English: The Manasara – also called Manasa – is one of many surviving treatises on Hindu architecture and sculpture. The text consists of 10000 lines, and discusses a wide range of architectural topics, with many sections on Hindu temples. The text discusses the qualifications of an architect and the construction team, soil testing and preparation methods, design proportions and guidelines, and civil construction. The text includes infrastructure for public services such as water tanks, wells, gardens, markets and others. Sections are dedicated to many plans of village, town and city layout and recommends one of forty plans depending on the terrain and resources available (four examples shown above), with a temple or a public assembly hall at the center of the settlement.

Finalized by about 700 CE, many manuscripts of this text have been found in different parts of India. The Thanjavur manuscript was translated by Prassana Acharya, with a summary published in 1917. Before this translation, it had attracted the attention of British scholars such as E.B Havell and of Indian scholars such as Ram Raz. The latter published drawings of town and village plans in 1834, which were revised by Havell in 1910.

The traditional Hindu architectural principles for town planning emphasizes directional alignment and symmetry, favoring human settlements that face the sunrise and streets that allow movement of the natural seasonal wind patterns. According to Havell, the forty plans in Mansara cover settlements from 4000 square feet to 30 square miles, of which one third was ideally for homes and public buildings, while the rest was for gardens, farms, water, streets and other infrastructure.

The image above illustrates the padmaka (lotus) and the nandyavarta (abode of happiness, a swastika variant) layouts for town planning. The images are derived from these public domain sources:

1. Ram Raz (1834), Essay on the Architecture of the Hindus, The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (Harvard College Library archives).

2. E.B. Havell (1915 edition), The Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India: A Study pf Indo-Aryan Civilisation, John Murray, London.

3. P.K. Acharya (1915), Summary of the Manasara, Manasara Series, Oxford University Press, London