Town Planning in Ancient India c6.34

c6.34

One of the most potent factors which influenced the amalgamation of several villages into a city or a capital was the political condition of ancient India. When India began to evolve politically beyond its clannish or tribal state and advantages of unity against a common enemy impressed upon the tribes the utility of hegemony under a common chief or sovereign, they made amicable efforts to round off their angularities, and the assimilation of tribal traits due to frequent intercourse hastened the hegemony. Now a clan or tribe was nothing but a family of persons descended from the same primitive stock and hence each had its own village fort. Therefore a natural consequence of consolidation of the tribal system into greater states and kingdoms was the improvement and expansion, gradual and continual, of the Indo-Aryan villages into larger cities or capitals planned in the same way as many wards of a village fitted into a larger whole. Furthermore, an Indian village community, like the Russian communes, is an autonomous political unit exercising all the functions of a state. No change in the overlordship could seriously and permanently perturb the even tenor and harmony of its career. For mutual protection or by force of arms several villages were federated together into a large state and the political organisation thus brought into existence was a democratic institution, each village community forming a unit. A king, hereditary in some cases and elected in others, who lorded over them all, raised the central village or the one most suitably situated into his royal citadel.