The Dṛkpakṣasāraṇī: A Sanskrit Version of De La Hire’s Tabulae Astronomicae

In November of 1730 the Portuguese astronomer Pedro da Silva arrived in Jayasimha’s court bearing, among other books, a copy of the second edition of Philippe de La Hire’s Tabulae Astro-nomicae, published in Paris in 1727. The choice of this text as the representative of contemporary European astronomy being sent to the Mahārāja was apparently due to the fact that de La Hire, finding fault with the Rudolphine Tables, whose alleged errors he attributes to Kepler’s hypotheses, claims: Quamobrem id statui Tabulas meas nulli hypothesi, sed observationibus tantummodo superstruere, nullâ cuius vis Systematis habitâ ratione. This abjuring of adhesion to an “heretical” astronomy must have pleased the Jesuits who chose the book. This aspect of the Tabulae Astronomicae (though in fact de La Hire does adhere to an astronomical hypothesis, the heliocentric) appealed also to Jospeh Dubois, who wrote at the beginning of the Jayapura copy on September 1732: Tabulae Astronomicae in quibus Solis, Lunae, reliquorum planetarum motus ex ipsis observationibus nulla adhibita hypotesi traduntur. This same propaganda explains the title, Drkpaksasāranī, given to the adaption of the Tabulae Astronomicae written in Sanskrit verse by Kevalarama, Jayasimha’s jyotisarāja, in or after 1733 when the new city of Jayapura, to which he refers, began to be occupied, and the astonishing fact that Kevalrarāma nowhere in this work mentions the heliocentric theory though the computations that he prescribes are based upon it.