Town Planning in Ancient India c7.43

c7.43

The next duty of the master-builder was to fix the area of the city or village, suitable to its requirements. The books of Indo-Aryan town-planning discourse at length upon what may be the possible areas of towns and villages. Of the villages I have treated in a separate chapter and here I consider only the areas of the towns as laid down in them. The Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa suggests that the natural fort should be eight yojanas (1 yojana = 8 × 1,000 × 17½ cubits) long and four yojanas broad.¹ According to Bhoja, the royal capital should be so many ‘rājakṣetra’ square (1 rājakṣetra = 10 × 10 × 10 × 10 × 10 × 10 × 10 × 10 × 10 cubits, here one cubit = length of the fore-arm of the particular king) as denoted by the number of the particular moment (lagna) in which the king for whom the capital was going to be built was born. Thus if a king is born at a quarter to the fourth daṇḍa when the Meṣa constellation (Aries) is ascendant, the area of his capital should be four rājakṣetras square. The astrological significance of this peculiar standard of measuring the area is explained to be that a king soon dies who lives in a town laid out in measurement with the number denoting the period of lagna pertaining to another king’s birth or in a city constructed by a different king.² The Agni Purāṇa, on the other hand, has that the town should extend over eight or four miles square.³ Mayamuni’s detailed statements of the city area are different in different places of his book. The length of one side of a town, in his opinion, may range from 1,000 daṇḍas (1 daṇḍa = 6 ft.) and the circumference of a town may measure four ways, varying from 2,000 to 8,000 daṇḍas, the common difference being 2,000 daṇḍas. In a different calculation he gives 768, 704, and 640 daṇḍas as the three lateral measurements respectively of good, mediocre and bad forts,¹ while the sides of the same three varieties of a town are 832, 896, 962 daṇḍas long. It is to be noted here that in both cases the common difference is 64 and the difference between the lengths of corresponding kinds of a fort and a town is also the same. Again a fort or a town may be of nine different measurements, the common difference being 16. The length may be 2, 1¾, 1½, 1¼, 1⅛, 1⅙, or 1 times the breadth measured as above, or it may be as much in extent as may be desirable. Yet in another chapter he would divide towns into 78 kinds according to the lengths of a side ranging from 300 to 8,000 daṇḍas by a common addition of 100 daṇḍas. Furthermore he has innumerable townships measuring from 100 to 3,000 daṇḍas by a common addition of 10 (or 100 according to a different reading) daṇḍas. The circumference of a splendid town, he further goes on, varies 25 times from 1,600 to 4,000 daṇḍas by a common addition of 500 daṇḍas. The ratio of the other sides to these is the same as laid down above.¹ Naturally these arbitrary measurements were not strictly adhered to in practice, but the measurements were varied enough to afford the master-builder ample scope for adjusting them to necessities of space and population. Indeed the conflict of measurements given for some known towns with those laid down above goes to confirm the foregoing view. Thus we find in the Rāmāyaṇa that the town of Ayodhyā was twelve yojanas in length and three yojanas in breadth and from the Harivaṃśa we come to learn that the extended and reconstructed city of Dvārakā was 12 by 8 yojanas in area.