A Mughal astrolabe preserved in the Sampurnanand Sanskrit University at Varanasi is unique in many respects. While almost all the extant Indo-Persian astrolabes emanate from a single family of astrolabe makers of Lahore or are influenced by the products of this family, the present astrolabe differs from the characteristic style of the Lahore family and testifies to the presence of another style of astrolabe-making in the Indian subcontinent. Made by a Brahmin apprentice of a Muslim astrolabe maker at Jahāngīr’s court in Agra, this astrolabe carries legends in Arabic and Sanskrit so that it can be used by Muslim nuzūmis as well as by Hindu jyotiṣīs and is thus a ‘unique testimonial to an intercultural encounter’—to borrow David King’s phrase. This article offers a full technical description of this astrolabe and attempts to situate it in the history of production of Indo-Persian astrolabes on the one hand, and that of Sanskrit astrolabes on the other.
The Archaic and the Exotic: Studies in the History of Indian Astronomical Instruments by Sreeramula Rajeswara Sarma is a collection of 15 papers published by the author in the period between 1986 and 2004, most of them during the 1990s. The 15 papers have not been changed since their original publication, except that each of them is accompanied by a note explaining where and when the article was originally published. In addition, a brief preface and a very useful index have been included. What unifies the papers is that they all deal with the history of astronomical instruments in India.
Even though the traditional naked eye astronomical instruments became obsolete after the introduction of the telescope, their production was vigorously cultivated in the nineteenth century at Lahore. The central figure in this production was a remarkable instrument maker named Lālah Bulhomal Lāhorī who produced instruments with Arabic/Persian inscriptions and legends as well as instruments with Sanskrit inscriptions and legends. He is indeed the last representative of both Islamic and Sanskrit traditions of astronomical instrumentation. This paper offers an overview of some forty-five extant instruments of diverse types made by Bulhomal and his associates thus forming the last phase of history of astronomical instruments in pre-modern India.
The British Library, London, holds a unique manuscript copy of a Sanskrit text entitled Sarvasiddhāntatattvacūḍāmaṇi (MS London BL Or. 5259). This manuscript, consisting of 304 large-size folios, is lavishly illustrated and richly illuminated. The author, Durgāśaṅkara Pāṭhaka of Benares, attempted in this work to discuss all the systems of astronomy – Hindu, Islamic and European – around the nucleus of the horoscope of an individual personage. Strangely, without reading the manuscript, the authors Sudhākara Dvivedī in 1892, C. Bendall in 1902 and J. P. Losty in 1982, declared that the horoscope presented in this work was that of Nau Nihal Singh, the grandson of Maharaja Ranjit Singh of Lahore, and this has been the prevailing notion since then.
The present paper refutes this notion and shows – on the basis of the relevant passages from the manuscript – that the real native of the horoscope is Lehna Singh Majithia, a leading general of Maharaja Ranjit Singh.
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