The Peripheral Spaces of Ancient Indian Cities: Villages, Viharas, and Cremation Grounds

When we picture an ancient Indian city like Pataliputra or Ujjain, we usually imagine the busy centre: the king’s palace, the marketplace, temples, and the orderly streets running between them. But the city did not simply end at its walls. Just beyond the fortified boundary lay a whole world of spaces that were equally important to urban life, even though they sat at the margins. Cremation grounds, settlements of those pushed to the social edges, sprawling Buddhist and Jain monasteries, and lush pleasure gardens all occupied this peripheral zone. These places tell us as much about how ancient society thought about purity, death, learning, and leisure as the grand monuments at the centre. Understanding the periphery is essential to understanding the city itself.

Conceptualising the urban periphery 🔗

Ancient Indian texts on town planning did not treat the city as a single uniform block. They drew careful distinctions between what belonged inside the walls and what had to be kept outside. The classical treatises on architecture and statecraft, including Kautilya’s Arthashastra and the various Vastu Shastra texts, laid out detailed rules about who lived where and which activities were permitted in which zone. The best residential quarters near the centre were generally reserved for Brahmanas and skilled architects, while groups considered ritually impure were assigned the outermost edges.

This spatial sorting was not random. It reflected a worldview in which certain people, occupations, and events were seen as polluting and therefore needed to be physically separated from the sacred and administrative heart of the settlement. The result was a clear inner-outer logic, where social hierarchy was literally mapped onto geography. The further you moved from the centre, the lower your standing was assumed to be.

Cremation grounds beyond the walls 🔗

The cremation ground, known in Sanskrit as the shmashana, was perhaps the most significant peripheral space. Hindu scriptures gave precise instructions on where it should be located. According to these texts, the cremation ground was to be placed on the outskirts of the village or town, typically near a river or another source of water, with the land sloping away and positioned so that it would not be visible from a distance. Many traditional texts specified the northern or north-western side as the appropriate direction.

The reasoning behind this placement combined the practical and the spiritual. Death was viewed in Hindu philosophy as a transition rather than an end, and the rituals surrounding it carried deep meaning. Yet the act of cremation also carried strong associations with impurity, which is why the space had to be kept at a distance from daily life. Even today, many of these grounds remain segregated, carrying the same social distance and stigma that shaped their location thousands of years ago. The famous Swargadwara at Puri, regarded as one of the most auspicious cremation sites, sits on the shore at the edge of the city, illustrating how these spaces hugged the boundaries of urban settlement.

Settlements of the marginalised 🔗

Alongside the cremation grounds lay the dwellings of communities placed at the bottom of the social order. The town planning texts explicitly directed that the huts of Chandalas and outcaste groups be located in the outer proximity, beyond the protective wall. These communities were often associated with occupations linked to death, waste, and other tasks considered impure, including work at the very cremation grounds described above.

This arrangement reveals an uncomfortable truth about ancient urban planning. The same people whose labour was essential to the functioning of the city, whether in handling the dead or maintaining sanitation, were the ones denied a place within its walls. The temples of fearsome deities such as Chamunda were also placed outside the boundary, suggesting that the periphery was imagined as a zone for everything the orderly centre wished to keep at arm’s length. The geography of the city thus encoded a social message that was impossible to miss.

Viharas and monastic establishments 🔗

Not every peripheral space carried the weight of stigma. Some of the most celebrated institutions of ancient India deliberately chose locations on the outskirts of cities. The Buddhist and Jain viharas, or monasteries, were a defining feature of this peri-urban zone, and they transformed the periphery into a place of learning, reflection, and architectural splendour.

Why monasteries chose the edge 🔗

Viharas began modestly as temporary shelters for wandering monks who needed a place to stay during the rainy season, when travel became difficult. Over time, generous gifts from wealthy lay followers allowed these shelters to grow into permanent residential complexes and eventually into great centres of scholarship. The choice of location was deliberate. A spot on the edge of a city offered monks the quiet and separation they needed for meditation and study, while keeping them close enough to receive alms and teach the urban population.

This balance between seclusion and connection was central to monastic life. The periphery gave monks distance from the noise and distractions of the marketplace without cutting them off entirely from the society that supported them. Town planning texts noted the quarters allotted to Buddhists and Jains, confirming that these religious communities had a recognised, if separate, place in the spatial scheme of the settlement.

