Introduction

While certain Orientalists and other European scholars in India were still considering the possibilities for philosophical and practical engagement with Indian astronomy, some individuals focused more squarely on researches in astronomy traceable to problems and methods emanating from contemporary Europe. With this increasing sense that pursuing modern astronomy in India meant practising a Western science in an Indian context, exploration of the paradigms of Indian astronomy appeared to become less and less significant. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Europeans in India were moving towards observatory mode, with an observatory being established at Madras in 1786. In this context, historical glances back to the more recent period of Zij astronomy – associable with Islamic influence – under the rule of Jai Singh (1688–1743) to some extent reflected continuing efforts to research the past in pursuit of a practical engagement with Indian astronomers. However, the dominant theme of the early nineteenth-century European engagement with astronomy in India was the further establishment of observatories for the practice of modern Western astronomy, under the aegis of the East India Company. Though the historical literature has considered Madras in some depth, arrangements in Bombay and Calcutta have been largely ignored, and so in this respect, there is much more to be learned from the East India Company records. Europeans took to the practice of modern astronomy in and around these observatories in the coastal metropolises.