Photographing Indian observatories

This fascinating illustrated book deals with the observatories founded by Rāja Jai Singh Sawā’ī (1688–1743 AD) in four cities in India between ca. 1720 and 1740 AD, known as the Jantar Mantar. It is neither a historical book, nor a technical assessment of the observatories’ components. Rather, the author’s intention is to present a comprehensive view of the gigantic architectural units that form the great observatories by taking a new approach: wide-field photography and immersive spherical panorama technique. This bestows the interested reader with the impression that s/he is in direct touch with the observatories’ environments and is looking at the instruments on the spot. The photographs were taken in 2001 and 2004, but the book, in fact, offers the fruits of Professor Perlus’s 30-year project that started from 1989.

The core of the book is divided into two sections. In “Explanation,” the author explains the basic structural elements and features of the instruments and their applications in an easily understandable way. Clear and clean virtual reconstructions effectively help the reader to grasp all key points at first glance. Some minor shortcomings may be noted. For instance, the mechanism proposed in the case of “Digamsa Yantra” (consisting of two concentric circular walls—the outer being higher than the inner—and a crosswire installed on the outer wall whose knot is located just above a pillar in the center) only makes possible measurement of the azimuth of a celestial body in a single altitude, which renders it of no practical use; the instrument seems to have had a separate movable component installed on the top of the central pillar, which has been lost in the vicissitudes of time. Likewise, “Daksinottara Bhitti” cannot be used at night, unless the instrument is equipped with a sighting device. And “Nadivalaya” was not intended to measure the declination. These mistakes are, on the whole, negligible, and may be due to the sources consulted by the author (though he does not cite any). The second section, “Immersion,” presents the spectacular photographs.

The Achilles’ heel of the book is its preface written by A.S. Mukherji, titled “Time and Space in the Jantar Mantars,” in which the author intends to fold the observatories in the shield of an enigmatic epistemological discussion. At the outset, it might be of interest to some readers, but it soon turns out to be of little value because it detracts from a relevant historiography: the author wishes to view the observatory complex of Jantar Mantar as “an intrinsic part of an indigenous Indian tradition of knowledge system,” which causes meaningless, anachronistic remarks to enter into the text (e.g. the attribution of the discovery of precession to Indian astronomy on p. xii and fn. 19 on p. xvii).

It has been firmly established by the late David Pingree and other scholars ¹ that Jai Singh’s era saw the intersection of a long-persisting medieval Middle Eastern tradition of mathematical and observational astronomy and a new astronomy brought from Europe in a collaboration of Jesuit missionaries and Persian and Indian astronomers. The observatories came in the succession of a long-persisting tradition originating from the medieval Middle East that had already reached the Yuan capital of Beijing in the 13th century and Istanbul in the 16th century. The product of Jai Singh’s observational program, the Muḥammad-Shāhī zīj, was written in Persian and represents the continuation of a tradition of compiling astronomical tables with explanatory sections for their use in Persian which started in the 11th century. This tradition included the 12th-century Alā’ī zīj by Ibn al-Fahhād, the 13th-century Īlkhānī zīj prepared at the Maragha observatory, the 14th-century Sultānī zīj compiled at the Samarqand observatory, the Shāhjahānī zīj by Dihlawī (early 17th-century India), and finally reached the Muḥammad-Shāhi zij. Its main compiler was Mirzā Khayr-Allāh Muhandis (i.e. the “Geometer”) of Shiraz (d. 1747). And it is beyond doubt that, in planetary astronomy, the latter was a complete adoption of the Tabulae astronomicae Ludovici magni (1702) by the French astronomer Philip de La Hire (1640–1718); to confirm this one may simply compare, for example, the planetary equation tables in the two works. So the author of the introduction must understand that in medieval scientific historiography, the central rule is “continuity is originality.” Jai Singh and his team of astronomers, indeed, did the best of what they were able to do; where it took decades for the early medieval Middle Eastern astronomers to digest Ptolemaic astronomy and to use it in practice, Jai Singh’s team learned and adopted the European new astronomy within two decades. And this is sufficient to be a great source of pride.

Putting the preface aside, Perlus must be praised for using photography as an abstract language to describe historical observatories. Such an approach deserves to be imitated and extended to other surviving astronomical heritage sites around the globe.

S. Mohammad MozaffariUniversity of Science and Technology of China, Hefeimozaffari@ustc.edu.cn