towns are only expansions of the original markets (hāts or bāzārs) as the names of Cox’s Bazar in Chittagong, Bagerhāt in Khulna, Rampurhāt in Birbhum unquestionably point out. It is to be noticed that it is the markets where distinctive characteristics of town life are more or less evident and which accentuate civic tendencies. It is significant that in very many towns the ‘sāhāganj’ or the general market is located in the centre.