Jyotihshastra: Astral and Mathematical Literature c10.13

c10.13

Śūramahāṭha Śivadāsa, (or Śivarāja), however, the author of the largest extant astrological *nibandha*, the Jyotirnibandha,⁸ probably lived in Mahārāṣṭra or Madhya Pradeśa. Though the edited text contains various additions from the seventeenth century⁹ (its relation to the revision by Kṛṣṇa,¹⁰ the Saṃhitā-sāra, has not been investigated), the earliest dated manuscript was copied in 1579 and the JN was cited by Pītāmbara and others earlier in the sixteenth century. Moreover, Śivadāsa (p. 25) mentions 1440 as the first year of a sixty-year cycle, which it was in the Northern Cycle. One must conclude, therefore, that he wrote in the latter half of the fifteenth century. His work is an extraordinarily rich collection of excerpts on all branches of astrology and some branches of divination from a wide range of named sources, many of which are no longer extant. A thorough investigation of Śivadāsa’s manuscripts and his sources would do much to illuminate the rather obscure history of Indian astrology outside of Gujarāt in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.