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I note here the usual caveat regarding the representation in English, using the standard ASCII character set, without orthographic marks, of words from languages other than English. |
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9.6.1
Traditional Indian Calendars |
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India is a unique area in may respects. It contains a very large number of language groups and a very diverse set of cultural traditions. For many years, India was conceived to be, and governed as, a group of individual states, not as a single nation. |
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As part of this diversity, India developed 30 different local calendars. These calendars share some common roots, but differ in many details. These traditional calendars are essentially religious. Most are based on a lunar zodiac and a set of related astrological associations. Most derive from the rules of the Surya Siddhanta, which contains certain critical errors. The precession of the equinoces is denied by most of these calendars, which are demonstrably wrong by scientific measures but which are defended vigorously by their adherents. |
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When India was granted independence in 1947, its leaders were forced to deal with the problem of welding the many diverse groups into a single nationstate. A unified calendar was conceived as one tool for accomplishing this goal. |
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The astrological calendars are difficult but not impossible to implement. Their implementation, however, requires reference to detailed astronomical phenomena. This information must come either in the form of detailed and lengthy tables, along the lines of an ephemeris, or in the form of a complete set of astronomical algorithms for performing the necessary calculations. Both of these approaches would take this work far into other areas and would require a large mass of additional material. Neither approach has been deemed suitable for this book, and so this class of calendar remains outside the scope of this work for the present. |
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9.6.1.1
Overview of Indian Calendric History |
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Six general periods in Indian history are of concern for calendrics. |
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The earliest civilization known in the Indus Valley is the Harappa-Mohenjo-Daro, which was contemporary with Mesopotamia, about 2500 B.C. The society was agriculturally based and possessed a written script, so the probability of a calendar is high. The script remains untranslated, so a chronology is not possible. |
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The Aryan people invaded from what is now Afghanistan in successive waves between 2500 and 1500 B.C. Few material artifacts remain, but the Rig-Veda contains references to the Sun, the Moon, and the seasons, which imply the use of an empirical lunarsolar calendar, used perhaps until about 1300 B.C. |
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The latter part of the period 1300250 B.C. is called the Vedanga Jyotisha period by S.B. Diksit, a pioneer in Indian calendar research. The Vedanga Jyotisha period was continued to the end of the reign of the Satavahanas (ca. A.D. 200). |
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