Burgess: 'The star referred to can hardly be any other than that in the head of the Wagoner, or δ Aurigae (4)', wondering 'why so faint and inconspicuous a star' was singled out. He also doubts the authenticity of vv. 20-21 and notes the two definitions of its longitude (v. 11 + v. 20 vs 'end of Taurus') do not quite agree.
प्रजापति Prajāpati
Prijipati · δ Aurigae · Auriga
Attestations
Devanagari transcribed by the compiler from the page FACSIMILE (archive.org scan leaf n220 = printed p. 118) because the archive.org OCR of this volume is unusable for Devanagari; the page image itself was fetched in this session at https://archive.org/download/in.ernet.dli.2015.292705/page/n220.jpg . Every numeral was re-read at full scan resolution. Cross-checked against a second, independent scan of the same Ray edition at https://archive.org/download/siddhantadarpanachandrashekarsimha1897_252_Z/ , which agrees character for character on the figures. Round brackets and the figures in them are the PRINTED EDITION'S own: (n) is the serial number of the asterism/star, the figure after it the edition's decoding of the preceding bhūtasaṅkhyā word-numeral, so no numeral has been silently converted here. A handful of the compound word-forms in this worn 1899 type are uncertain and are marked in this database as read, not emended; the FIGURES, which carry the astronomy, were verified at high magnification in both scans.
★★ THE MOST RADICAL OF SĀMANTA'S RE-IDENTIFICATIONS. The Sūrya Siddhānta (8.20) puts Prajāpati five degrees east of Brahmahṛdaya, 38° NORTH — the position that made Burgess settle, reluctantly, on the faint δ Aurigae. Sāmanta reports that tradition at XII.30 and then overturns it: after announcing at XII.31 that modern observers have determined a different position for Hutabhuj, Brahmahṛdaya AND Prajāpati, he ends XII.33 with 'that Lubdhaka which lies south of Soma's asterism (Mṛgaśiras) — this is the asterism of Prajāpati'. That star was specified at XII.27 as dhruva 56°, śara 32° SOUTH, disc 10 vikalās, which in his frame is RIGEL (β Orionis: 55°55' / 31°17' S) to within 5' and 43'. Sāmanta therefore moves Prajāpati from 38° north of the ecliptic to 32° south of it — from Auriga to the foot of Orion — and does so with coordinates that land squarely on a first-magnitude star, whereas the traditional position lands on a fourth-magnitude one. Recorded here as disputed: it is one text against the rest of the tradition, but the one text is the only observationally grounded member of it.