Town Planning in Ancient India c9.28

c9.28

A remarkable feature of the towns of ancient India was the big boulevard circumscribing the city within its walls. This is the concomitant consequence of circumvallation and was common to all old towns, Indian or European, for example, the cities of Sparta and Athens. One other peculiarity is that the canonical books of the Hindu city-builders called the Śilpa Śāstras are emphatic against any structure or vāstu pointing towards the diagonal corners of the heavens. Hence all the streets ran straight from east to west and north to south. This is as it should have been, as it has been pointed out in another chapter that the contours of the city were laid out axially to the cardinal directions. Even in very ancient times, we find these directions were acted up to as illustrated in the city of Dvārāvatī which had eight large highways crossing each other at right angles, girdled round by another. Even in recent ages the city of Jeypore was laid out after a similar scheme, by a Bengali Brāhmaṇ, Vidyādhar Bhaṭṭāchāryya. The plan was quite scientific and was drawn after the traditions of the Hindu city-builders. It is a chess-board plan similar to what is technically known as ‘prastara’. The main streets of the city run approximately from east to west and north to south.