:: Shekhar Bhatia

A matter of time

Shekhar Bhatia

Augest.28 : My father was an atheist, a sceptic and a rationalist. In short, a man of science and reason. One of his dying desires was to learn how to use a computer so that he could get on to the Internet and explore the wealth of information.

His knowledge came from books that he would buy from second-hand bookshops, pick up from my shelves and borrow from the various libraries he was a member of. He could often answer questions for which I would have to do a Google search. For example, the name of the planet shining at a given time, when to go to the beach to be just in time for the high tide, how to set the sundial we have outside our house, and which festival will fall on what date.

Diwali is early this year — compared to last year. It’s on Saturday, 17 October; last year it was on 28 October. All I had to do to get this information was get on to the Net. The first hit gave me the Diwali dates till the year 2022. My father, however, used to get the dates by looking them up in what I call his little blue book: "Lahiri’s Indian Ephemeris of Planets’ Positions".

An ephemeris is a set of charts that enable one to determine the position of astronomical objects in the sky at a given time. I never bothered to look inside the book until recently when a friend remarked that all festivals are early this year and Diwali is on a Saturday ("One holiday lost", she said), and I recalled how my father used to get the dates.

I found a copy of the 2008 edition (it’s updated every year) among my books. At first glance, the 180-page Ephemeris looks more like a scientific journal — page after page of complicated astronomy symbols, numbers and charts. On closer scrutiny, there is a mine of interesting information on the positions of the sun and the moon, stars and planets, on sunrise and sunset, and of course holidays. In fact it is the last word on festivals and holidays. And it also tells you about the marriage season and supposedly auspicious days based on the Hindu signs of the zodiac.

Until the mid-50s, there was no attempt to unify the various calendars being used in India. The administrative services largely used the Gregorian calendar, handed down from the British. There were also many religious calendars — the Islamic calendar is based on a lunar cycle and the Christians used the Gregorian calendar based on the solar cycle. The Hindus, however, had many religious calendars. Each state had its own set of charts that it followed to declare the dates for Hindu festivals and religious holidays. The result was total confusion.

In 1952, the government set up a Calendar Reform Committee to unify these assorted Hindu calendars in a scientific manner. The committee was chaired by eminent physicist Meghnad Saha, also the founder of the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Calcutta that was later named after him.

In a four-year-long study, it identified 33 Hindu calendars that where in use in India — all of which were variants of the ancient treatise of Indian astronomy called Surya Siddhanta. The date of this treatise is uncertain — somewhere around 500 CE, at a time when Indian astronomy was co-enriched by advances in Babylonian and Greek astronomy. You will find references to it if you read about the 5th century Indian mathematician astronomer Aryabhata. The text describes a luni-solar calendar, a type of calendar that takes into account the phase of the moon as well as aspects of the solar cycle.

The committee sought to standardise an Indian system of calendars — to try and reconcile traditional practices with standard astronomical concepts. From what I gather from the blue book — and many subsequent searches on the net — it must have been a complicated and, perhaps, also controversial exercise, a mix and match of science and cultures, of astronomy and religion.

Their recommendation was to use the Gregorian solar calendar for civil purposes, and they created a unified luni-solar calendar for Hindu religious use. While this attempt at unification may not have entirely succeeded (different regions still adopt slightly different calendars), it was certainly a progressive step in the right direction.

Like calendars, most Indian cities used to keep their own time. Later, there was Calcutta time and Bombay time with an hour’s difference between the two, and after the British East India Company introduced railways to India in 1853, there was the in-between Madras time (also called "Railway time") — perhaps because the British had set up an observatory there. Every day, at a fixed time, the railways would send out — via telegraph — a time signal to synchronise clocks.

The calendar reform committee included a man named N.C. Lahiri, who was then in charge of what is now known as the Positional Astronomy Centre in Calcutta and who also published the first edition of the Indian Ephemeris, and whose 2008 edition is what I am referring to.

It’s not a book for a lay reader — in fact it’s quite technical, full of intimidating symbols, numbers and charts. But if you want to know the name of the shining object next to the moon, when is the next eclipse and the best place to view it, or have a basic interest in astronomy, it’s worth the Rs 80. If you are inclined towards astrology, it also tells you how to "erect" your birth chart. But most of all, it’s the last word on holidays.

Shekhar Bhatia can be contacted at shekhar.bhatia@gmail.com