The Argumentative Indian
Page 36
15
India through Its Calendars*
‘The calendar’, argued Meghnad Saha, the distinguished scientist and the leader of calendar reform in India, ‘is an indispensable requisite of modern civilized life.’ He could have gone further than that. The need for a calendar has been strongly felt – and well understood – well before the modern age. The calendar, in one form or another, has been an indispensable requisite of civilized life for a very long time indeed. This explains why so many calendars are so very old, and also why most civilizations, historically, have given birth to one or more specific calendars of their own. The multiplicity of calendars within a country and within a culture (broadly defined) has tended to relate to the disparate preoccupations of different groups that coexist in a country.
Calendars as Clues to Society and Culture
The study of calendars and their history, usage and social associations can provide a fruitful understanding of important aspects of a country and its cultures. For example, since calendars often have religious roles, there is sometimes a clear connection between regional religions and domestic calendars. Indeed, even the global calendars of the world are often classified as ‘Christian’, ‘Muslim’, ‘Buddhist’ and so on. The connection between calendars and cultures, however, goes well beyond this elementary linkage. Since the construction of calendars requires the use of mathematics as well as astronomy, and since the functioning and utilization of calendars involves cultural sophistication and urbanity, the history of calendrical progress can tell us a lot about the society in which these developments occur.
Furthermore, given the fact that local times vary with the exact location of each place within a country, the use of a shared time and a common calendar requires the fixing of a reference location (such as Greenwich for Britain) and a principal meridian (in the case of Britain, the one that runs through Greenwich, giving us the Greenwich Mean Time, GMT). The determination of a reference location and a principal meridian is also, if only implicitly, a political decision, requiring an integrated view of the country. When GMT was imposed as the national standard in late-nineteenth-century Britain (the clinching statute came in 1880), it was not an uncontroversial decision: those in opposition included the Astronomer Royal, and also self-confident institutions that valued their independence and the ‘accuracy’ of their respective local times. The great clock of Christ Church in Oxford continued, for a while, to show, through an extra hand, both GMT and its local time – five minutes behind GMT – and the college tradition allowed the belief that ‘one is not late till five minutes past the appointed time, that is till one is late by Oxford mean solar time as well as Greenwich’.1 When, in 1884, at the International Meridian Conference in Washington, DC, the meridian through Greenwich was given the status of being ‘the prime meridian for all nations’ (by which GMT also acquired its official international position), Britain’s dominant standing in world affairs certainly played an important political part.
Because of these associations, the nature, form and usage of calendars in a particular society can teach us a great deal about its politics, culture and religion as well as its science and mathematics. This applies even to as diverse a country as India, and it is in this sense that there will be an attempt in this essay to try to understand India through its calendars.
Millennial Occasions and Akbar’s Concerns
This essay is being written as the second millennium of the Gregorian calendar comes to an end. That moment of passage has been interpreted in two distinct ways. In one system of counting, the Gregorian second millennium will end on 31 December 2000, but the glittering celebrations that have already occurred on 31 December 1999 indicate that the other view – according to which we are already in the third millennium – has its devoted supporters, at least among the fun-loving world population.
Even though the divisions of time that any particular calendar gives are quite arbitrary and dependent on pure convention, nevertheless a socially devised celebratory break point in time can be an appropriate occasion for reflection on the nature of the world in which we live. Different ways of seeing India – from purely Hinduism-centred views to intensely secular interpretations – are competing with each other for attention. The calendars relate to distinct religions and customs.
It is worth recollecting in this context that a little over four hundred years ago when the first millennium in the Muslim Hijri calendar was completed (the year 1000 of the Hijri era ran from 9 October 1591 to 27 September 1592), Emperor Akbar was engaged in a similar – but very much grander – exercise in the Muslim-dominated but deeply multi-religious India. Akbar’s championing of religious tolerance is, of course, very well known, and is rightly seen as providing one of the major building blocks of Indian secularism. But in addition, Akbar’s actions and policies also related closely to his enquiries and interpretations of India, and in that investigation, the calendrical systems had an important place.
