Periodic Reporting for period 1 - EMESAS (Early Modern Exchanges in Sanskrit Astral Sciences)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2019-11-01 do 2021-10-31
Within the global discourse of history of science, the Indian contribution remains marginally represented and insufficiently studied. While recent scholars have highlighted the mathematical developments in Indian astronomy of the early modern period (ca. 1500–1800), and others have written about the sociocultural context of the Indo-Persianate Mughal India, these studies have been largely composite and synoptic in their scope. An acute requirement has been the availability of critical and comparative studies of primary sources in Sanskrit and Indo-Persian astronomy of early modern India; in particular, of those Sanskrit texts that were highly influenced by Islamicate ideas of the time. The project 'Early Modern Exchanges in Sanskrit Astral Sciences' (EMESAS) has taken the first steps in this direction by studying an important corpus of Sanskrit and Indo-Persian texts from early seventeenth-century Mughal India and bringing out comparative critical editions (with annotated English translations and technical expositions) of selected chapters from these texts.
The aim of this project has been to identify and analyse certain 'knowledge elements' (like computational methods, geometrical arguments, astronomical suppositions, etc.) found in these texts that typify the process of transformation of Islamicate astronomy into Sanskrit. More generally, this project has offered new insights into the phenomenon of transmission and translocation of knowledge between cultures. By critically studying a well-defined corpus, this project has also shown how structural changes in the knowledge systems of a society are a transformative phenomena shaped by the cognitive, cultural, and linguistic diversity of its pluralistic past. This observation offers the cosmopolitan perspective that is needed today to fight historical revisionism, cultural parochialism, and zealous traditionalism.
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.