DDK HistoryF.p65 - CSIR

386 EPHEMERAL CITIES [ 10.5
The ephemeral nature of feudal cities, which produced for a
comparatively restricted group of consumers based upon the relatively
mobile court and army, is well known. Auranga-bad reached a population
of 400,000 in the times of Aurang-zeb, who administered his empire
from that centre for many years ; his waterworks, though
severely damaged by the efforts of a British engineer to locate their
underground source, suffice for the little town thatx remains. Vijayanagar
at its height was one of the most impressive cities in the world. The ruins
of the palace are quite unimpressive, while the houses have been
washed down into the mud of ploughed fields ; only numerous shrines
with tremendous monolithic images tell the visitor that a settlement out
of the ordinary existed. The railway did not save Bijapur from
becoming a glorified village in a famished district. Agra was a tiny
settlement, even though a capital in Mughal times, as soon as the court
moved out. The few cities which had grown into outstanding centres
of usine hand production did not grow directly into new industrial
centres, but were killed with amazing rapidity by British manufacturers.
For example, Dacca city had a population of some 150,000 when the
district annually produced and exported (mostly through the British East
India Company) millions of ‘pieces of fine hand-made cloth to Europe
and America. By 1837, the movement of cloth was entire y in the
opposite direction, and the population of Dacca had sunk within a
generation to 20,000. It was not Surat, the East India Company’s original
trade centre, but Bombay — whose street names still betray the villages —
that developed the first cloth mills. Correspondingly, Surat faded away.
“ Swarms of beyds, looties, and pindarees, all different classes of plunderers,
follow the armies, and are far more destructive than the soldiers in the countries
through which they pass. These marauders receive no pay, but give a moiety of the
spoil to the commander of the corps to which they respectively attach themselves,
and prefer a life of rapine to any other profession ; armed with spears and sabres,
and provided with hatchets, iron crows, and implements of destruction, they enter
villages already laid waste by the army, and deserted by the inhabitants : there, as if a
general pillage of grain, furniture and other movables, had not been sufficiently
distressing, the .pindarees deprive the houses of locks, hinges, and every kind of
iron work, with such timber as they think proper ; then digging up the floor in search