Mean and True Positions of Planets as Described in Gaṇitagannaḍi

The unpublished seventeenth-century Kannaḍa-language mathematical work Gaṇitagannaḍi is transmitted in a single palm-leaf manuscript. It was composed by Śaṅkaranārāyaṇa Jōisaru of Śṛṅgeri and is a karaṇa text cast as a commentary on the Vārṣikatantrasaṅgraha by Viddaṇācārya. Gaṇitagannaḍi's unique procedures for calculations wer introduced in an earlier paper in volume 8 (2020) of this journal. In the present paper the procedures for calculations of the mean and true positions of planets are described.

Jaina Thoughts on Unity Not Being a Number

At one time, the Jainas in India and the Greeks in abroad held that unity was not a number. This paper provides an insight for the first time into the thoughts offered by the Jainas as to why unity was not a number for them.

Who is the Native of the Sarvasiddhāntatattvacūḍāmaṇi?

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.

Three Purāṇic Statements on the Shape of the Earth

The article analyses an argument given in Jñānarāja's Siddhāntasundara (ca. 1500) on the shape of the earth according to the Purāṇas. The argument involves the use of the word gola, 'ball, globe,' in the Purāṇas, a Purāṇic statement about the mountain Meru being north of everywhere, and a Purāṇic comparison of the earth to a mirror. The article concludes that Jñānarāja breaks with the Purāṇas as well as the traditional commentaries on these texts, and further suggests that we might have to rethink the dictionary definition of gola.

Persian Astronomy in Sanskrit

Starting from the late medieval period of Indian history, Islamicate and Sanskrit astral sciences exchanged ideas in complex discourses shaped by the power struggles of language, culture, and identity. The practice of translation played a vital role in transporting science across the physical and mental realms of an ever-changing society. The present study begins by looking at the culture of translating astronomy in late-medieval and early-modern India. This provides the historical context to then examine the language with which Nityānanda, a seventeenth-century Hindu astronomer at the Mughal court of Emperor Shāh Jahān, translated into Sanskrit the Persian astronomical text of his Muslim colleague Mullā Farīd. Nityānanda's work is an example of how secular innovation and sacred tradition expressed themselves in Sanskrit astral sciences. This article includes a comparative description of the contents in the second discourse of Mullā Farīd's Zīj-i Shāh Jahānī (c. 1629/30) and the second part of Nityānanda's Siddhantasindhu (c. early 1630s), along with a critical examination of the sixth chapter from both these works. The chapter-titles and the contents of the sixth chapter in Persian and Sanskrit are edited and translated into English for the very first time. The focus of this study is to highlight the linguistic (syntactic, semantic, and communicative) aspects in Nityānanda's Sanskrit translation of Mullā Farīd's Persian text. The mathematics of the chapter is discussed in a forthcoming publication. An indexed glossary of technical terms from the edited Persian and Sanskrit text is appended at the end of the work.

Doṣas by the Numbers

This paper explores the origins of the Indian medical nosology involving the three doṣas from the perspective of its formulation into three or four distinct types. The essay compares similarities in passages from three different literary sources: Pāļi texts of early Buddhism, early Sanskrit medical literature, and Greek texts from the Hippocratic Corpus and the Anonymus Londiniensis. The study reveals that the tridoṣa-theory, common to āyurvedic literature from an early time was based on the adoption and then adaption of ideas nourished by an intellectual exchange with the Greek-speaking world.

Note on the Indian Planetary Exaltations and their Greek-Language Sources

A close examination of the lists of planetary exaltations given by two of the earliest known Sanskrit authors on horoscopic astrology – Mīnarāja and Sphujidhvaja – solves the confusion surrounding Mīnarāja’s idiosyncratic assignment of degrees and suggests that both authors, and indeed all later Indian astrological literature, depended for this doctrine on a single, Greek-language source.

Al-Bīrūnī’s India, Chapter 14

This article provides an English translation of Chapter 14 of al-Bīrūnī's Kitāb taḥqīq mā li-l-Hind. The whole book was translated by E. Sachau (as Alberuni's India) more tha 100 years ago. Thanks to the recent works by David Pingree, especially the Census of the Exact Sciences in Sanskrit, we can offer many improvements and additions to Sachau's translation. We focused our attention to Chapter 14 of the same book where we find much interesting information about the history of Indian astronomy and mathematics. In the Appendix we have compared the table of contents of the Brāhmasphutasiddhānta as reported by al-Bīrūnī (in Arabic) and those given in Dvivedin's Sanskrit text.

Sīdhu (Śīdhu): the Sugar Cane “Wine” of Ancient and Early Medieval India

This article considers the nature of one particular drink made from sugar cane called sīdhu (usually m., also śīdhu), exploring the evidence from textual sources. Other drinks were made with sugar cane products, such as āsavas, medicinal ariṣṭas, and the drink called maireya, but I will not consider those here. As I argue, sīdhu was the basic fermented sugar cane drink, not strongly characterized by additives—“plain” sugar-wine as it were. Though in a manner typical of premodern Indic alcohol culture, even this one drink was a complex and variable affair. Rather than consider this drink in medical sources alone—important as that evidence may be—my methodology here is to examine the history of this drink in the light of a wide range of textual evidence, placing this drink in the broad context of pre-modern South Asian drinking culture.

Gaṇitagannaḍi - A Text of 1604 CE on Siddhāntic Astronomy in Kannaḍa

From a private collection of palm leaf manuscripts the text Gaṇithagannaḍi has been unearthed and studied. The contents follow the traditional texts with all the chapters starting from the calculation of ahargaṇas to the predictions of eclipses. The text presents a unique method of calculation which the author, Viddaṇācārya, declares to be his own invention. In this paper, the procedures are described with the help of the elaborate commentary, written in Kannaḍa language, by Shankaranārāyaṇa Jōisaru of Sringeri. This paper highlights the uniqueness of the procedure for calculating the ahargaṇa and the dhruvās for the positions of planets.