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It was by considerations of this sort that India came to support the introduction of The World Calendar to the United Nations as late as 1956, when calendar reform was a dead issue in most countries. |
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Ultimately, the calendar accepted was carefully crafted to be a modern solar calendar but also attempted to be Indian, by: |
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attempting to preserve the position of the vernal equinox within the calendar, |
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using the traditional Saka Era, and |
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using traditional Indian month names. |
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The major problem faced by the framers in making an Indian calendar was that the traditional calendars were derived from the Surya Siddhanta, which contains a number of calendric errors. Specifically, it uses a length for the tropical year that is wrong, uses lengths for the months that are out of date, and denies the precession of the equinoces. The dilemma, therefore, was to produce a calendar that was correct and still Indian. |
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The Committee, however, backed away from implementing serious changes to the religious lunisolar calendar. It favored changing the solar year (to which the lunar religious calendar was pegged) to start from the day of the vernal equinox, but it considered that "the change would be too violent." Rather, it recommended that the solar year for the religious calendar commence at a particular fixed point, to stop further accumulations of error. |
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The result of the various compromises and political imperatives was a nationalistic calendar, which expressly laid a foundation for unification of the various local calendars perceived at the time as pernicious impediments to the policy of national unification. |
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9.6.2.2. 9.6.2.4
Code on CD-ROM |
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See the SCDTL text on the CD for the discussion of the code. |
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9.7
Some Important Historical Calendars |
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In this section, I look at some calendars that are important because they have been used to record dates during periods of historical interest. |
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9.7.1
The Hatcher Equations |
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The core routines used to "solve" a calendar are routines that convert dates in a calendar to the corresponding Julian Day numbers and back again. When this pair of routines is operating correctly, the rest of the routines for the calendar may be added as auxiliary functions to answer certain questions, expand the utility of the calendar, or format dates. |
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