ABSTRACT
Various kinds of towns and cities have sprung up in the Indian subcontinent since the earliest times. But the history of urban settlement in India is not continuous, leaving gaps in chronology. The mid-seventeenth-century French traveller Francois Bernier had termed the Indian cities as nothing but military outposts that was partly repeated by Max Weber in later years although he had conceded that there were administrative towns in pre-British India. The Indian historians today hold a different opinion but proper analysis of such towns of medieval India is yet to be seen. In this monograph an attempt is made to survey the important towns and cities in different parts of the Indian subcontinent in both the Sultanate and the Mughal periods, starting from approximately Ad 1200 till Ad 1765 when the English got the Diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa from the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam II. At one point of time in recent past it has been asserted, obviously to show the superiority of the Western European civilization, that India was an agglomeration of villages. This is obviously an inaccurate estimate. In recent years India has more than twelve thousand urban settlements each containing more than five thousand people. From that point of view the Indian civilization is the largest civilization dependent on urban settlements. The number of people living in urban settlements in India is far more than the people living in the towns of America. In 1981 the number of small and big towns in India was more than three thousand. Unfortunately there has been very little work on the urban settlements in India despite its glorious past. There had been some publications earlier on urban settlements at the initiative of the Urban Association of India; it has practically stopped working in recent years.
