Abstract
The early part of the nineteenth century witnessed the widespread circulation of printed pañcāṅga (traditional Hindu calendars or almanacs) in the Madras presidency. Computed using the vākya algorithms, these pañcāṅga were full of errors, such as local circumstances of eclipses. Chinthamani Ragoonatha Charry, hailed as the first Indian to make modern astronomical discoveries and an employee of the Madras Astronomical Observatory, advocated the reform of the traditional South Indian pañcāṅga. Unhappy about the errors in the traditional pañcāṅga, during the 1870s he took it upon himself to publish ‘scientific’ pañcāṅga in Tamil and Telugu, two principle languages of the presidency, drawing upon the computations of modern astronomy. These almanacs confirmed to the ritual demands of the traditional pañcāṅga even while drawing upon elements of the almanacs published by the British settlers in the Madras Presidency. Charry’s pañcāṅga not only provided the computation of traditional elements, such as tithi, nākṣatra, yoga and karaṇa, but also elaborated on stellar phenomena, particularly those which are visible to the naked eye, and gave accurate predictions for solar and lunar eclipses, occultations, and so on. Convinced by the arguments advocated by Charry and the accuracy of his predictions, two major religious sects—the Smārta sect of Kanchi Kamokoti Mutt and the Aiyangar subsect owing allegiance to Jeears of Ahobila Mutt—supported his ‘scientific’ pañcāṅga.
Hitherto, Indian colonial science studies have focussed on the engagement between Europeans and Indians either as a process of philosophical rationalisation reconciling old and new forms of knowledge, or as a cross-cultural negotiation within Indian responses to Western science. Positing that the engagement during the colonial period was both philosophical and practical, this paper presents the context and an overview of the pañcāṅga reform attempted by Ragoonatha Charry. As such, it is a contribution to the debate on Indian modernity.
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Notes
- 1.
However, there was a solar eclipse on 6 June 1807 and a lunar eclipse on 21 May 1807, but neither was visible from southern India.
- 2.
Inaccuracies arising from the non-uniform nature of the motion of celestial bodies are inherent. The question is why there was a substantial divergence from prediction and observation with regard to say the timing of onset, the extent of geographical visibility and the magnitude of eclipses. Tamil proverb states that the ‘correct prediction of eclipses is the test of sastras’ indicating the popular perception (Percival 1877; 299) and Kochhar (2010) notes that in modern times, the almanacs borrow data from modern sources for computation of phenomena like eclipse, while retaining the computations following ancient texts with regard other aspects.
- 3.
See Young and Jebanesan (1995) for an account of the ambivalent responses of European missionaries towards the traditional vākya system. See, also, Joseph (1995) for ‘wonder and respect’ in the case of Burrow, ‘scrutiny and creeping condescension’ in case of Playfair and ‘silence and indifference’ in the case of Whish, in encountering traditional Indian astronomy.
- 4.
This critical edition prepared by Kuppuswamy Sastry and K.V. Sarma (1962) contains the commentary Laghuprakasika by Sundararaja, along with a valuable introduction and a resume of the text in English.
- 5.
The historian K.V. Sharma (1972: 196) says that Sundararaja was “… the son of Anantanarayna and protégé of Somadeva.” He had contacts with the Kerala astronomer Neelakanta Somayaji, who wrote a book titled Sundararajaprasnottara (Answers to Questions from Soundaraja) clarifying certain astronomical problems related to the computation of eclipses and so on.
- 6.
- 7.
The Candravākyani attributed to Vararuci uses the relation of 9 anomalistic months = 248 days. The larger cycles are 110 anomalistic months = 3031 and 449 anomolitic months = 12,372 days. Now the modern value of the anomalistic month is 27.55455 days on an average. Therefore, for say a longer cycle of 449 anomalistic month 12,371.99295 is much closer to 12,372. But then the pañcāṅga-maker would have to memorise 12,372 sentences, a herculean task.
- 8.
See for example the Hukkuma issued by Tipu Sultan. During Tipu’s reign the practice was to provide for the village astrologer from the public funds as a share from the tax collected (see Deshpande and Malini, 2008).
- 9.
This institution also was known as the College of Fort St George, was established in 1813 to train junior British civil servants before deployment in administration of native territories (see Basu, 1867).
- 10.
This pañcāṅga always had 28 pages, and it was published from a premises having door no 28. Asal in Tamil implies ‘original’.
- 11.
On the other hand, in typical northern Indian calendars the months are lunar (each month having either 29 or 30 days) and hence a typical year has only 354 days. By the periodic addition of an intercalary month (Adik masa) once in a while, the length of the years of northern Indian calendars are adjusted to coincide with the solar cycle.
