Celestial Observations Associated with Krishna

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"aareni" <aareni> wrote:

 

Dear Kalyana Raman: After my discussions with you I decided to share

the following work of mine that has been accepted for publication in

the 'Indian Journal of History of Science'. I am here posting only

some salient points. I can send the material as a pre-print to any

one who is genuinely interested and is willing to disclose his/her

name and real postal address by e.mail. I have sent a copy to you

already.

RN Iyengar

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Introduction

Mahaabhaarata contains, besides eclipse and planetary positions,

curious statements about a few stars. Several Puraanas that deal

with the life and times of Krshna also describe observations of the

sky, in the form of eclipses and comets. The present study

investigates whether the possible time periods of these observations

are harmonious with the date of 1493-1443 BC obtained previously for

the eclipse and planetary positions of Mahaabhaarata.

Krishna as a historical person has been a subject of continued

discussion. The belief about his historicity is anchored in an

unbroken cultural tradition supported largely by the epic MB, its

appendix Hari-vamsha and a few other Puraanas. In the absence of

archaeological evidences, investigations on the historical aspect of

the tradition have heavily depended on the above texts. However, the

texts as available now are not even homogenous, having undergone

additions and alterations by more than one person at different

dates. Several scholars in the past have studied the voluminous

textual collection from the perspective of what may be called

Purānic

paleontology. The major effort in this direction has been to trace

genealogies of kings and sages of ancient India. Pargiter(1) was

perhaps the first to have undertaken this type of work to demonstrate

that a historical tradition is embedded in the disordered layers of

these texts. Investigation along this line has been pursued by

Pusalker(2), Bhargava(3) and Sircar(4) among others. The second line

of work has been to study the relation between archaeological

findings and Puranic texts. This appears to have been successful for

the period after 500 BC. Prior to this period, the relationship

between the archaeological findings and the ancient texts are not yet

unequivocally understood5. A third approach to the texts has been

through archaeo-astronomy. Vedic literature is rich in celestial

information but is couched in a metaphorical language that is not

always easy to decode. The epics MB, Ramayana and a few Purānas

contain statements about eclipses and other phenomena. Study of this

type of information continues to attract attention, since some of

these are dateable. Recently the present author investigated the

eclipse and planetary positions mentioned in MB(6,7). The effort was

to know whether these are internally consistent among themselves to

be considered as credible historical observations. The period 501-

3000 BC was searched and it was found that the observations are

indeed consistent and in all likelihood should have been observed

during the epoch 1493-1443 BC(6). Extending the search period up to

3250 BC did not change the above conclusion(7). Two comments are

possible on this result. One may argue that the identified period

may represent only the probable time of the composition of the text

and not necessarily that of Krishna, who could have lived earlier to

the above time window. On the other hand, one can hold the view that

the text itself may belong to a much later period with only memories

of ancient happenings recounted in a poetic fashion. Both these

arguments are sound, but it is easy to observe that in either case

the above identified period should have been central to the over all

tradition of Krishna as a historical person. However, MB is not the

exclusive source for all that is carried on in the collective memory

of the country about the historical Krishna. Thus, a natural

question would be what relation MB has with other texts such as Hari-

vamśa (HV), Skānda-purāna (SP), Visnu-

purāna (VP), Bhāgavata-purāna

(BP) and a few others, that refer to Krishna and his times. The aim

of the present study is to see whether the celestial observations

given in some of these texts synchronize with the date obtained

previously from MB, namely 1493-1443 BC. MB itself contains

references to several obscure sky observations, some of which need

not be reconcilable with circa 1500 BC. For example,

Kārtikeya's

birth in the Pleiades, his subsequent falling on earth as Skanda and

a severe famine faced by Visvamitra are narrated in MB, not as

contemporaneous events, but as ancient history (itihaaasam

puraatanam). This has been discussed by the present author elsewhere

(8) and hence will not be taken up here.

 

Discussion and Conclusion:

The effort in this paper has been to see whether celestial

observations mentioned in ancient texts, in relation to Krishna and

his times, are consistent among themselves or not. The texts

considered are MB, HV, SP, VP and BP. Several other Purānās

also

narrate the story of Krshna, but progressively omit astronomical

information and concentrate only on mythology. Thus, a discernable

trend of these texts is that those called itihaasa (history) have

been structured to retain their chronological perspective in terms of

eclipse occurrences and other celestial events. This is particularly

true with MB and HV and to some extent with SP. It is seen that

taking all the above books together, consistency in celestial

happenings demands that these observations should be assigned to the

period 1543-1443 BC. This result is heavily influenced by MB(6,7),

but the other texts do not contradict this conclusion. Infact they

support this as in PKM, where the lunar eclipse introduces a

stringent constraint on the MB observations, but fits in neatly to

1480 BC. Similarly, narrating the last days of Krishna, PKM mentions

a comet that is not in MB. However, this fits in well with appearance

of Halley's comet in 1445 BC, a date that is too close to the figure

of 1443-1444BC for the last eclipse of MB identified previously(6).

Such correspondences between different texts cannot be coincidences,

but are indicators of over all consistency in the tradition of

Krishna as a historical person. There is another internal

information that supports the above period as the historical period.

This is the traditional chronology between Parīkshit, grandson

of

Arjuna of MB and the historical Mauryas. The relevant texts appear

in VP (IV. Ch. 24) and BP (XII. Ch.1 and 2). Thesare not celestial

observations and hence not discussed here further, but have been

thoroughly discussed previously by others. Majumdar(18), commenting

on this chronology concludes that as per these texts, two dates

emerge for the MB war namely 1900 BC and 1450 BC in round figures.

The latter figure is harmonious with the results of the present

investigation based only on celestial observations found in MB, HV,

SP, VP and BP.

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