Handbook entitled Urban History for Early India

ABOUT THE BOOK

This book addresses issues around urban growth in early India. It provides theoretical and empirical insights from the perspective of the different regions of the subcontinent using various sources. The book chapters discuss how early urban forms evolved, transformed, and survived on the subcontinent, beginning with the third millennium BCE. It also looks at how urban space gradually emerged in borderland areas of the subcontinent and hill areas, which throw up relevant issues and questions of how we need to review elements of what we define as ‘urban’. It includes chapters on both the early historic and early medieval periods. The book covers themes such as the Indus Valley civilization, the rise of cities in the Ganges valley, the cultural setting of the multi-ethnic and multi-lingual Kushan cities, the dynamic of the growth of cities in the ancient Tamilakam, theories of urbanization and archaeological and epigraphic material reflecting on the first cities in different regions of the subcontinent.