Chaos By Design: Why Indian Cities Need A Civilisational Reboot

In the early hours of a languid summer morning, just before the first jasmine seller takes to the streets and while a low mist still lingers over the river Vegavathy, the temple city of Kanchipuram begins to hum. Not with the dull thrum of traffic, but with the echo of chants and the rustle of a town rising to meet its deity at the revered Kamakshi Amman Temple. Around the temple, the city unfurls like a quintessential kanjivaram sari, pleated in concentric streets and draped in rhythm and purpose.

This is not urban planning in the Western sense. It is a uniquely Indian performance, wizened by tradition, and seeped in the grammar of rich wisdom found in the shilpa and vaastu shastras.

In the national imagination today, a modern city evokes images of gleaming glass towers, post-facto zoning, and transit-oriented development, among other things. We consistently seek inspiration in the sterile suburbs of America or the hyper-planned grids of Chengdu. This, unfortunately, results in a cityscape that is modern yet soulless.

In our anxiety to imitate the megacities of the world, we sometimes forget that India has already built some of the world’s most intelligent urban cities: our ancient temple towns.

From Thanjavur to Varanasi, India’s civilisational genius for urban design lies hidden in plain sight. These temple towns were not merely religious hubs. Far from it. They were thriving centres of commerce, culture, governance, urban life, and ecology, designed to integrate the sacred with the civic.

If India is to build cities that are truly modern, it must look inward to its own cultural grammar and marry it with the best modern practices.

Sacred geometry: the cosmic code of Indian cities

In classical Indian urban planning, our ancient cities were an expression of cosmology, a unique space where geography, civil engineering, architecture, and metaphysics intertwined.

One of the most important models of ancient city planning in India was the vaastu-purusha-mandala design. In India, the application of this is best seen in Jaipur and Madurai. Jaipur was designed by Maharaja Jai Singh II, laid out on a nine-square grid (representing the navagrahas), and each of these nine squares represented a distinct civic function.

Similarly, in Madurai, the Meenakshi Amman Temple stood not only as a spiritual centre but as the fulcrum of municipal planning. Streets radiated outward in concentric squares. Each street had a designated function, jewellers in one and flower sellers elsewhere.

These designs also find resonance in the sacred symmetry of Sarnath and the axial sanctity of Anandpur Sahib. Across traditions, India’s cities were designed in a similar fashion.

Contrast these with the 21st-century Indian city, such as Gurugram or Navi Mumbai. Perennially choked and suffering from crippling dysfunction, the urban practices are driven by speculative real estate and shrinking public spaces. The modern city, very quickly, devolves into a scattered collage of malls, ill-planned colonies, slums, and traffic snarls.

Even Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh, hailed as the city of the future, fails the test. It is geometrically kosher but spiritually void. Corbusier simply transposed a brutalist version of Paris force-fitted to India.

Instead of urban centres with anonymous sectors, we can and should focus on clusters of neighbourhoods, each acting as a mini-town. Each cluster can have its place of worship, local civic amenities, an eminently walkable market, and mixed-income housing. Such a polycentric model will avoid the tyranny of the ubiquitous central business district and restore metaphysical coherence to our urban sprawls.

Once upon a time, water bodies were central to city design. They had a multitude of roles, from recharging aquifers to anchoring seasonal festivals. Take, for instance, the baolis and vavs of Delhi and Gujarat. They are not just functional structures but marvels aimed at water conservation.

Tree cover was based on native species and waste management, due to its ritual dimensions, was done scientifically. Modern India, in contrast, has bulldozed its wetlands, turned its rivers into putrid nallahs, lakes into parking lots, and replaced tree cover under the guise of expansion.

In the age of climate change, restoring traditional ecology must be the core urban strategy. The Delhi Jal Board’s ambitious plan to revive the over 600 defunct water bodies in Delhi, or the incorporation of sustainable ecology in the planning of the Amravati city in Andhra Pradesh, shows that modern urban planners are aware and alive to the need for embedding the environment within the framework of anodyne urban planning.

While ecology anchored the city’s pulse, it was architecture that gave it soul. The architectural language of these temple towns was based on climate appropriateness, values, proportion, materiality, and symbolic resonance. India’s towns were designed to uplift and had but one aim: to awaken the rasa of life.

