The city that Kalaketu built

An inspiring vision and meticulous planning went into the design and construction of the city of Gujarata. Kalaketu, the builder of the city, was a lowly hunter by caste and occupation and one who had mostly lived a life of poverty, envisioned and built the city after receiving a gift from the goddess Candi. He cleared a jungle and built Gujarata there as a city of clay with the aid of such divine mistris as Visvakarma and Hanuman. The city was built in two phases. The first phase saw the building of Kalaketu's great compound (the only self-indulgence we see here), and in the second phase the rest of the city along with all other residential buildings was built. Kalaketu's compound certainly formed the urban core of the city. It had high walls around it, and in the center was a striking palace structure with a stone platform. In the interior of the compound was a tank that had four ghats made out of stone. The central compound also held a temple to Candi, a stone audience-platform, and elaborate gates at the various sides.

The rest of the city was however a great sociological and architectural achievement. Kalaketu invited people from all castes, creeds and religions of his time to come and settle in Gujarata. People flocked from everywhere, people of all varieties and all kinds of ideological persuasions. Despite the almost encyclopedic categories of people present in Gujarata, there was a remarkable harmony. Gujarata proved that an ideal city is a civic place where differences are addressed reasonably and amicably, and by catering to the requirements of all community constituencies.

More than 25 Muslim and 60 Hindu groups came to populate the city. There were the Saiyads, Maulanas, Kazis, and Pathans, with ancestral names like Lohani, Lodani, and Surayani. Among the various occupations, there were jolas, seller of pithas the Pitharis, fish sellers called Kabaris, Hajams and Tirakars, paper makers the Kagajis, the Darjis, cloth dyers the Rangrej, and the Kasais. Among the Hindus, there were the Brahmans of various kinds, the Catuti, the Mukhati, the Bandya, the Kanjilala and the Ganguli, and, of course, there were the Senguptas, Dasas, Dattas, Karas, as well as the Kayasthas, Baniks and Gopas. There were the Baidyas who administered drugs, the astrologers and heads of low caste priests, the Varna-vipras. The Tantubayas wove silk fabrics, and the Malis made beautiful garlands while the Gandhabeniyas sold perfumes and incenses. There was also space in the city for the wandering Kalandars, the matted hair Kapali Sannyasis, and the chanting, swaying Vaisnavas. What made this a rather happy urban and social ensemble is that Kalaketu gave members of each caste grants of land and constructed the dwellings for them. That is how the writer Mukundrama describes the social planning of the city.

Each group lived in a separate neighborhood and engaged in one or more specialised occupations. Even though there was a hierarchy in the social composition there was also interdependency. Besides the dwellings, places of religious assembly were built for different communities, for example, a mosque for the Muslims, and a temple each for the followers of Visnu, Durga, and Siva. As the description goes: "In the middle of the courtyard of the town he built a temple of Siva, a shelter for the unprotected, and a feeding establishment. He set up a long hall for travelers there and a gathering place for guests. To the west he erected a Muslim prayer-hall, and a mosque in various shapes. He built a cooking-hall there which was prosperous and artful; and in it Muslim women and serving-girls cooked." There were ample market centers, and resting places for visitors as well as shelters for the very poor. Artificial tanks supplied water to the city, all of which were indicative of a highly attuned civic consciousness.

What really can we make of this fabulous story about the making of an ideal town in 16th century Bengal? The idealisation of cities is a window to how cities are framed, how a social matrix is formed for the design and planning of a city is also the creation of social space. One could see in the Candi-mangal a quasi-theory of cities, that even in a literary form people of that time considered the ideals of a Bengali urbanism. The narrative tells us that a city is planned and built following a vision, and such an ideal city is a civic place catering to the widest possible citizenry. Such a narration of an idealised environment as Kalaketu's city is part and parcel of the mangal-kavya genre. It doesn't matter if the place is idealized for "those who populate the mangalas live in a world where passage between real and the ideal is possible."

Still, the particular story of the Candi-mangal leaves us with a few questions to ponder about. Why would a poor lowly hunter as Kalaketu, instead of squandering off his new found wealth in the established capitals or living a life of eternal leisure in his rustic abode, spend it on creating a newly planned city? What does it say about him? What does it say about the literary intention of the writer Mukundarama Cakravarti? What does it say about the literary and urban imagination of that time?

As the late Edward Dimock, renowned Bengal scholar at the University of Chicago, who with Ronald Inden translated and analysed the text, explain, Gujarata is not a "real" town; it is the "realistic ideal" of a town. It is both physical and metaphysical, and sometimes it is difficult to tell the difference between the two, and yet for us, the narration gives us an indication of the urban social imagination of the time, of both the requirement of a civic purpose of a city as well as a communitarian harmony needed in a condition of social plurality.

Dimock also argues that the ideal life for a Bengali of means in the 16th century lay neither in the village nor in the major capitals, the so-called principal cities, for example, or the metropolis, so to speak, such as Dhaka, Murshidabad, or Lakhnauti, but in the urban center of a man's own local domain (which is neither a village nor a town). That is why Kalaketu did not go off into the major cities of his time to spend his wealth in a self-indulgent or reckless way but invested it in a meaningful manner, in a material, social and spiritual sense, by building communities.

Kazi Khaleed Ashraf, an architect and writer, currently teaches at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu.