A History of the Kerala School of Hindu Astronomy (in Perspective) c7.s1: 1. Introduction

c7.s1.1

Mathematics and astronomy are two of the scientific disciplines to which significant contributions have been made, down the centuries, by Kerala scholars. The land of Kerala, a narrow strip of territory tucked away between the Western Ghats and the Arabian sea, produced superb mathematicians from very early times. The fervour with which the sister science of astrology, in its different branches, was cultivated, had had the beneficial effect of promoting the study of mathematics and astronomy, for the latter provided the basic framework for the practice of the former. The social structure which confined mainly, to certain sections of the community, the study of these disciplines and the freedom from political or religious upheavals which Kerala enjoyed helped the uninterrupted development, here, of these sciences. As a result of all this, significant strides were made and a very large number of treatises came to be written, down to the 19th century, in these disciplines. However, only a fraction of these works have come down to us, the bulk having been lost on account of the ravages of time and the inclement climate of the land which had a highly detrimental effect on the palmleaf manuscripts on which these works had been inscribed. The highly conservative outlook of the custodians of extant manuscripts of these technical texts, the local Malayalam language in which many of these works have been composed or commented upon and the rather obscure Malayalam script used for writing the manuscripts have all stood in the way of a proper study and interpretation of these works in terms of modern mathematics and thereby institute a proper evaluation thereof. In fact, modern scientific studies on Kerala astronomy have been based mainly on just a handful of texts as have, so far, been made available in print, out of the few hundreds of texts still available in the form of manuscripts.