Essays

Long-form readings across the databases — every Sanskrit quotation verbatim from a cited e-text.

• Five stars the texts kept watching
  Rohiṇī's Cart, Arundhatī, Agastya, Dhruva and the Seven Sages: how the Sanskrit texts used five fixed stars as omen-site, eye test, season bell, pivot and calendar — every claim quoted verbatim from a cited e-text.
• The sky that moved
  The Pleiades rose due east once, a 28th star fell out of the calendar, and the solstice changed its month — how the Sanskrit texts recorded a drifting sky, every claim quoted verbatim.
• The shadow explained
  From Svarbhānu piercing the sun to the earth's shadow computed: the Indian eclipse from myth to mechanism, every claim quoted verbatim.
• The instruments
  A stick, a bowl of water, a bowl for rain, and a globe that turns itself: the four instruments the Sanskrit texts specify, every claim quoted verbatim.
• The cup that refills
  The moon as the sky's account-book: drunk and refilled, named and numbered, address of the dead, mirror of the earth — every claim quoted verbatim from the Sanskrit texts.
• The wanderers
  The planets stray, stop, and go backwards — and the Sanskrit texts name that loop in every register they own, from war-omen to speed taxonomy. Every claim quoted verbatim.
• The smoke-bannered
  Comets in the Sanskrit texts: the one sky-visitor the calculators refused to compute — from Agni's smoke-banner to Death's flag to the chapter that says 'not by gaṇita'. Every claim quoted verbatim.
• The sphere that turns
  Bhagol or khagol? Sanskrit has two spheres over your head — kha is space, bha is the star — and in the texts it is always the bhagola that revolves, never the khagola. With bhugol, the earth's sphere, as the sidenote it deserves.
• The nothing that counts
  The zero in the Sanskrit texts: an empty place, an algorithm's marker, a dot — and then a number with rules of its own, whose division yields the quantity that will not change. Every claim quoted verbatim.
• The sum without end
  π and the sine in the Sanskrit texts — from Āryabhaṭa's 'approached' value to the Kerala school's infinite series, two and a half centuries before Leibniz. Every claim quoted verbatim.
• The pulverizer and the wheel
  Indeterminate equations in the Sanskrit texts: the kuṭṭaka that grinds calendar problems down to integers, and the cakravāla that solved Fermat's challenge five centuries early. Every claim quoted verbatim.
• Where should it fall?
  Why doesn't the earth fall? From wind-cords and Dhruva's bonds to Bhāskara's power of attraction and the argument from symmetry — the explanatory slot gravity later fills. Every claim quoted verbatim.