Abstract
Modern astronomy came to India in tow with the Europeans and was institutionalized by the English East India Company as a geographical and navigational aid. Madras Observatory, set up in 1787, became the first modern astronomical facility outside the Western World. However, once observatories were opened in South Africa and Australia, the British lost interest in Madras. British India’s astronomical fortunes revived with the advent of physical astronomy. Of the various initiatives following the 1874 transit of Venus, the one that has stood the test of time was the Kodaikanal Observatory, which is now a field station of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics. Other astronomical facilities created in British India turned out to be short-lived, and either they closed down or became meteorological/magnetic observatories. It is only since Independence, in 1947, that India has supported astronomy and space sciences for pleasure and prestige.
This chapter is a revised version of Kochhar (Vistas in Astronomy, 34, 69–105, 1991c), and it also builds, in places, on Kochhar (Historical perspective, Astronomy in India: Past, Present and Future, IUCAA, Pune, 1993) and other earlier works.
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Notes
- 1.
In earlier publications Kochhar (1985a, 2016) listed the date as 1786.
- 2.
- 3.
Note that 1 pagoda equalled three and a half rupees, while eight rupees were equivalent to one pound sterling.
- 4.
This is yet another instance of the so-called ‘tyranny of distance’, where discoveries—particularly of comets—made in the ‘colonies’ were not assigned due credit because of the difficulty in communicating with Britain and Europe. Australian examples are discussed in Orchiston (1997).
- 5.
This telescope has been in Kodaikanal Observatory since 1899, and in use as a photoheliograph since 1912.
- 6.
The present-day name of Trivandrum is Thiruvananthapuram, and it is the capital of the Indian State of Kerala. In Raja Varma’s era it was the capital of the State of Travancore.
- 7.
The Germans sent two teams to observe this eclipse—the second one was based in Aden. The French also sent two teams, and the other one was in Siam (Orchiston and Orchiston 2017). The Dutch only had one observing team in SE Asia, and this was based in the Dutch East Indies—now Indonesia (see Mumpuni et al. 2017).
- 8.
Eventually this telescope reached Kodaikanal (via South Kensington and Poona), and its mounting now supports Pogson’s 8-in refractor at Kodaikanal Observatory.
- 9.
Thomas Cooke & Sons would later amalgamate with the equally well-known British scientific instrument-makers, Troughton and Simms (see McConnell 1992).
- 10.
We wonder if this is in fact the Survey’s foremost photographic expert, James Waterhouse (1842–1922) who in 1866 moved to Calcutta to take charge of the Photolithography Department, and built a considerable reputation as a photographer. Our searches revealed no Captain James Waterhouse associated with the Mathematical Instrument Department in Calcutta. Note that the James Waterhouse who accompanied Tennant was responsible for the photographic component of the project, using the Dallmeyer photoheliograph.
- 11.
This same name was used more than half a century later when the present Astronomical Society of India was set up at Hyderabad in 1973.
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Kochhar, R., Orchiston, W. (2017). The Development of Modern Astronomy and Emergence of Astrophysics in India. In: Nakamura, T., Orchiston, W. (eds) The Emergence of Astrophysics in Asia. Historical & Cultural Astronomy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62082-4_24
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