Volume 12, 2024

EN:

Kaṇakkatikāram is the title of elementary mathematical treatises that focus on measurements, calculation techniques and practical-recreational word problems. These treatises enjoyed substantial distribution in medieval and colonial Tamil Nadu and Kerala (Parameswara Iyer 1990, Vol. 2, 524-527). In this paper we will describe these treatises based on Malayalam manuscripts. We will discuss their content, linguistic and stylistic form, context of use, relation to actual professional practices, the cultural values that they express, and the political-economic reality that they reflect. Since the Tamil versions have already been analyzed in Senthil Babu (2022), here we focus on aspects that complement his analysis and on features that are unique to, or more salient in, the Malayalam versions.

EN:

In the seventeenth century, the astronomer Haridatta of Mewar, Rājasthān, produced a table text named the Jagadbhūṣaṇa (epoch Śaka 1560, or 1638 CE). This table text provided calendar makers with a complete set of data and associated procedures for the computation of the annual calendar known in Sanskrit as a pañcāṅga. The tables are huge and represent an enormous computational effort, and the astronomical structure that underlies them is somewhat akin to the Babylonian Goal Year texts and similar cyclic schemes set out by Ptolemy and al-Zarqālī. The accompanying text consists of around one hundred and thirty verses organised into five chapters. This article is the first in a series that presents the Sanskrit text of the Jagadbhūṣaṇa along with a translation and a detailed technical commentary of the text and analysis of the associated tabular material, chapter by chapter. In the opening chapter, Haridatta begins the work with a lengthy encomium to his patron, Mewar Rajput Jagatsiṃha, before describing the procedures by which the true longitudes and motions of the sun and the moon can be determined using the accompanying tabulated data.

EN:

The Ma‘dan al-šifā’-i Sikandar-šāhī is an extensive Persian handbook of Ayurvedic medicine made for Miyān Bhuwa ibn Ḫawāṣṣ Ḫān, a vizir of Sultan Sikandar Lōdī (r. 1489-1517) to whom the book was dedicated. This treatise was thought to provide Indian Muslim physicians, unfamiliar with Sanskrit, with a comprehensive manual of Ayurvedic medicine and therapy. Miyān Bhuwa allocated considerable resources to achieving this translation project and hired scholars to translate the many parts of Ayurvedic books used to compile the Persian text. This article explores the reasons behind the production of the Ma‘dan al-šifā’ and proposes a new reading of this book. It argues that Miyān Bhuwa’s project was part of a broader process of incorporation of Ayurvedic materials within Persian texts which had already started about two centuries earlier and which allowed Muslim physicians to master new forms of interpretation, classification and treatment of diseases when compared with earlier Arabic and Persian medical books. It looks at the epistemic and the practical issues raised in the preface of the Ma‘dan al-šifā’, which directly questions the adequacy of how Greco-Arabic thought understood body temperament in the Indian environment. It inquires into the authorship of this Persian Ayurvedic handbook and suggests that probably Miyān Bhuwa only assembled the translations made from Sanskrit texts. The last part of the article looks at the conceptual structure of the Ma‘dan al-šifā’ and how the Sanskrit sources and their models shaped the organization of the sections of the Persian book. Moreover, it suggests that the overall framework of the book relied on the overlap of models of presentation of medical knowledge, a device meant to negotiate between the models of the Sanskrit sources and those of the Muslim readers.