“COSMOS-Mysuru'' is an upcoming state-of-the-art LED-Dome planetarium in the city of Mysuru and is being established by the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA).
A key project under its education and public outreach program is to identify, collect, digitise and catalogue literature (in Kannada) and materials on astronomy and related sciences over the last couple of centuries from the old Mysore Province. This includes the following activities
- Identify and locate astronomy material in Kannada in various forms and media from the 19th century and earlier. This will involve travelling to the location of people who possess these materials across the state. These materials are found in archives and as well as in personal collections of individuals.
- Digitise/scan the material, and catalogue them. Organise a physical repository for non-digitisable material.
- Transcribe and translate the manuscripts into modern Kannada and English.
- Design a classification system for cataloguing the material in collaboration with science outreach experts in Kannada, produce suitable catalogues with relevant metadata, and create the online database with help from computer experts.
It is well known that astronomy and mathematics flourished on Indian soil even before the Common Era and in Karnataka, and astronomical events like eclipses, and conjunctions are recorded on the stone inscriptions. The more systematic study of astronomy goes back to the 11th century.
Sources
The manuscripts are available at various institutes such as Oriental Research Institute or ORI, University of Mysore, Maharaja Sanskrit College, Mysore, Kuvempu Kannada Adhyayana Samsthe, UoM, Mysuru, and private collections.
ORI is home to thousands of manuscripts, which are catalogued in several volumes. The manuscripts here consist of various topics from religious texts, Vachan poetries, astrology, etc. The collections in the Kannada Department of the university are currently being arranged so that they are made available for us to read.
Mysore Palace and Divisional Archive also have a repository of scientific work done by British officers. Our work involves carefully sifting through these manuscripts to identify just the genuine astronomy content for further analyses.
Work done so far
Our work started from the University of Mysore (UOM) library. There we identified more than 10 books ( in Kannada) on astronomy from the last hundred years (starting from the 1920s). Its difficulty level varies from that of school children to undergraduate students and the astronomical terminologies also have explanations.
The Oriental Research Institute (ORI), which is operating under UOM catalogued all the astronomy-related work in Volume 9 titled “Jyothisham”. It consists of more than 4000 entries running to 700 pages and they are classified with details about the type of writing material (paper/palm leaf), number of pages, language of the manuscript, content and condition of the manuscripts. These texts are in a variety of languages (Old Kannada, Sanskrit, Prakrit) and also written in a variety of scripts (Old Kannada, Devanagari, Nandinagari, Pali, etc).
We selected about 40 paper and palm leaf manuscripts that have information related to the description of celestial events in the manuscript, for example, eclipses, and conjunction of planets. We get to build a vocabulary on technical terms, names of constellations, full moon, and stars. Many manuscripts are in good condition and have better readability.
One of the completed projects is "Laghumanasa vyakhya". It has been studied in detail for the mathematical treatment and its importance as a text older than 1000 years and has been submitted to the studies to JoAA for publication. A brief report of the work here was presented at the GHOU-2023 conference which was held in virtual mode. Also, a brief report on the studies on Laghumanasa was presented as a poster in ASI-2024, held in Bengaluru. The talk by Dr. B. S. Shylaja on Laghu Manasavyakaya can be found here. A talk by Punith can also be found here, starting at 1:19:00.
A Talk by Dr. B. S. Shylaja on Laghumanasa vyakhya
A talk by Punith R. at 1:19:00
Another text on astronomical computations called Grahaganita has been rendered in to readable unicode script. Further study is in progress. Kuvempu Kannada Adhyayana Samsthe (KKAS), UoM, Mysuru is also home to some of the manuscripts and there we have identified more than 20 manuscripts on astronomy and mathematics which need further analysis.