Town Planning in Ancient India c7.4

c7.4

The capital of a kingdom was as far as possible centrally situated.¹ Kauṭilya, consistently with his Machiavellian, autocratic, and imperialistic views, inculcates the necessity of a ‘sthānīya’ (a fortress of the same 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 ‘samgrahaṇa’ in the midst of a group of ten villages. The sites of villages or towns were carefully chosen according to principles, ritualistic and sanitary, preserved in the traditions of the Indo-Aryan master-builders as well as laid down in their treatises.² The bank of a river or a sea-shore, the site of a lake or big tank were the most favoured and generally accepted places, so that ample bathing facilities were easily accessible. With the Hindus ablution itself is a religious rite and is an indispensable preliminary to any religious function or observance and sacrificial rites. The Devas, literally ‘shining ones’, who were the guardian deities of the Aryan people loved the places that by nature or artifice were provided with limpid water and pleasant gardens. We can cite the ancient town of Kajuraha as an instance of a town set up round a big tank. The ruins of the town can still be seen eighty-five miles to the south of the station Harapalpore on the combined lines of the G.I.P. and E.I.R. running from Jhansi to Manickpore. With the local people it still passes for a holy place of pilgrimage and they call it a ‘puri’ or holy city. In the heart of the ruined town lies the great tank, paved with stones along its two embankments, and by the side of the tank stands the royal palace with its back against a series of temples. The site of Udaypur, eventually the capital of the Rānās of Mewar, was first selected by the vanquished Rānā Uday Sing for his place of retreat and hiding because of its seclusion. But the site had this outstanding merit that it lay on the bank of that magnificent lake, Udaysāgar, which the Rānā had previously constructed after his name. It is superfluous to remark here that commercial emporiums and holy cities that owed their origins to accidents of physiography or geology, or to religious traditions, or to the sanctuary of some renowned hermit, could not be laid out on a premeditated plan with reference to the extent and symmetry of the kingdom. Their natural growth precluded any idea of deliberate planning from the very beginning. Nevertheless the town-planning traditions and instincts of the people endowed them, at various stages of their development, with certain features which stamped them with unmistakable Indo-Aryan character. When, at any intermediate stage of its growth, a town was chosen as the headquarters of a king's representative, then it is very likely that it subsequently received a conscious planning.