The Observatory at Jaipur

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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Observatory in Jaipur with its vast and beautiful instruments built to make astronomical measurements of the stars. Commissioned in the early 18th century by the Rajput prince and child prodigy, Jai Singh, it was at the centre of attempts to marry hundreds of years of Indian and Persian astronomical tradition. The Observatory was also at the very centre of the city which was laid out according to astrological principles. Jai Singh’s observatory was the cutting edge of Indian astronomy but also a repository for aeons of Hindu and Islamic intellectual life. The instruments were extraordinarily accurate for the time but used no lenses and were built of…