From monastery to university 🔗

The grandest expression of this tradition was the mahavihara, or great monastery, formed when clusters of viharas grew together along with their stupas and temples. The most famous example is Nalanda in present-day Bihar, located on the outskirts of the ancient city of Rajagriha. Built under Gupta patronage in the fifth century CE, Nalanda flourished as a renowned centre of learning for several centuries until around 1200 CE.

Excavations at Nalanda have unearthed eleven monasteries and six brick temples arranged neatly across a site spanning roughly twelve hectares. The layout was organised around a central walkway running south to north, with the residential viharas on one side and the temples on the other. Students came from across Asia to study Buddhist scriptures and other subjects, and the teachings that spread from here reached China and Tibet. Nalanda shows how a space at the margin of a city could become a beacon of intellectual life recognised across the continent, today honoured as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Recreational and social spaces 🔗

The third major category of peripheral space served pleasure rather than penance or pollution. Just beyond the built-up city lay gardens, parks, and groves that the urban elite used for leisure, festivals, and social gatherings. These green spaces were a celebrated part of refined city life, and they appear again and again in the literature of ancient India.

The pleasure garden in urban life 🔗

Sanskrit literature used several terms for these spaces, including udyana for a park or garden and arama for a place of delight. According to research on gardens in ancient India, these spaces played a particularly significant role in urban life from the Gupta period in the fifth century CE onwards. The elite did not simply admire their gardens from a distance. They used them actively, celebrating festivals, holding social events, and seeking relief from the formality of city life.

The cultivated city dweller, the nagaraka, was expected to take part in garden excursions, an activity referred to as udyanagamanam. Prescriptive texts of the period actually recommended frequent visits to these gardens for people of standing. The pleasure garden grew out of an urban lifestyle that prized sophistication and a certain nostalgia for nature, offering a curated version of the wilderness just outside the city gates.

Gardens, courts, and culture 🔗

Pleasure gardens were closely tied to royal and courtly life. A well-appointed garden with lotus pools was considered a mark of a true king, and rulers sometimes used these spaces to hold discussions on matters of state away from the formal setting of the court. The image of the garden runs through some of the greatest works of Sanskrit literature, including Kalidasa’s celebrated play Shakuntala, which features a pleasure garden as part of its setting.

What makes these spaces especially interesting is how they connected with the monasteries discussed earlier. The peri-urban gardens, parks, and groves were also linked to religious institutions, and Buddhist sources frequently mention gardens attached to monasteries in the neighbourhood of a city. Such verdant areas drew travelling monks, nobles, and merchants alike, and well-to-do women are recorded as visiting gardens and monasteries on sightseeing excursions. The periphery, in this sense, was not a dead zone but a lively belt of activity where the sacred, the social, and the recreational overlapped.

The periphery as a mirror of the city 🔗

Taken together, these peripheral spaces reveal the full character of the ancient Indian city. The cremation ground and the outcaste settlement expressed anxieties about death and purity. The vihara expressed the value placed on learning and spiritual discipline. The pleasure garden expressed the refined tastes and social ambitions of the urban elite. Each of these zones existed because the centre defined itself against them, pushing certain functions outward while drawing benefit from all of them.

This pattern is not entirely a thing of the past. Modern cities still place certain functions, from crematoriums to waste facilities, at their edges, and still cluster places of learning and leisure in distinct zones. Looking at the ancient periphery helps us see that the way a city organises its margins is never neutral. It always tells a story about what that society values and what it would rather keep out of sight.

What do you think? Do the spatial divisions of the ancient Indian city, with its careful sorting of people and activities into centre and periphery, still echo in the way modern Indian cities are organised today? And if the periphery once held both the most stigmatised spaces and the most celebrated centres of learning, what does that tell us about how societies decide which functions belong at the margins?

References

1. https://www.wisdomlib.org/hinduism/book/vastu-shastra-indian-architecture/d/doc1112514.html
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shmashana
3. https://www.britannica.com/topic/vihara
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda_mahavihara
5. https://www.culturalindia.net/monuments/nalanda.html
6. https://scroll.in/article/1012939/gardens-in-india-have-surprisingly-ancient-and-sprawling-roots
7. https://www.degruyter.com/database/URBREL/entry/urbrel.28602859/html