Administrative System of the Marathas c23.s4.6

c23.s4.6

Raigad was capital of the Maratha kingdom for sixteen years only and had to stand a siege of eleven days in 1818, when many of the houses and public buildings were badly damaged. Since then it has been suffered to fall into ruins and to-day it is deemed quite uninhabitable. But still there is no scarcity of ponds and cisterns in the ruined city, two of which, the Ganga Sagar and the Kushavarta tank, are fairly large. This naturally reminds one of Shukracharya's injunction that the capital "must ever be provided with wells, tanks and pools."[5] It is not easy to establish the identity of all the ruined buildings, but in the map published in the Bombay Gazetteer[6] we find that the ministers' quarters and the bazar were situated to the north-east, there were two store-houses to the south and the south-east, and the Mahadeva temple stood far to the north of the palace and around the temple were the dancing girls' quarters. Within two hundred yards of the Rang Mahal or palace of pleasure, to the north of it, stood the citadel and the powder magazines were built near the Shrigonda point to the east. To the north-west of the palaces were the elephant-stables. According to Shukra, "houses should be built towards the west for cows, deer, camels, elephants and other animals"[7] "Dwelling houses for ministers, clerks, members of the council and officers should be built separately to the north or east. Leaving a space of 100 cubits towards the north and 200 cubits towards the east of the palace, military cantonments are to be laid out."[8] Kautilya observes that "royal teachers, priests, sacrificial place, water reservoir and ministers shall occupy sites east by north to the palace; to the north by west shops and hospitals; to the north the royal tutelary deity of the city.¹⁷⁹ It is not easy to dismiss this resemblance as a chance coincidence. The more logical inference is that these conventional rules of town-planning have been transmitted from generation to generation, and the plan of Raigad had been evolved from one that was in fashion in Northern India more than three centuries before Christ.