Jyotihshastra: Astral and Mathematical Literature c4.s6.22

c4.s6.22

A more significant adaptation of Islamic instruments was that by Savāi Jayasiṃha in the 1720’s and 1730’s, the Mahārāja and founder of Jayapura whom we have previously mentioned as the author of a koṣṭhaka. His monumental stone observatories erected at Jayapura, Ujjayinī, Delhi, Mathurā, and Vārāṇasī in imitation of Ulugh Beg’s at Samarqand have often been described, though first by his learned paṇḍita, Jagannātha.²⁸⁷ He also wrote a prose treatise on the construction and use of the astrolabe, the Yantrarājaracanā;²⁸⁸ there is a versification of this, the Yantraprabhā²⁸⁹ of Śrīnātha. Though a number of Sanskrit astrolabes made in north India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries survive, the only other extant Sanskrit texts on instruments written after 1500 are the yantrādhyāyas of the SSJ (II 5), the SR (II 3), and the SSBM (II 2). The topic of the development of Indian astronomical instruments is one worthy of much fuller scholarly investigation than has hitherto been devoted to it.