Town Planning in Ancient India c6.31

c6.31

For efficiency of administration and government, it was necessary to plant fortresses in the midst of villages which were grouped under their jurisdiction and supervision. William the Conqueror of England adopted the same policy of covering his kingdom with a net-work of strongholds in order to subjugate the refractory barons who used frequently to rise up against him. "There shall be a 'sthānīya' (a fortress of that name) in the centre of eight hundred villages, a 'droṇamukha' in the centre of four hundred villages, a ‘kharvaṭika’ in the centre of two hundred villages, and a ‘saṅgrahaṇa’ in the midst of a collection of ten villages.¹ These military outposts favoured the growth of towns about them and the urban tendency was accelerated by the fact that the construction of the Indo-Aryan villages proceeded on the same principle as that of a fortress. The names of the towns Cuttack (Kaṭaka), Sealkot, Nagarkot, Mangalkot speak of their genesis, inasmuch as ‘kaṭak’ or ‘kot’ means a fort. Indeed even an antique house represents a fort in structure. The predominance of defensive character in any sort of human habitation, in ancient India, be it a house, a village, or a town, is as old as the patriarchal rule in the Aryan social evolution. The word ‘gotra’, usually applied to denote a family descended from one of the several patriarchs, originally meant an enclosure for kine and this was the genesis of the Indo-Aryan village or town. Max Müller points out the connection between its etymological and secondary meanings thus: “In ancient times, when most wars were carried on, not to maintain the balance of power of Asia or Europe, but to take possession of good pasture, or to appropriate large herds of cattle; the hurdles grew naturally into the walls of fortresses, the hedges became strongholds; an Anglo-Saxon *tun*, a close (German *zaun*), a town; and those who lived behind the same walls were called a ‘gotra’, a family, a tribe, a race.”¹