A System's Evaluation of Global History of Indian Architecture

System's approach (SA) is a holistic approach of understanding. The approach streamlines how small parts or things or events influence one another within a sequence of events, which constitutes of to-and-fro causal relationships. The network of such relationships represents a whole, where more than the co-existence of parts, the pattern of relationship gains a higher significance.

Recently, the entire scientific world, ranging from social sciences to basic quantum and relativistic physics, and say, from ecology to trans-personal psychology, are being revolutionized by the system's approach. The system approach expands from a conventional reductionist paradigm of looking at linear causal relationships to a view port of looking at things or events in a wider and deeper perspective involving a non-linear or cyclic nature.

In applied and social sciences, a system's approach presents a system of interconnections between the evolution of human society and systems through a chain of to-and-fro relationship with environment itself. Architecture is a science of built environment, and the evolution of architectural systems likewise is an outcome of human-nature or behaviour-environment correlations, and often, these correlations are reciprocal, cyclic and complex. Under system's approach, therefore, it is extremely important to see the architecture as a co-evolutionary function of these correlations. This is the principal essence and concern of the present book.