Town Planning in Ancient India c8.1

c8.1

THE characteristic features which distinguish the towns of ancient India from the present day cities and principalities are their strong fortifications by means of circumvallation and ambient trenches. Exactly in a similar way were the ancient Greek or Roman towns, *e.g.*, Florence, Sparta, and Rome, fortified by walls and ditches. This similarity in the art of civics both in the East and the West must have originated in the similar conditions, political and social, obtaining in ancient India as well as in ancient Europe. Politically they were the times of disturbance and topsyturvydom, depredations and pillage with consequent insecurity of life and residence. Hence the ramparts and trenches constituted an integral part of oriental as well as occidental town-planning. They formed the *sine qua non* of Aryan habitation, the very breath of their life and existence; so much so that we scarcely come across a description of any town, nay of a village in ancient India which is silent about them.¹ Indeed originally a town was a fort and a fort was a town, both having been synonymous. In the Vedic literature the word ‘pura’, the modern Sanskrit synonym of a town, was used in the sense of a fort or stronghold.¹ But later on as towns grew in area these fort-towns became obsolete and were supplanted by cities containing forts within them. “ Cities should be established, supported, and protected by one of the six types of forts.”² This clearly shows that, though every city was fortified in ancient India, the city was not in all epochs, co-extensive with the citadel which, in later times and in very many cases, was included within the city or was situated in some special part of it, as in the case of Jeypore, the citadel is located in its north-west corner. That the town was once a fort is further corroborated by the descriptions of Ayodhyā, Laṅkā (Ceylon), Mathurā, Dvārāvatī, Indraprastha, and other cities of ancient India which we come across in the Rāmāyaṇa, the Mahābhārata, or the Purāṇas. Many towns of Rājputanā such as Chitore were nothing but forts. Even a temple had its own girth of walls, the word ‘mandira’ carrying sometimes the same import as the word ‘pura’, the Sanskrit term for a town.