Town Planning in Ancient India c6.7

c6.7

It should be noticed that the origin of those towns which grew independently of any deliberate planning from the beginning, can be traced to a house, a temple, a village (if it contains a market or a manufactory), or a market and to natural advantages of the locality such as an island, a river-bend, a sea-coast, a mountain valley and the like. A house, rather a patriarchal family, is the nucleus round which developed a village as the word ‘ekabhogam’ (denoting a village exclusively inhabited by a single patriarch with his family and retinue) clearly demonstrates.¹ The ‘pārās’ of Bengal, e.g., the ‘pārās’ of the Ghoses, the ‘pārās’ of the Dattas, of the Banerjees, or Mukherjees of a modern complex village, which are genealogically derived from the same patriarch, are nothing short of a village-unit. A modern village is nothing but a conglomeration of such units of different ‘gotras’ or primitive stocks. Similarly an Indo-Aryan city was a market-village grown to greatness. It consisted of several villages or wards, each ward being set apart for a single community exactly like a ‘pārā’ in a village. Like their western counterparts which “were originally nothing more than the township-mark of a Teutonic village-community”, the large majority of Indian towns had their origin in villages. This is corroborated by the different grades of respective measurements of a town and of a village.² It will be observed that some grades of city-area more or less tally with the highest grades of a village-area. It goes to prove that