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Space Man From Pataliputra

The legacy of Aryabhatta, calculator of stars’ movements, leaves a greater impress this eclipse

Outlook Web Desk

Updated on:

I
f he hadn’t been such a sceptic, Aryabhatta might have claimed that solar eclipses ruled his destiny. It was his theories about eclipses—that they are caused by the sun or moon’s shadows, rather than by being swallowed up by demons, as the ancients believed—that earned him both fame and derision during his lifetime. And, in a curious dispensation of delayed justice, it is a solar eclipse over 1,500 years later that has turned him into India’s new poster saint of science. Scholars say Aryabhatta’s rivals in the Gupta royal court ridiculed his findings, especially his claim that the earth rotated on its axis. “He was the first to remove hocus pocus from the study of the science of the stars,” points out astronomer Amitabh Pandey of SPACE. “No astrologer could afford to ignore scientific calculations, their jobs depended wholly on accurate predictions of planetary movements. But only Aryabhatta had the guts to admit publicly that these movements had nothing to do with magic and fortune-telling.”

If Aryabhatta didn’t face the kind of backlash that astronomers like Galileo faced a thousand years later, it’s only because ancient societies, both agricultural and seafaring, relied so heavily on the science of planetary movements, according to Pandey. Aryabhatta’s methods of calculations—his measurement of pi, for instance, was accurate down to three decimals—were quickly adopted by his contemporaries, even as they rubbished his then revolutionary theories. He soon gained international repute, with his treatises being translated into Arabic.

Both astrologers and astronomers claim him as their own. The former revere him because of how his predictions of planetary movements helped them in their predictive work. But now, cashing in on the popular wave of interest in the ancient astronomer, Bihar has decided to use Aryabhatta’s name to promote a scientific temper in the state. To start with, a new university is to be named after him.

What little we know about Aryabhatta comes from what survives of his original texts: some 120 stanzas of his Aryabhatiyam. But thanks to a mathematical conceit that was popular during his time, he worked his birthdate into his treatise: March 21, 476 AD. But was he a son of the soil, as people in Bihar now claim? Unlikely, say scholars, who believe that he migrated to Kusumapura, modern-day Patna, to seek the patronage of the Gupta kings. Some claim he was born in Kerala, others that he belonged to a community from the northwest who settled in Maharashtra. But it’s highly probable that he did set up an observatory in Taregna. At 35 km from what was then the royal court, it was close enough for patronage and far enough to study the stars in peace, as Pandey points out. Taregna was ideal for another reason: it’s elevation is slightly higher than Patna, and villagers point to a mound which they claim was once 70 ft high. What’s indisputable is that for 21st century Bihar, his name spells a new revolution that is already taking place in the minds and hearts of thousands of Indian youth across the state.

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