Holly Larson

Columbia University, B.S. Candidate

Jantar Mantar: How Indian Princes Looked at the Stars

The power to control time is the greatest power of all. At the end of the Mughal Empire, the famous Taj Mahal had set the precedence for architectural displays of power in India. It was by building a set of monolithic time keeping instruments that the Maharaja Jai Singh II exhibited his command over time to his subjects and royal patrons. This remarkable set of pre-modern Astronomical observatories involves a series of enormous instruments that were erected in four Northern Indian cities over a period of 15 years. The device designs, or ‘Yantra Mantra’, represent a union of Hindu, Muslim, and European observation techniques developed prior to the early 18th century. We will discuss the way that court astronomers kept track of their calendar, told the time in Japan, Delhi and Greenwich simultaneously, as well as introduce some of the mysteries regarding how the sites were used for scientific and ritual purposes.