Vastu-shastra (2): Town Planning

by D. N. Shukla | 1960 | 29,408 words | ISBN-10: 8121506115 | ISBN-13: 9788121506113

This page describes Beautification (b): Gardens, etc. of the study on Vastu-Shastra (Indian architecture) second part (Town planning). It discusses the construction and planning of various types of villages, roads, forts and towns in ancient India. References to Vastu-shastra include the Samarangana-sutradhara.

Beautification (b): Gardens, etc.

There are only two or three stray references regarding this topic in the text which fully give hint that the towns of old, and more especially those belonging to the medieval period when Mālava King, Raja Bhoja, was ruling, were full of gardens, parks, pools, tanks and public places. The directions as given in the text for the planning of Temples expressedly mention the laying out of the gardens (Chapter X. 110). These towns were so planned out as to allot suitable places, more especially in the intervals of the different localities, to open places for fresh air and plenty of sun-shine. The modern gardens, parks, open fields and plantations, characteristic of gardencities used to revolve round the temple, the centre of the communal life in those days, with magnificent maṇḍapas, serving as common halls for debates, discourses, religious sermons and the like and there were rest-houses within the temple compound where all sorts of people could freely congregate together. The temple platforms adjoining some tank or pond and flower orchards were the common public places where the towns-men of old used to sit and discuss the things and evolve state-craft.

Again the Samarāṅgaṇasūtradhāra, in its delineation puon[?] the fortification of the town and the planning out of the gates and gopuras, has specifically mentioned a beautiful belt of gardens surrounding the entire town. This points to the ideal of a garden-city for those days. We have seen that gardens were an essential constituent of a temple establishment in ancient India, but the large parks and gardens were also laid out, in the centre of the town. The green belt of beautiful shrubs along with the moats full of water served the rows of plantation, (Samarāṅgaṇasūtradhāra 10. 22-24) so highly extolled these days.

But apart from these common establishments, the fundamental philosophy in the minds of the Indians which guided them to plant trees was their conception of sanctity and sacredness attached to a number of trees apart from their aesthetic property and sanitary potentialities. The holy Bilva, the shady Baṭa (Banyan), the sublime Kadamba, the Neem, the sacred Aśvattha, the flowering Campaka or Bakula and a host of others, satisfied not only the aesthetic sense of the people but their religious sense also as some of them were regarded as sacred as to be offered worship. The trees were indispensible. They had their sway in every walk of life. The shady Baṭa situated in the centre of a village or a town served as the Council hall Bhoja in his Yukti-Kalpataru directs that a town should be adorned not only with sheds for drinking water (Prapā) tanks (Kāsāra—artificial lotus lakes), shrines and halls but also with gardens and the alike (ibid). It appears that cities in ancient India somewhat partook of the character of our modern garden-cities. The hill surroundings, the rivers, tanks and lakes together with profusion of trees (the gardens) were considered to be an ideal situation for the establishment of a city (Samarāṅgaṇasūtradhāra X. 51).

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