The project EMESAS began by focussing its attention on one of the earliest Sanskrit translations of a Persian astronomical text. At the court of Emperor Shāh Jahān (r. 1628–58), the Hindu Pandit Nityānanda (fl. 1630/50) worked alongside the Islamic scholar Mullā Farīd (d. ca. 1629/32) to translate into Sanskrit the latter's Persian 'zīj' (a handbook of astronomical tables) the 'Zīj-i Shāh Jahānī' (ca. 1629/30), itself based upon the famous 'Zij-i Jadīd-i Sulṭānī (ca. 1438/39) of Mirzā Ulugh Beg. Nityānanda’s 'Siddhāntasindhu' (ca. early 1630s), like the 'Zīj-i Shāh Jahānī', is an enormous work that includes theoretical discussions on hermeneutics, logic, metaphysics, mathematics, and astronomy, along with a large number of astronomical, calendrical, and geographical tables. It remains the largest (and among the earliest) Sanskritic presentation of Islamicate astronomy known to us; however, neither the Persian nor the Sanskrit text had been edited, translated, or studied until now. In June 2021, the first publication of the project EMESAS presented, for the very first time, a comparative study of the 'Zīj-i Shāh Jahānī' and the 'Siddhāntasindhu', along with critical editions, translations, and technical analyses of select passages from both these works highlighting the linguistic (syntactic, semantic, and communicative) aspects of the translation process.
Along with this, the project EMESAS has also examined three seventeenth-century Sanskrit canons that discuss Islamicate ideas from various positions, namely, Nityānanda’s 'Sarvasiddhāntarāja' (1639), Munīśvara’s 'Siddhāntasārvabhauma' (1646), and Kamalākara’s 'Siddhāntatattvaviveka' (1658). Among these, Nityānanda's 'Sarvasiddhāntarāja' is an adaptation of his 'Siddhāntasindhu' where he restructures the Sanskritised prosaic presentations of Islamicate ideas seen in the latter text into the more refined metrical Sanskrit poetry of the former. In this process, Islamicate astronomical ideas─ideas like the concept of second declination of a celestial object or the division of the oucemene into climes─enter the discourse of Sanskrit canonical (siddhāntic) astronomy; however, all references to Islamicate sources are masked and replaced by stories of divine revelation, observational concordance, or mathematical acuity as motivation. The last part of the project EMESAS has studied, in great detail, the mathematical aspects of one such Islamicate concept described in all of the three aforementioned texts. The findings of the project EMESAS, in particular, the philological, philosophical, and mathematical processes by which Islamicate (Ptolemaic) astronomy entered the world of Sanskrit intellectual discourse of the seventeenth century India, have been presented in major international conferences.
