Astronomical Instruments in the Rampur Raza Library

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Sreeramula Rajeswara Sarma.

formerly Professor of Sanskrit at Aligarh Muslim University. wrote extensively on history of science in India.

Born in Andhra Pradesh in 1937, he studied Sanskrit at Santiniketan and Indology in Germany, where he earned his PhD from Philipps Universität, Marburg, for his thesis on a tenth century Sanskrit astronomical text.

He has been a fellow of the German Academic Exchange Service at the universities of Marburg and Frankfurt; visiting associate professor at Brown University, Providence; visiting professor at the Université de Paris III and at Kyoto University.

For over a decade he has been surveying Indian astronomical and time-measuring instruments preserved in India and abroad. He visited more than seventy-five museums and private collections in India, Belgium, Germany, France, the Netherlands, UK and USA and identified some 400 Indian instruments. A descriptive catalogue of these instruments is in preparation.

Scientific instruments of the pre-modern period, like literary documents, constitute an important source for the reconstruction of the history of science and technology. Often they are also artistically valuable pieces. In museums and private collections all over the world, there exists today a large corpus of Indian astronomical and time-measuring instruments produced after pre-Islamic or Islamic prototypes. Like manuscripts and paintings, like sculpture and jewellery, these instruments are also part of our cultural and intellectual heritage, but they did not receive adequate scholarly attention so far. In order to facilitate their study, I began preparing a comprehensive catalogue of all pre-modern Indian astronomical and time-measuring instruments which are preserved in museums in India and abroad. In this connection, I visited more than seventy-five museums and private collections in India, Belgium, Germany, France, the Netherlands, UK and USA and studied some four hundred Indian instruments.

Rampur Raza Library, like the other great Indian repositories of Arabic and Persian manuscripts such as the Salar Jung Museum of Hyderabad and the Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library of Patna, possesses an important collection of astronomical instruments. The collection at the Rampur Raza Library consists of three regular astrolabes, one Mariner's astrolabe, four celestial globes, one sine quadrant, one perpetual calendar-cum-horary quadrant, and one horary quadrant-cum-nocturnal. It is an interesting mix of Indian, Middle-Eastern and European instruments. While seven of these instruments were manufactured in India, two emanate from the Middle East and two are of European make. Chronologically speaking, they belong to the thirteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and carry legends in Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit and English. Some of these are unique or rare specimens. No other Indian collection of astronomical instruments offers such a rich variety in typology, provenance and chronology.

The Nawabs of Rampur were avid collectors of manuscripts, paintings and other objects d'art. They also collected some rare astronomical instruments belonging to different ages and different lands. Many of the manuscripts of the Rampur Raza Library have been catalogued, but not so far these astronomical instruments.

In the course of his project of cataloguing Indian astronomical and time measuring instruments of the pre-modern period, Prof. Sreeramula Rajeswara Sarma, formerly Professor of Sanskrit at Aligarh Muslim University and a noted historian of science, has studied the astronomical instruments in our collection. At my request, he has now prepared a comprehensive catalogue of these instruments.

In the Introduction, Prof. Sarma provides a brief history of each instrument type represented in this collection, together with the method of construction and use. The most important types are the astrolabe and the celestial globe, with their long history spread over various culture areas. The Introduction is followed by a detailed scientific description of each individual instrument of our collection. Though not very numerous, these instruments show a wide diversity in typology, age and provenance. Some of these instruments are from the Middle-East, some from Europe and the rest from India. The two oldest instruments are the Kufic Astrolabe produced by Al-Sarrāj Damishqi in AH 626 (AD 1228-29) and the Kufic Celestial Globe crafted by Muhammad ibn Ja'far in AH 834 (AD 1430-31). These are historically very important. So also the Mughal astrolabe and celestial globe in our collection. The production of these traditional instruments continued in India well up to the end of the nineteenth century. Our collection has some interesting specimens from the nineteenth century also and these exhibit the interplay of traditional and European influences.

The Rampur Raza Library is happy to bring out this Catalogue which, I am sure, will prove to be a useful guide to astronomical instrumentation in general and to the instruments in our collection in particular.

0.0 Cataloguing Scientific Instruments" In reconstructing the history of science and technology of any civilization, the scientific instruments play as valuable a role as the literary documents do. This is all the more true in the case of observational astronomy. As Francis Maddison, long-time curator of the famous Museum of the History of Science at Oxford remarks, "it was in astronomy that accurate measurement was first used systematically to obtain quantitative evaluations of observed phenomena. The instruments which were invented and which developed in response to this approach to scientific enquiry are (...) worthy of study as primary sources of the history of scientific thought and of technological achievement."

In the 1950s, the History of Science Division of the International Union for History and Philosophy of Science set up a commission to promote the compilation of an "inventaire mondiale des appareils scientifiques historiques". The first step in this direction was to compile national inventories. Accordingly, several European countries brought out national inventories of scientific instruments: Belgium (1959-1960), Italy (1963), France (1964), USSR (1968), Czechoslovakia (1970; unpublished), Ireland (1990). The latest is from the United Kingdom and Eire (1992).

In the Indian subcontinent, scientific instruments were used throughout history. The large number of weights, the remains of some metal scales and the fragment of a scale incised on a shell, recovered at Mahenjo-daro and Harappa, are some of the earliest specimens of Indian scientific instruments that are extant today. Unfortunately, these instruments have neither been inventorized systematically nor studied in the context of their historical development. Even Sawai Jai Singh's observatories, which must be ranked as unique astronomical monuments of the world, are in a sad state of neglect. The large masonry instruments which Jai Singh designed and erected in his observatories are indeed the culmination of a long process of development in astronomical instrumentation. But what sort of instruments were used until the eighteenth century, before the time of Jai Singh?

Sanskrit astronomical texts describe many instruments for measuring time, for taking the altitudes of heavenly bodies, for measuring the angular distance between two stars and so on. At the beginning of the sixth century, Aryabhața I described some interesting astronomical instruments in his Aryabhatasiddhānta. This work is now lost but luckily the descriptions of the instruments survive in Ramakrşņa Arādhya's commentary on the Suryasiddhanta. In the next century, Brahmagupta devoted an entire chapter of his Brahmasphutasiddhanta to instruments.