Town Planning in Ancient India c9.25

c9.25

From the above and what follows it is evident that the streets of India were arranged and planted according to what is known as the rectangular chess-board system of street-planning. That is to say that the streets were laid out in parallel rows cutting one another at right angles. Ancient town-planning, whether Greek, Roman, or Indian, has been based on the straight lines and the right angles. This is the most natural method of street-planning that suggested itself to the unsophisticated mind of the Indian civic architect, but this is also the most generally recognised one even in modern times, because the rectangle is most convenient for building block. Sister Nivedita would however trace the origin of this rectangular plan of laying out streets to the predominant occupation of Indians which is agriculture, *i.e.*, labour in the paddy fields. "And certainly in the Indian Jeypore, we have the rectangular plan of the rice fields reproduced with their intersecting paths."¹ I need hardly add that the streets were all straight.²