Discuss the salient features of the Harappan architecture.

Planned cities, not random mounds

A typical mature Harappan town had a raised citadel on the west and a lower town to the east. Streets ran in a rough grid, with main roads wide enough for carts and lanes that served houses. Houses opened inward onto a courtyard. Many had a bathing platform and a drain that joined a covered street drain. That drainage is the signature of the civilisation: waste was not left to soak the street.

The brick was standardised. A common ratio was 1:2: 4. Builders used mud brick for cores and burnt brick where water would attack the wall. Timber and gypsum plaster appear in special buildings. There is little monumental sculpture on the walls. Beauty sat in proportion and civic order, not in a carved temple tower.

Water, work and worship in stone and brick

• Mohenjo-daro, on the Indus in Sindh, holds the Great Bath: a watertight tank with bitumen, side rooms, and a drain. It looks like a public ritual of cleanliness. Nearby stand a large granary or warehouse and a dense lower town. Harappa, on the Ravi in Pakistani Punjab, has circular working platforms and granary blocks beside the citadel. Dholavira, in the Rann of Kutch, is the most dramatic water city: rock-cut reservoirs, storm-water channels, and a giant stone signboard. Lothal, on the Gulf of Khambhat, has a baked-brick basin usually read as a dock or water tank linked to trade. Kalibangan in Rajasthan shows ploughed fields and fire altars. Rakhigarhi in Haryana is among the largest settlements on the Ghaggar–Hakra (often identified with the Saraswati) belt. Banawali and Bhirrana extend that eastern map.

Fortification walls at Dholavira and Harappa, and the absence of palaces stuffed with royal art, suggest a civic elite more than a god-king. Architecture here is infrastructure: drain, well, warehouse, dock.

The map runs from the Himalayan piedmont to the Makran coast and down to Gujarat. Architecture followed rivers and the sea, not a single capital.