Astronomical observatories of Jai Singh

Explore the eighteenth-century Indian astronomical observatories called the Jantar Mantars, massive, stunning structures built to observe and understand the heavens between 1724 and 1730, Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II of Jaipur constructed five astronomical observatories, called Jantar Mantars in northern India. The author first encountered the Jantar Mantars, as Jai Singh’s observatories have come to be known, in 1989. He was so deeply impressed that he returned several times in the decades that followed to photograph and learn about them. Now, nearly 300 years after they were created, the observatories retain a powerful presence, conveying silently through their forms the beauty and mystery of our relationship with the heavens. This book celebrates the Jantar Mantars through combinations of text and image designed to both inform and inspire. It features a section explaining the astronomy and design Jai Singh used in his observatories. When Jai Singh designed the observatories, one of his foremost objectives was to create astronomical instruments that would be more accurate and permanent than the brass instruments in use at the time. His solution was to make them large, sometimes really large, and to make them of stone. Jai Singh built 15 different types of instruments. Many were based on earlier Hindu and Arabic designs, but seven were of his own invention. In all, he constructed 39 masonry instruments. Jai Singh conceived of an observatory with the stability and permanence of masonry, and the capacity for accuracy arising from large scale.

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