Town Planning in Ancient India c8.71

c8.71

Having dealt with the general character of fortifications, I shall now dwell upon the walls in fuller details. Even where Nature offered sufficient defence, these walls were, on rare occasions, thought unnecessary. In connection with the artificial forts the erection of ramparts and parapets were essential and the Indian town-planners were emphatic upon the point. Thus we find in the Devī Purāṇa:—“The construction of brick-built walls is indispensable in artificial forts.”⁵ The ancient towns of Ayodhyā, Mathurā, Pāṭaliputra, to cite only a few instances, were encompassed by walls. That this is not a fine product of the fertile brain of the highly imaginative Aryan poets is borne out by the fact that Tamil authors also make copious references to them in their treatises. Thus, “Madurā (the capital of the Pāṇḍyas) was a fortified city.”¹ Megasthenes, in his travels, also describes the timber walls of Pāṭaliputra. Some of them, *e.g.*, Ahemdabad, Delhi, retain to this day remnants in debris of their ancient circumvallation. Similarly travellers come across many towns or villages in Southern India which retain traces of their ruined walls and battlements. Firstly, mud dug out of the ditches is heaped on their banks so as to make a kuccha (mud-built) dyke round the city. The pucca wall is raised upon this ‘vapra’² (rampart). Thus the Matsya Purāṇa lays down :³—“The forts should have ditches, girt with ramparts surmounted by towers on the walls.” The town of Mathurā was ‘chayāṭṭālaka keyūrah’, that is, ‘decorated with ramparts and turrets on them.’⁴ Kauṭilya furnishes us with fuller details about this rampart : “At a distance of four daṇḍas (24 ft.) from the (innermost) ditch, a rampart six daṇḍas high and twice as much broad shall be erected by heaping mud upwards and by making it square at the bottom, oval at the centre pressed by the trampling of elephants and bulls, and planted with thorny and poisonous plants in bushes. Fissures in the rampart shall be filled up with fresh earth."¹