The cities were designed not by unimaginative public works departments or by foreign consultants, but by artisans embedded in local traditions.

India must rediscover its vernacular design language. From sloped roofs in Kerala to jaalis in Rajasthan, from arches and domes to the use of airy spaces, modernity must mean culturally coherent design, not the oppressive uniformity engendered by the overuse of glass and chrome.

Further, replacing run-of-the-mill visual clutter with Indic facades and requiring public buildings to include regional art forms will make every street an invitation to pause and take in the beauty. For example, the wonderful use of Warli paintings in and around Janpath (Delhi) has transformed the area from a mere flea market to an avant-garde one.

At the end, cities are not just brick and mortar, but their people. Temple towns thrived because they empowered local communities. Traders, musicians, dancers, priests, masons, and poets all thrived around temples.

Varanasi gave us the mellifluous dulcets of Hindustani classical, Mathura animated the Krishna tradition, and Ujjain (Avanti) became an important trading hub on the dakshina-patha.

Civilisational urbanism thrived on subsidiarity. In today’s India, this would mean focusing on decentralising governance to the ULBs, giving RWAs and local institutions greater fiscal autonomy, empowering cultural trusts like the Shriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra (SBKK), and reviving artisan-led manufacturing alongside heritage-linked livelihoods.

Silent symphonies: from Kumbh to Kyoto

However attractive this vision may be, it faces one serious and intractable practical problem — the issue of scale. Ancient towns housed thousands, while modern cities like Mumbai or Delhi teem with millions. Shastra-based layouts were perfect for compact settlements but seem ill-suited to the dizzying verticality and extent of the 21st-century city.

The solution lies not in replication but in modular adaptation.

In India, perhaps the best embodiment of this idea is the Kumbh Mela. For a few weeks, an entire city springs forth. It has everything: proper roads, sewage networks, tented townships, security outposts, kiosks, and thousands of toilets. It is also the ultimate counter-argument to those who say sacred urbanism cannot scale.

The city operates on the ancient principle of the vaastu-purusha-mandala. There are clearly demarcated zones of function, and the streets follow sacred alignments, mainly oriented towards the confluence of the Ganga, Yamuna, and Saraswati. Even crowd control is done as per darshana-based movement.

Yet this ancient model is paired with modern engineering, including GPS tracking of crowd density, AI-based surveillance, drone monitoring, and modern infrastructure pop-ups. It is also a study in inclusivity. There are no caste-based entry barriers. People of all castes stand side by side for the same holy dip.

Borrowing a leaf from this book, under the Smart Cities Mission, Bhubaneswar has integrated development and inclusive infrastructure around its ancient sacred zone, the Ekamra Kshetra. Varanasi's Kashi Vishwanath Corridor has also modernised pilgrimage infrastructure while preserving the city’s spiritual core. Encroachments were removed, and the spiritual bond between the river and the temple was restored.

Arguably, the best global example is that of Kyoto, Japan. It is a city that refuses to be erased by modernity, choosing instead to evolve by folding time like a Mobius strip.

Municipal laws in Kyoto limit the height of high-rise developments in its central districts. This ensures that temples and traditional machiya-style architecture dominate the skyline. Local ordinances even regulate the colour of signage and facades to preserve visual coherence. Despite all of this, Kyoto hosts global conferences and tech start-ups.

Instead of displacing heritage, modern amenities such as coworking spaces and boutique hotels have been inserted painlessly into the old skin.

What these examples illustrate is simple. Scale is not a question of size but of sensitivity, to tradition, to modernity, to ecology, and to human ingenuity.

Towards a ‘new’ urbanism

The notion that tradition and innovation are opposites is a false binary. In fact, tradition is not a fossilised custom but accumulated civilisational intelligence. It is the ideal foundation for designing our cities.

Our cities must not feel like temporary waiting rooms, demanding frequent getaways to the hill station in order to overcome the pangs posed by the multitude of stressors that urban life imposes upon us.

India has always been modern, but on its own terms. It does not behove us to blindly copy Western models. Not because they are Western, but because they are contextless. Our climate, our mohalla style of living, our habits, our chaos, our culture, all demand a different idiom.

We can either blindly copy global cities, or we can remember how we once, long ago, built cities. It is incumbent upon us that the blueprint of India’s future must emerge from its past, not in pale imitation, but in intelligent and purposive continuity.