What the languages of South Asia call the sky

A research compilation of 975 star names in 57 languages, every one cited to the page of its source — beside 168 Sanskrit names attested in the classical texts.

Most Indian languages inherited the twenty-seven Sanskrit nakshatra names and adapted them. A table of those adaptations would be large and nearly uninformative. So every name here carries a register — whether a language formed it itself, uses it colloquially, carries it from a distinct Adivasi tradition, or took it from Sanskrit — and separating those layers is what the compilation is for.

Most-named things in the sky

• Ursa Major (the Big Dipper)
  93 names in 34 languages
• The Pleiades
  87 names in 41 languages
• The Milky Way
  74 names in 39 languages
• The lunar mansions as a system
  69 names in 15 languages
• Orion
  61 names in 27 languages
• Meteors and shooting stars
  45 names in 33 languages
• Comets
  45 names in 30 languages
• Venus as morning star
  41 names in 27 languages

All 65 sky objects →

Best-attested languages

• Marathi
  64 names
• Tamil
  62 names
• Telugu
  57 names
• Kolami
  43 names
• Kannada
  41 names
• Mizo (Lushai)
  38 names
• Malayalam
  36 names
• Sindhi
  34 names

All cultures →

The classical tradition

The Sanskrit compilation is separate: 168 names from the Vedas, the Sūrya Siddhānta, the Purāṇas and the lexicons, each with the śloka that attests it, a published translation and a citation. Browse the Sanskrit stars →

Reading the sky

• Five stars the texts kept watching
  Rohiṇī's Cart, Arundhatī, Agastya, Dhruva and the Seven Sages — omen-site, eye test, season bell, pivot and calendar, every claim quoted verbatim.
• The sky that moved
  The Pleiades rose due east once, a 28th star fell out of the calendar, and the solstice changed its month — precession as the texts recorded it.
• The shadow explained
  From Svarbhānu piercing the sun to the earth's shadow computed — the Indian eclipse from myth to mechanism, register by register.

Two ways to see the whole of it at once

• The sky chart
  Every object on one map, filtered by language or by register. Turn the borrowed names off and what is left is what the languages made themselves.
• The coverage matrix
  65 objects against 57 languages, each cell coloured by the least-borrowed name in it — and the empty cells honestly meaning no source was found.

Seeing them

The compilation has a companion app, Bhagol: Indian Sky Map, which points a phone at the sky and labels what is up there in the language you choose.