Indeed, Akbar tried to understand the different calendars known and used in India, along with trying to study the different religions practised in the country. He went on, in the last decade of the millennium (in fact, in 992 Hijri, corresponding to 1584 CE), to propose a synthetic calendar for the country as a whole, the ‘Tarikh-ilahi’, just as he also proposed an amalgamated religion, the ‘Din-ilahi’, drawing on the different religions that existed in India. Neither of these two innovations survived, but the motivations behind the two moves – interrelated as they are – have received attention over the centuries and remain very relevant today. The present millennial occasion may well be an appropriate moment to return to some of Akbar’s questions and concerns, presented at the end of a different millennium.
To this, I shall return at the end of the essay. But first I must examine the principal calendars that have governed the lives of Indians, and try to use that information for whatever understanding of India it offers. This perspective can provide clues to many different aspects of the science and society of India as well as its cultures and practices.
Arjuna hits the target: Daswant, described by Abul Fazl as the greatest Indian painter in Akbar’s court, depicts in Moghul style and letters a scene from the Mahābhārata
The Indian Calendars
India provides an astonishing variety of calendrical systems, with respective histories that stretch over several thousand years. The official Calendar Reform Committee, appointed in 1952 (shortly after Indian independence), which was chaired by Meghnad Saha himself, identified more than thirty well-developed calendars in systematic use in the country.2 These distinct calendars relate to the diverse but interrelated histories of the communities, localities, traditions and religions that have coexisted in India. If one wanted confirmation of the pervasive pluralism of India, the calendars of India would provide fine evidence in that direction.
The authoritative Whitaker’s Almanack reduces this long list to seven principal ‘Indian eras’. It also gives the translation of the Gregorian year 2000 into these selected major calendars. Since, however, the beginning of the year in different calendars occurs at different times and in different seasons (for example, the Śaka era, the most widely used indigenous calendar in India, begins in spring, in the middle of April), these translations have to be seen in terms of substantial overlap rather than full congruence. The Gregorian year 2000 CE corresponds, Whitaker’s Almanack reports, respectively with:
Year 6001 in the Kaliyuga calendar;
Year 2544 in the Buddha Nirvāṇa calendar;
Year 2057 in the Vikram Saṃvat calendar;
Year 1922 in the Śaka calendar;
Year 1921 (shown in terms of five-year cycles) of the Vedāṇga Jyotiśa calendar;
Year 1407 in the Bengali San calendar; and
Year 1176 in the Kollam calendar.
To this list, we can of course add other major calendars in extensive use in India, including the old Mahāvīra Nirvāṇa calendar associated with Jainism (in use for about the same length
of time as the Buddha Nirvāṇa calendar), and later additions, such as the Islamic Hijri, the Parsee calendar and various versions of Christian date systems (and also the Judaic calendar, in local use in Kerala since the arrival of Jews in India, shortly after the fall of Jerusalem).
Ancient India and Its Calendars
It is clear from the table of Indian calendars in Whitaker’s Almanack that the Kaliyuga calendar is apparently much older than – and quite out of line with – the other surviving old calendars. It also has a somewhat special standing because of its link with the religious account of the history of the world, described with mathematical – if mind-boggling – precision. (It is the last and the shortest of the four yugas, meant to last for 432,000 years, and has been preceded respectively by three other yugas, which were in length – going backwards – two, three and four times as long as the Kaliyuga, making up a total of 4,320,000 years altogether.) It is, of course, true that the Vikram Saṃvat and the Śaka calendars are also sometimes called ‘Hindu calendars’, and they are almost invariably listed under that heading, for example in The Oxford Companion to the Year. But they are mainly secular calendrical systems that were devised and used – for all purposes including, inter alia, religious ones – by people who happened to be Hindus. In contrast, Kaliyuga is given an orthodox and primordial religious status. Furthermore, as the ancientness of Hinduism is not in doubt, and since ancient India is often seen as primarily Hindu India, the temporal seniority of the Kaliyuga has also acquired a political significance of its own, which has a bearing in the interpretation of India as a country and as a civilization.
