Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c6.s1.5

c6.s1.5

This article made an attempt to provide documentary evidence of the Benares observatory as having been the creation of this early eighteenth century Raja Jayasinha by quoting from what is called the *Zeej Mohammedshahy*. (If it still exists, much more needs to be known about this mid-eighteenth century document: how it came to be written, by whom, under whose patronage and in what year.) According to this document, having ‘assembled the astronomers and geometricians of the faith of Islam and the Brahmins and Pundits, and the astronomers of Europe’ etc., Jayasinha ‘bound the girdle of resolution about the loins of his soul, and constructed (at Dehly) several of the instruments of an observatory.’ And ‘in order to confirm the truth of these observations’ i.e., at Dehly, ‘he constructed instruments of the same kind in Sewai Jeypoor and Matra, and Benares and Oujein.’ With the foregoing statement from the *Zeej Mohammedshahy*, the documentary proof ended. For the rest, he added: ‘The observatory at Benares having been described by Sir Robert Barker and Mr Williams, I have only a few remarks to offer, in addition to the account delivered by those gentlemen’¹¹ and the writer made some more observations on its measurements, etc.