URBANISATION IN INDIA 39 with the modernisation of the production methods, town and country relations re-oriented themselves whereby the cities started serving their rural hinterlands with marketing and service facilities and supplying industrial goods and in turn received the influx of rural agricultural products to meet the demands for food and raw materials. According to Janet Abu-Lughod, "industrial urbanity heightened 'the urban-rural contrasts but also allowed the influence of city culture to extend into the hinterlands".12 Rapid industrialisation simultaneously ushered in an era of unprecedented urbanisation in the West. K Popov refers to this industrial urbanisation in the context of Japan in the following words: "As capitalism advanced, Japan's large towns became hubs of economic life as well as political and cultural centres. ... A number of new towns arose in places where minerals were mined and mines sunk, other industries were springing up, and power stations were being built. The newly-built raiwiways required stations: some of these, located at highway intersections, grew into large communities/'13 The concomitance of industrialisation and urban growth gave rise to a hierarchical pattern of towns. And "by 1890 there were 234 towns in Japan of which 153 had a population of 10,000 to 20,000, sixty between 20,000 and 50,000, thirteen between 50,000 and one lakh and eight cities having an even larger population. The hierarchical pyramid was almost ideal."14 The industrial urbanisation in Germany followed very much the same path. The generation of a complementary town-country functional relationship, of a process of urban decentralisation and at the same time of a 'hierarchical diffusion' of cities and towns appears to be the most marked feature of industrial urbanisation in the developed Western countries where the period of rapid urbanisation was uninterruptedly linked with the era of rapid industrialisation. The development of this complementary functional interaction between town and country, nourished by a process of industrial transformation, does not necessarily hold true in the context of Indian urbanisation and for that matter in the pattern of urbanisation of most of the Third World countries, where industrialisation resulted in the development of a few segregated industrial pockets or metropolises with a highly urbanised character, superimposed upon vast stretches of rural hinterlands infested with continued poverty, stagnation and under-development. E F Silva and M V Soto show that a noteworthy aspect of Latin American urbanisation is the overwhelming growth of a single metropolitan area, which is not linked with a system of urban nodes hierarchically distributed over a certain territory, and which has caused a heavy concentration of people in the primate cities.15 Urbanisation in Colonial India We have observed earlier the disparity in the characteristics of