Vistas in Astronomy, 1976, Vol. 20, p. 195. Pergamon Press. Printed in Great Britain

30. THE EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF WESTERN ASTRONOMY IN INDIA

S.M.R. ANSARI

Aligarh Muslim University, U.P., India

Although Flamsteed's Historia Coelestia Britannica and La Hire's Tabulae Astronomicae were brought to India, presumably by the Portuguese Jesuit Father Figueredo sometime in 1730, and 4 years later Father Boudier, a French Jesuit, with the aid of a telescope determined the longitude of Jaipur, yet regular Western astronomical observations were started only in 1792, when the East India Company commissioned a European wpe observatory at Madras - the forerunner of the Kodaikanal Observatory.

The old Madras Observatory came into existence due to the efforts of the mathematician and geographer Mr. Michael Topping, who was succeeded by the first astronomer Mr. John Goldingham, F.R.S. (1792--1830). In later years the astronomers T.G. Taylor, F.R.S. (1830-1846) - trained at the Greenwich Observatory under John Pond, the fifth Astronomer Royal -- Captain W.S. Jacob (1846-1859), Major W.K. Webster and Major J.F. Tennant (1859-1861), Mr. N.R. Pogson (1861-- 1891) and C. Michie Smith (1891-1899) guided and performed significant astronomical work at the observatory.

There are many important contributions to early Western astronomy by these Indian efforts. The Royal Greenwich Observatory played a relevant role in the organization of the Indian observ- atories. Here we may also mention another less known observatory at Lucknow, which was com- pleted in 1831, and which worked under the directorship of Wilcox (who died in 1848), and was equipped with astronomical instruments, as the statement goes, "just as in the Greenwich Observatory".

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