Interestingly enough, according to Whitaker’s Almanack Kaliyuga too, like the Gregorian, is at the end of a millennium – its sixth. This ‘double millennium’ seems to offer cause for some jollity (such coincidences do not occur that often), not to mention the opportunity of inexpensive chauvinism for Indians to celebrate the completion of a sixth millennium at about the same time that the upstart Europeans enjoy the end of their modest second millennium.
How authentic is this dating of Kaliyuga in Whitaker’s Almanack? The Almanack is quite right to report what is clearly the official date of the Kaliyuga calendar. Indeed, that dating is quite widely used, and even the Calendar Reform Committee reported the same convention (noting that year 1954 CE was year 5055 in Kaliyuga, which does correspond exactly to 2000 CE being 6001 Kaliyuga). However, this numbering convention raises two distinct questions, which deserve scrutiny. First, does the official Kaliyuga date correspond to the ‘zero point’ of the analytical system of the Kaliyuga calendar? Second, does the zero point of the Kaliyuga calendar reflect its actual historical age?
I fear I have to be the kill-joy who brings a doubly drab message. First, the zero point of Kaliyuga is not 6,001 but 5,101 years ago (corresponding to 3101–3102 BCE). Second, this zero point (5,101 years ago) is most unlikely to have been the actual date of origin of this calendar.
The first point is not in any kind of dispute, and the defenders of the pre-eminence of the Kaliyuga calendar rarely deny that the zero point is 3102 BCE. The zero point can be easily worked out from a statement of Āryabhaṭa, the great Indian mathematician and astronomer born in the fifth century, who had done foundational work in astronomy and mathematics, particularly trigonometry, and had also proposed the diurnal motion of the earth (with a corresponding theory of gravity – later expounded by Brahmagupta in the sixth century – to explain why objects are not thrown out as the earth turns). He noted that 3,600 years of the Kaliyuga calendar were just completed when he turned 23 (the year in which this precocious genius wrote his definitive mathematical treatise).3 That was the year 421 in the Śaka calendar, which overlapped with 499 CE. From this it can be readily worked out that 2000 CE corresponds to year 5101 in the Kaliyuga calendar. This tallies also with what the Indian Calendar Reform Committee accepted, on the basis of all the evidence it had. This robs us of the opportunity of celebrating a double millennial occasion – the Gregorian second and the Kaliyuga sixth – but it still leaves the seniority of the Kaliyuga over the Gregorian quite unaffected, since 5,101 years is quite long enough (at least for chauvinistic purposes).
It is, however, important to take note of the often-overlooked distinction between a calendar’s historical origin, and its zero point as a scaling device. To illustrate the distinction, it may be pointed out that the zero point in the Christian calendar was, obviously, fixed later, not when Jesus Christ was born. The zero point of the Kaliyuga calendar is clear enough, but in itself it does not tell us when that calendrical system, including its zero point, was adopted.
It has been claimed that the origin (or year zero) in Kaliyuga was fixed by actual astronomical observation in India in 3102 BCE. This has not only been stated by Indian traditionalists, it also received endorsement and support in the eighteenth century from no less an authority than the distinguished French astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly, who computed the orbit for Halley’s comet. But as the great scientist and mathematician Laplace showed, this hypothesis is not likely to be correct. There is a clear discrepancy between the alleged astronomical observations (as reported for the zero year) and what would have been seen in the sky in 3102 BCE. Laplace had the benefit of contemporary astronomy to do this calculation quite precisely. This old calendar, ancient as it undoubtedly is, must not be taken, Laplace argued, as commemorating some actual astronomical observation.
