Volume 8, 2020

EN:

This paper discusses a model of the universe found in Mohan courtyard of the old royal palace of Kathmandu, the Hanūmānḍhokā. It was commissioned and installed by King Pratāpa Malla in 1656 CE. The artifact is referred to as “earth-ball” or terrestrial globe (bhūgola) in an inscription and is based on Purāṇic concepts of the universe. An eighteenth-century ritual text indicates that it was an object of worship in the courtyard.

EN:

From a private collection of palm leaf manuscripts the text Gaṇitagannaḍi has been unearthed and studied. The contents follow the traditional texts with all the chapters starting from the calculation of ahargaṇas to the predictions of eclipses. The text presents a unique method of calculation which the author, Viddaṇācārya, declares to be his own invention. In this paper, the procedures are described with the help of the elaborate commentary, written in Kannaḍa language, by Śaṅkaranārāyaṇa Jōisaru of Shringeri This paper highlights the uniqueness of the procedure for calculating the ahargaṇa and the dhruvās for the positions of planets.

EN:

This article considers the nature of one particular drink made from sugar cane called sīdhu (usually m., also śīdhu), exploring the evidence from textual sources. Other drinks were made with sugar cane products, such as āsavas, medicinal ariṣṭas, and the drink called maireya, but I will not consider those here. As I argue, sīdhu was the basic fermented sugar cane drink, not strongly characterized by additives—“plain” sugar-wine as it were. Though in a manner typical of premodern Indic alcohol culture, even this one drink was a complex and variable affair. Rather than consider this drink in medical sources alone—important as that evidence may be—my methodology here is to examine the history of this drink in the light of a wide range of textual evidence, placing this drink in the broad context of pre-modern South Asian drinking culture.

EN:

This article provides a new English translation of Chapter 14 of al-Bīrūnī's Kitāb taḥqīq mā li-l-Hind. The whole book was translated by E. Sachau (as Alberuni's India) more than 100 years ago. Thanks to the more recent work by David Pingree, especially the Census of the Exact Sciences in Sanskrit, we can offer many improvements and additions to Sachau's translation. We focused our attention to Chapter 14 of the same book where we find much interesting information about the history of Indian astronomy and mathematics. In the Appendix we have compared the table of contents of the Brāhmasphutasiddhānta as reported by al-Bīrūnī (in Arabic) and those given in Dvivedin's Sanskrit text.

EN:

A close examination of the lists of planetary exaltations given by two of the earliest known Sanskrit authors on horoscopic astrology – Mīnarāja and Sphujidhvaja – solves the confusion surrounding Mīnarāja’s idiosyncratic assignment of degrees and suggests that both authors, and indeed all later Indian astrological literature, depended for this doctrine on a single, Greek-language source.