The Urban Experience: Physical and Sensorial Representations of the City in Early Sanskrit Literature

Representations of cities in Sanskrit literature have long been studied. However, while early scholarly attempts at reading them were somewhat compilatory and credulous rather than going into the deeper semantics of literary portrayal, later historians—and the majority of them—have displayed the opposite approach. They have tended to dismiss textual depictions as idealized and stereotypical rather than possessing anything of value for the urban historian. Rare have been the voices advocating a more sympathetic and literature-sensitive perspective where the strength of these representations is shown to lie in the symbolic realm, yielding a grasp of structure otherwise unavailable to the modern scholar (as Ramanujan advised in The collected essays. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1993), or interpretive approaches that capture the cityness of the city beyond its physical contours (as Chattopadhyaya in Stud Hist 13:181–208, 1997 and Kaul in Imagining the urban: Sanskrit and the city in early India. Permanent Black, Delhi, Seagull, New York, 2010demonstrated). In this chapter, I bring to bear a symbolic reading on the very phenomenology and materiality of the city in early Sanskrit literature. Further, I explore sensorial renditions of the city which flesh out its physical and behavioural dimensions as well. Taken together, in this way, the early Indian urban experience comes alive for modern readers in an unparalleled fashion in all its complexity and vibrance.