Jyotihshastra: Astral and Mathematical Literature c11.2

c11.2

At present there exist in India and outside of it some 100,000 manuscripts on the various aspects of *jyotiḥśāstra*. The great majority of these were copied within the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries; for manuscripts cannot long survive in India except under exceptional circumstances. We have, therefore, essentially only those texts selected for study or composed by the scholars of the Mughal and British *rājyas*. Since the practice of copying manuscripts is virtually dead in modern India, many of these estimated 100,000 manuscripts will soon disappear, and the possibilities of our achieving a reasonably accurate assessment of the continuity, development, and transformation of the astral and mathematical sciences in India will be correspondingly diminished. But even without this appalling prospect, we must constantly be aware of the arbitrary way in which was made the selection of texts and commentaries preserved in today's libraries.