Which are the caskets of the Indian astronomy
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Nearly a hundred years ago, English historian George Rusby Kaye remarked that “the History of Indian Astronomy has a considerable history of its own.”
He was referring, of course, to the greatly fluctuating opinion in Europe, during the 18th and 19th centuries, regarding the substance and originality of Indian Astronomy.
It is widely acknowledged that the Indian civilization is among the oldest in the world, if not the oldest. The vast region of the Indian subcontinent, which can comfortably house the entire continent of Europe, has been home to many nations, cultures, customs, languages and religions over the millennia.
The most ancient texts of Indian literature show clear evidence of being at least 6000 years old. The subcontinent has also produced the two longest epics ever written by the hand of man.
In the field of astronomy too, ancient India appears to have produced a significant amount of output. We read in the ancient texts of at least 18 major treatises on astronomy, most of which have unfortunately been lost.
While the West has acknowledged the great age of the Indian civilization, the same has not been accorded to Indian Astronomy, the main reason for which has been political. The bulk of Western research into Indian Astronomy was carried out during the 18th and 19th centuries, when India was a colony of the British, and a major effort was on by the colonizers to impose their culture and religion on the Indians, to make them pliable and comfortable with the idea of western subjugation. In such a scenario, it is only to be expected that Indian Astronomy was deprecated by western scholars, and even accused of being plagiarized from Europe (read Greeks).
Even so, the history of Indian Astronomy from a European perspective is an enthralling area of research. The views and counter-views of the European scholars of those times make for fascinating reading. While the majority espoused the vision that the Indians had borrowed their Siddhantic Astronomy from the Greeks, a small minority took the opposite view.
Unlike the Indians, the West has had an enormous head-start in their extolling and eulogizing of Greek Astronomy. As one enters the field of Archeo-Astronomy, one becomes acutely aware of the vast gulf that exists between resources available for Greek and Indian astronomies. For anyone wishing to learn the ins and outs of the Greek science, there are bountiful resources available, including Otto Neugebauer’s comprehensive three-volume set on Greek Astronomy.
In contrast to Greek Astronomy, where the single text of Ptolemy’s Almagest reigns supreme, Indian Astronomy has multitudes of books, each with its own unique significance. There has been little effort, as yet, to synthesize the essence of these Indian texts into a comprehensive resource on Indian Astronomy. The available literature, such as it exists, can be aptly described as “meager”, with a good chunk of it having been written by western scholars, with their typical Greek bias. Most Indian papers and articles that one comes across appear to only skim the surface of its topic, utterly lacking in depth and rigor. Indian Astronomy, it appears, waits in hope for its Neugebauer.
In this series of articles, we will firstly examine the discovery of Indian Astronomy by the western world, starting in the late 17th century, and the effusive praise that was showered on it by various Europeans. Later, we will delve into the politics of colonization that led eventually to the enforced deprecation of Indian Astronomy by western scholars, with such lasting effects, that even today, in the eyes of the world, Indian Astronomy bears the ignominious stamp of being a second-hand science, borrowed from foreign sources by incompetent, bungling amateurs.