This book provides a critical edition and an English translation of the chapter on spheres (goladhyaya) from Nityanandas Sarvasiddhantaraja, a Sanskrit astronomical text written in seventeenth-century Mughal India. Suitable for those studying and interested in the history of non-western astral sciences.
This book provides, for the very first time, a critical edition and an English translation (accompanied by critical notes and technical analyses) of the chapter on spheres (goladhyaya) from Nityanandas Sarvasiddhantaraja, a Sanskrit astronomical text written in seventeenth-century Mughal India.
Readers will learn how terrestrial and celestial phenomena were understood by early modern Sanskrit astronomers using spherical geometry. The technical discussions in this book, supported by the critically edited Sanskrit text and geometric diagrams, offer an opportunity for historians of the astral sciences to understand developments in astronomy in seventeenth-century Mughal India from a more nuanced perspective. These are supplemented through explorations of modernity, mathematics, and mythology and how they thrived within Sanskrit astronomical discourse at the courts of the Mughal emperors.
This book will be of interest to historians and philosophers of science, in particular those interested in the history of non-Western astral sciences. The book will be a valuable resource for scholars studying the general history of Sanskrit astronomy in the Indian subcontinent as well as those interested in the technical aspects of Sanskrit and Indo-Persian astronomy in Mughal India.
1. Introduction, 1.1 Indian astronomy: a brief overview, 1.2 The
Sarvasiddhntarja, The King of all siddhntas, 1.3 The Goldhyya in
Nitynandas Sarvasiddhntarja,
2. Manuscript Sources and Stemma, 2.1
Catalogues, holding institutions, and manuscript sigla, 2.2 Metadata,
structure, and content of the manuscripts, 2.3 Stemma of the manuscript
witnesses, 2.4 Editorial Notes, 3 Critical Edition, 4 Edited Sanskrit text
and its English translation , 5 Critical Notes and Technical Analyses, A
Nitynandas geodetic method vis-ą-vis al-Brns method to calculate the
Earths radius, B The cosmography of the Puras, C Numbering of verses in
the critical edition vis-ą-vis the eight manuscripts of the goldhyya in
Nitynandas Sarvasiddhntarja.
Anuj Misra is a Gerda Henkel Fellow at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. His research focuses on medieval and early modern exchanges in Sanskrit astral sciences and includes articles and book chapters on the influence of Islamicate thought in the Sanskrit astronomyof Mughal India.
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