Indian Cities: Ancient and Medieval

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Did You Know? The urban population during Akbar's rule had exceeded the urban population of the entire Europe of that time!

By 1500 CE, the city of Hampi was the world's second-largest medieval-era city after Beijing.

Dholavira, the Harappan desert city, adopted highly advanced hydraulic engineering in order to maintain the same standards of living as was seen in other Harappan cities.

This Quick and Concise reference explores the beginning of urbanization in India and its advancement in science, technology, architecture, town planning, economics, art and culture in the ancient and medieval periods.

Indian Cities throws light on the political history of old cities-both lost and extant - including invasions by foreign powers or by neighbouring states. The intriguing comparisons between cities helps put information in context and makes it easy to access. Timelines and visuals further the charm of this classic reference.

Raghavan Srinivasan is a chemical engineer (Madras University) and an MBA from McMaster University, Canada. He currently works as a development professional and has written a number of articles for print and online newspapers as well as international journals. He co-edits an online magazine called Ghadar Jari Hai. Raghavan is passionate about various aspects of Indian history and writes regularly on the same. His published books include Rajaraja Chloe and Yugantar.

This reference book is written for those who are generally interested in India's history, her polity, art, architecture, literature, and other aspects but who don't have a full appreciation of her ancient and medieval cities.

To deep dive into all the Indian cities of importance spread over a period of five thousand years, with a huge geography and multiple cultures of sub continental proportions, is impossible in the limited pages of this book. Therefore, some sort of selection is inevitable. The cities that have been chosen in this book are representative of all periods of Indian history from the Harappan Civilization to the late medieval period. Care has also been taken to represent as many dynasties, geographies, and cultures as possible so that the reader can savour this splendid heritage.

The urbanization process, the emergence of cities, started very early in the Indian subcontinent. The easiest way to present the story of these cities would have been to select twenty or thirty of the more important ones and deal with them as independent entities. Such a presentation has been attempted before. But besides lacking a presentation style, such a narrative would leave out important aspects of connections between these cities, such as geography, empires, culture, polity, and technology.

The narrative in this book groups major cities according to historical periods in which they thrived and also weaves into the narrative common elements of comparison, such as size, architectural features, technology, metallurgy, writing, food surpluses, transport, trade, relationship between cities, and their hinterlands, cultural complexity, social stratification, literature, agricultural surplus, political control, military organization, religious views, schools of thought, communication and exchange, and so on. Some of the cities which straddled many historical periods, such as Pataliputra and Madurai, have been covered in a particular period where they reached their peak and cross-referenced in others.

With this perspective in mind, we have presented twenty-five cities in this publication. Each section comes with an introductory note which enlightens the reader on the specific features of that period and about the basis for the selection of cities in that section.