History of Kanauj to the Moslem Conquest c12.s6.1

c12.s6.1

The prosperity and importance of Kanauj, so well begun during the time of the Maukharis, grew tremendously under Harṣa; and it now easily became the premier city of Northern India supplanting Pāṭaliputra, the older centre, through which the main currents of political life had flowed since the days of the Buddha. To the observant eyes of a foreigner it must have appeared as a great cosmopolitan town, whose inhabitants were equally divided between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. There were one hundred Buddhist monasteries with more than 10,000 brethren who were students of both the “Vehicles.” The Deva-temples amounted to more than two hundred, and the non-Buddhists were several thousands in number.³ The town itself had grown to enormous proportions. With the river Ganges flowing down its western base Kanauj was above twenty *li* in length and four or five *li* in breadth (i.e., about five miles long and 1¼ miles broad). According to the traditional practice the city was very strongly defended by quadrangular walls, broad and high, and had lofty structures everywhere. "There were beautiful gardens and tanks of clear water, and in it rarities from strange lands were collected".¹ Yuan Chwang is silent regarding further details of the appearance of the metropolis, but the following general description of the system of town-planning then in vogue may be of some interest in this connection: "The thoroughfares are narrow tortuous passages. The shops are on the highways and booths (or, inns) line the roads. Butchers, fishermen, public performers, executioners, and scavengers have their habitations marked by a distinguishing sign. They are forced to live outside the city and they sneak along on the left when going about in the hamlets".² Thus people following certain occupations were segregated, and these regulations must have doubtless been galling to them. As to the construction of houses in Kanauj, we must here refer to the general character of Indian buildings described by Yuan Chwang. "Their halls and terraced belvederes have wooden flatroofed rooms, and are coated with *chunam*, and covered with tiles burnt or unburnt. They are of extraordinary height." But the more modest dwellings "thatched with coarse or common grass are of bricks or boards; their walls are ornamented with *chunam*; the floor is purified with cow-dung and strewn with flowers of the season."³ They were onthe whole comfortable and simple, or in the words of Yuan Chwang “sumptuous inside and economical outside.” The houses of the rich were probably decorated and whitewashed on ceremonious occasions. Bāṇa at any rate informs us that at the time of Rājyaśrī’s marriage painters “painted auspicious scenes” and workmen “mounted on ladders, with brushes upheld in their hands and plaster pails on their shoulders, whitened the top of the street wall of the palace”¹ at Thanesvar.