Hindu Astronomy

Abstract

THE study of the origin and progress of Indian astronomy has attracted a good deal of attention among Orientalists and historians of astronomy during the last 140 years, and has given rise to a considerable amount of controversy, which now seems to have ceased, at least among competent scholars. The history of the literature of the subject down to 1893 was written by the late James Burgess (Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, October 1893) and need not detain us here. While during the last seventy years critical editions and commentaries of the Siddhantas or textbooks have finally silenced the opponents of the connexion between the later Hindu astronomy and that of the Alexandrian Greeks, attention has also been directed to the earlier Vedic and post-Vedic periods. But a general account of the subject in the English language was wanting, and this has now been supplied in a valuable memoir by Mr. G. R. Kaye,1 who had already published several minor papers on Indian science, and an exhaustive monograph on those strange aftermaths of Muslim astronomy, the great masonry instruments of Jai Singh.