- 12.
This should not be confused with ‘yoga’ of the five core elements of Panchanga. In Tamil pañcāṅga, the Yogam is used in two senses. Firstly, it is the sum of the angle of the Moon and the Sun as explained above, while in the second sense it is the combination of the day of the week (vāram) and nakṣattiram.
- 13.
The Uttarāyaṇa is supposed to commence on the winter solstices and the Dakshinayṇa on the summer solstices, but due to the precessional motion of the Earth currently they actually occur about 21 days before the dates marked in the Tamil pañcāṅga.
- 14.
In Indian astronomy/astrology the Sun and the Moon are also taken as Grahas, as are two imaginary/shadow planets, Rahu and Ketu (the ascending and descending nodes of the Moon), which along with the five visible planets make the Grahas total nine.
- 15.
His name is spelt in various ways in the contemporary literature and later literature. While the obituary (Obituary, 1881: 180) records ‘Chintamanny’, his own submissions to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society were by Charey (Ragoonatha Charey, 1859) and Chary (Ragoonatha Chary, 1868b). A contemporary chronicler refers him as Cintamani Raghunatha Acarya (Dikshit, 1981: 181). Following Rao et al. (2009) we adopt the spelling of his name as it appears in his signature: Chinthamani Ragoonatha Charry.
- 16.
We should note that Ragoonatha Charry was not alone in this, as the movement for Dṛggaṇita Pañcāṅga also was supported by Bapudev Sastri, Nilamber Sharma, Kero Lakshman Chhatre, Vishnu Ragunath and Khetkar Madhab Chandra Chatterjee in other parts of the country.
- 17.
We were able to access compilations of pañcāṅga prepared by Ragoonatha Charry from 1869–1870 to 1879–1880. All of these were in Telugu, except for one (for 1873–1874), which was in Tamil. The overall formats of the Telugu and Tamil versions were similar. The descriptions presented in this paper are based on the Tamil version for the year 1873–1874.
- 18.
On 26 March 1878 the Madras Government issued a proclamation that time-keeping henceforth would be based upon the standard Christian calendar in all official records and deemed it necessary that all the pañcāṅga published in its jurisdiction provide corresponding dates, months and years in the Gregorian calendar system, along with any preferred traditional system. (Proceeding No 521, 1878).
- 19.
In this system, a day consists of 60 nāḷikāi (or nāḍikā) and one nāḷikāi is 60 vināḍi. Therefore, one nāḷikāi is approximately 24 min.
- 20.
Indian astronomy used both the epicycle model (with the Earth at the center) and the deferent model where the center of the Earth was not at the center of the celestial sphere for the computation of the position of the planets.
- 21.
Nīlakaṇṭha, interestingly, was one of the progenitors of a new school, the Dṛggaṇita system. His cosmological model is said to be semi-heliocentric, that the inner planets revolved around the Sun and the exterior planets revolved around a point in space away from the centre of Earth (see Ramasubramanian et al., 1994; Sarma, 1972).
- 22.
However, some rival mutt, like the Sringeri Mutt, were livid, but the controversy that Ragoonatha Charry engendered will be the topic of another paper.
- 23.
The texts of the Kerala School had by then been ‘discovered’, but they were not recognised and went into oblivion for many years (see Whish, 1835). The works of the Kerala school were only edited, published and studied by historians of astronomy since the 1960s when K.V. Sarma began publishing critical editions of some of the important works—see Sriram (2010) for a brief sketch of Sarma’s contribution towards the rediscovery of the ‘Kerala School’. Thus arose the often-cited claim that after Baskara II, Indian astronomy and mathematics ‘stood still’ (e.g. see Parameswaran, 1992).
- 24.
However Sastri (1958) refutes the authorship by Bhāskara II, largely due to the apocryphal style of presentation as well as errors, and he believes it to be a later composition. In his Siddhānta Dharpana, Samantha Chandrasekhara also cites the Bījopanaya, implying that it was a text known to traditional astronomers during the nineteenth century (see Uphdyaya, 1998(II): 329).
- 25.
See the manuscript No 13431 (Dṛggaṇitam) by Raghunātha of Nungambakam and manuscript No 13429 (Dṛggaṇitam) by Taḍakamalli Kṛṣṇarāyar in the Telugu script for the tables prepared for the computation of Dṛggaṇita computations.
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Venkateswaran, T.V. (2019). Ragoonatha Charry and His ‘Scientific’ Pañcāṅga . In: Orchiston, W., Sule, A., Vahia, M. (eds) The Growth and Development of Astronomy and Astrophysics in India and the Asia-Pacific Region. Astrophysics and Space Science Proceedings, vol 54. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3645-4_20
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