|
|
||
| a r t i c l e s o n h i n d u i s m | ||
|
The Building of Jaipur - In the 1720's Raja Sawai Jai Singh II, realizing that his kingdom had outgrown its old capital at Amber, began to dream of a new city which would someday be the capital of a unified Rajaputana - a great, flourishing center of commerce, the arts, and religion. He started work on building Jaipur in 1727. The city turned out to be an astonishing well-planned one, based on the ancient Hindu treatise on architecture, the Shilpa Shastra. The town planner was a talented, young scholar and engineer, Vidyadhar Bhattacharya, whose family had been invited to settle in Jaipur from the distant state of Bengal by Raja Man Singh I.
Louis Rousselet, the well-known 19th century French traveler, wrote, "The town is built in a style of unusual magnificence....I doubt whether at the time it was built there were many cities in Europe which could compare with it." The 19th century English bishop, Heber, wrote that it was comparable to the Kremlin in Moscow. Raja Sawai Jai Sing II named the new city after himself (fortuitously Jaipur also means "City of Victory"). "... THE GOOD PEOPLE OF AMERICA BUILDED THEIR TOWNS AFTER THIS PATTERN, BUT KNOWING NOTHING OF JEY SINGH, THEY TOOK ALL THE CREDIT THEMSELVES." Wrote RUDYARD KIPLING, LETTERS OF MARQUE, 1899
***** Janatar Mantar
The
first observatory was built in Delhi. The second and more sophisticated one is
Jaipur. In addition, three smaller ones, in Varanasi, Ujjain, and Mathura, were
built to supplement the observations made in Jaipur. ( The Mathura one has since
been destroyed.) In Pursuit of Astronomy
“
Ptolemy is a bat…the demonstrations of Euclid are imperfect sketch of the
inaccuracies in the existing tables were all a result of mechanical limitations
of the instruments used at the time – they were too small in size to be
accurate, and their moving parts made them unreliable. His solution therefore,
was to build gigantic instruments from stone, masonry, and marble instead of
conventional brass ones. Samrat Yantra
Other Instruments
|
||
|
|
Copyright © 2001 - All Rights Reserved. |
|
|
a r t i c l e s o n h i n d u i s m |
||
|
|
||
Raja Jai Singh II
(1693-1743), was given the title of "Sawai",
meaning "The One-and-a-Quarter", by Emperor Aurangzeb for his
intelligence. Ever since, the rulers of Jaipur have flown two flags, one full
and one quarter-sized, to symbolize this tile. 
Jaipur
was built on a grid system. Its main streets, 119 feet wide were intersected at
right angles by secondary streets, 60 feet wide, which were further criss-crossed
by lanes and bylanes, 30 feet and 15 feet wide respectively. The streets were
lined with fine buildings of uniform design and shaded by trees. In the middle
of the main road run an aqueduct, and there were wells for drinking water at
regular intervals, many of which are still used today. The city was divided into
nine rectangular sectors (representing the nine divisions of the universe).
Different streets were allotted for different professions such as potters,
weavers, dyers, jewelers, and bakers. 
Raja Sawai Jai Singh
II’s observatory prompted the Portuguese Viceroy in Goa to send an emissary to
Jaipur in 1729 to study it. Later, as its fame spread, French and German
scholars, astronomers, and priests also came here. Through his Portuguese
friend, Padre Manuel de Figueredo, Raja Sawai Jai Singh II procured the latest
astronomical texts and instruments from Europe. Using his huge masonry
instruments, he was able to detect errors in the well-known astronomical tables
of Pere de la Hire, who like other European astronomers, used only
standard-sized brass instruments. Raja Sawai Jai Singh II’s eclectic
collection of astronomical instruments and manuscripts from all over the then
known world are displayed at Jantar Mantar and the City Palace Museum. The
astrolabe, is a kind of celestial map engraved on a 7 foot wide metal disc. He
called it the Raj Yantra, and wrote two volumes on the principles and utility of
the device, which became one of his proudest possessions.
The Jaipur astronomical
observatory built by Raja Sawai Jai Singh II in 1827 is am amazing monument.
Jantar Mantar ( the name roughly translates as “The Formula of Instruments”)
was one of five observatories he built in northern India. Its instruments, which
look like giant, abstract, futuristic sculptures, are actually highly
sophisticated devices that could, among other things, mark time accurate to one
second.
Raja
Sawai Jai singh II eagerly devored every known work on the subject written by
Indian, Arab, and Greek astronomers and even went to the extent of having
Ptolemy’s Almagest and Newton’s Principia specially translated
into Sanskrit for him. He greatly admired the work done by the Turkish royal
astronomer, Ulugh Beg, who had built an observatory in Samarkand in the 15th
century, which had produced the most accurated astronomical reading to date. In
the introduction to his own comprehensive treatise, he wrote that since nobody
had one any significant work in the field since Ulugh Beg, he would undertake
the daunting task himself. He sent out his emissaries to collect all the most
advanced astronomical instruments that were being used by 18th
century Europeans and Islamic astronomers. During the course of his studies he
discovered the inaccuracies in the existing astronomical tables of the time. In
the tables of the French astronomers, Pere de la Hire, for example, he was able
to detect a discrepancy of half a degree in the placement of the moon and
planets. He was outspoken in his criticism and once wrote: 
His
great Samrat Yantra, for example, is basically a sundial, except that it is a
massive 89 feet high and 148 feet wide. As a result, when the sun moves across
the sky it casts a shadow on the finely calibrated quadrants on either side,
which moves at a precise and measurable 0.08 inch every second. It was designed
to measure local time as well as such things as zenith distances, meridian pass
time as well as such declination of the stards with remarkable precision.
Interestingly, the Samrat Yantra at each of his five observatories varies
slightly in shape in order to ensure that the hypotenuse of its great triangle
is aligned perfectly with the axis of the earth and the flanking quadrants are
perfectly parallel to the Equator. 
In
all, Raja Sawai Jai Singh II invented fifteen different instruments, all of them
based on his principle of accuracy through gigantic size. They ranged from Ram
Yantra , which determines the azimuths and altitudes of various heavenly bodies,
to Misra Yantra, which, among other things, tells the time at four different
foreign observatories. The instruments are in such a good condition that,
surprisingly, they are still used today. Samrat Yantra, for instance, is
consulted every year on the full moon night of Guru Purnima, along with
the ancient Sanskrit texts, to predict the onset of the monsoon. One of the
instruments on display at Jantar Mantar and the City Palace Museum is a
telescope, indicating just how aware the Raja was of the latest technology of
his time.