The Indian Tables indicate a much more refined astronomy, but everything shows that it is not of an extremely remote antiquity … The Indian Tables have two principal epochs, which go back, one to the year 3102, the other to the year 1491, before the Christian era … Notwithstanding all the arguments brought forward with the interest he [Jean-Sylvain Bailly] so well knew how to bestow on subjects the most difficult, I am still of the opinion that this period [from 3102 BCE to 1491 BCE] was invented for the purpose of giving a common origin to all the motions of the heavenly bodies in the zodiac.4
Let me pause a little here to note two points of some general interest. First, Laplace is disputing here the astronomical claims – often made – as to what was actually observed in 3102 BCE, and the critique is thus both of history (of the Kaliyuga calendar) and of applied astronomy (regarding what was observed and when). Second, Laplace does not treat the dating of 3102 BCE as purely arbitrary. Rather, he gives it an analytical or mathematical status, as distinct from its astronomical standing. Backward extrapolation may be a bad way of doing history, but it is an exercise of some analytical interest of its own.
Indeed, Laplace can be interpreted as adding force to the view, which can receive support from other evidence as well, that it is mathematics rather than observational science to which ancient Indian intellectuals were inclined to give their best attention. From the arithmetic conundrums of the Atharvaveda and the numerical fascination of the epics to the grammatical tables of Pāṇini and the numbering of sexual positions by Vātsāyana, there is a remarkable obsession in ancient India with enumeration and calculation. The plethora of Indian calendars and the analytical construction of their imagined history fit well into this reading of Indian intellectual tradition.
Returning to the Kaliyuga calendar, it is also perhaps of some significance that there is no corroboration of the use of the Kaliyuga calendar in the Vedas, which are generally taken to date from the second millennium BCE. There is, in fact, plenty of calendrical discussions in the Vedas, and a clear exposition of a system in which each year consists of twelve months of thirty days, with a thirteenth (leap) month added every five years. While the oldest of the Vedas, the Rigveda, outlines the main divisions of the solar year into months and seasons (four seasons of ninety days each), the more precise calculations, including the ‘leap’ (or intercalary) months, can be found in the Atharvaveda.5 But the exact accounting system used in the Kaliyuga calculations is not found anywhere in the Vedas – at least not in the versions that have come down to us. It appears that there is no overt or even covert
reference to the Kaliyuga calendar in the Rāmāyaṇa or the Mahābhārata either. Consideration of this and other evidence even prompted Meghnad Saha and his collaborators in the Calendar Reform Committee to suggest that the Kaliyuga calendar might have taken its present form precisely at the time of Āryabhaṭa, in 499 CE. Indeed, they speculated that its analytical system is ‘a pure astronomical fiction created for facilitating Hindu astronomical calculations and was designed to be correct only for 499 AD’.
This may or may not be exactly right, but it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the Kaliyuga has not been in use much longer – if at all longer – than other old Indian calendars. The Vikram Saṃvat calendar, which is quite widely used in north India and in Gujarat, is traced to the reign of King Vikramāditya, and has a zero point at 57 BCE. But many of the accounts of the magnificent Vikramāditya are so shrouded in mystery, and there is so little firm evidence of its early use, that it is difficult to be sure of the exact history of the Vikram Saṃvat. In contrast, however, we do know that the Śaka calendar, which has a zero point (not necessarily its historical origin) in 78 CE, was in good use by 499 CE. Indeed, we know from Āryabhaṭa’s own dating of the Kaliyuga in terms of the Śaka era (421 Śaka year) that at least by then the Śaka era is well known and in good use. While there is very little written evidence that survives on the use of the Śaka calendar (or indeed any other old calendar), it is worth noting that one well-known record (the Badami inscription) dating from 465 Śaka era or 543 CE does confirm the use of the Śaka era (not very long after the Āryabhaṭa statement, dated at the 421st Śaka year, or 499 CE).