Adaptation to early modern heliocentrism in technical vocabulary of Sanskrit mathematical astronomy

Abstract

This article examines aspects of Indian ‘colonial science’ in mathematical astronomy viewed as an active development within the Sanskrit learned tradition of jyotiḥśāstra, rather than merely a passive reception of or reaction to the scientific disciplines of the colonizers. It thus considers a particular Sanskrit knowledge system as the central representative of science in order to explore how contact with different knowledge systems and their institutional and political contexts affected and finally terminated its development as a scientific tradition. The article identifies three distinct though overlapping strands within the long tradition of classical Sanskrit mathematical astronomy–siddhāntic astronomy, which synthesized Vedic calendric and predictive models and Vedāṅga texts with Hellenistic spherical astronomy and Indo-Greek horoscopy; the encounter between siddhāntic astronomy and Greco-Islamic Ptolemaic astronomy from Arabic and Persian sources, which produced a new textual form, the Sanskrit koṣṭhaka/sāraṇī or numeric-array table-text, a popular genre of the second millennium; and the meeting of Indian astronomy and European heliocentric (or crypto-heliocentric) theories, c. 1700, which produced Sanskrit translations of Latin texts. It argues that Sanskrit technical writing in the field accommodated new cosmological concepts, including ones from Latin texts, and integrated them within its own familiar mathematical and expository models.