The NCERT’s new social sciences textbook for Class 6 mentions an Indian prime meridian, predating the one in Greenwich. The chapter, titled ‘Locating Places on the Earth’, says the Greenwich Meridian “is not the first prime meridian” and that “many centuries before Europe, India had a prime meridian of its own” which passed through the city of Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh. This meridian became “a reference for calculations in all Indian astronomical texts,” the textbook says.
The first mention of the Ujjain prime meridian can be found in the ancient Sanskrit treatise Surya Siddhanta, composed between the 4th and 8th centuries CE. The text, in its 14 chapters and 500 rhyming shlokas, contains complex ideas pertaining to the fields of astronomy, geography and mathematics — from the motion of celestial bodies to the method for calculating sine values.
According to Surya Siddhanta’s own mythology, the text was a revelation made by the Sun God (or Surya) to the asura Maya. “Thine intent is known to me; I am gratified by thine austerities; I will give thee the science upon which time is founded, the grand system of the planets,” Surya said to Maya (translated by Rev Ebenezer Burgess, 1860; edited and republished by Phanindralal Gangooly in 1935).
The concept of a prime meridian (referred to in the Surya Siddhanta simply as rekha or ‘line’) is introduced in the text’s very first chapter in reference to the method for calculating planetary position. “Multiply the daily motion of a planet by the distance in longitude of any place, and divide by its corrected circumference. The quotient, in minutes, subtract from the mean position of the planet as found, if the place be east of the rekha, add, if it be west; the result is the planet’s mean,” say verses 60 and 61 of Surya Siddhanta.
Verse 62 further provides the geographical location of where this rekha lies. “Situated upon the line which passes through the haunt of the rakshasas (the mythical Lanka) and the mountain which is the seat of the gods (Mount Meru, the axis of the world in Hindu cosmology, and for astronomers, equivalent to the North Pole), are Rohitaka (possibly Rohtak), and Avanti (present-day Ujjain),” it says.
Scholars believe Ujjain’s relative location vis-a-vis ancient trade routes had something to do with the prime meridian passing through it. “Of all the centres of Hindu culture, it lay nearest to the great ocean-route by which, during the first three centuries of our era, so important a commerce was carried on between Alexandria, as the mart of Rome, and India… That the prime meridian was made to pass through this city proves it to have been the cradle of the Hindu science of astronomy, or its principal seat during its early history,” Burgess wrote in his accompanying commentary to Surya Siddhanta.
With Surya Siddhanta becoming the most influential text in Indian astronomy, the Ujjain meridian came to be widely used by Indian astronomers and geographers. This is perhaps why Maharaja Jai Singh II built one of his five astronomical observatories (popularly known as ‘Jantar Mantars’) in Ujjain in 1725. The other four are located in Jaipur, Delhi, Mathura and Varanasi.
At the end of the day, a prime meridian is arbitrarily chosen to represent zero degrees longitude: the line dividing the planet in two halves, from which all locations east and west can be measured. Throughout history, astronomers have chosen the prime meridian based on convenience or for symbolic reasons.
For instance, 2nd century CE Alexandrian polymath Ptolemy, in his Geographia, drew his prime meridian through the Insulae Fortunatae (“Fortunate Isles”, corresponding to the present-day Canary Islands) off the western coast of Africa. This was likely because negative numbers were not yet in use in the West and these isles were among the western-most places known to humans at the time.
However, at the time of Ptolemy and Surya Siddhanta, prime meridians (and indeed all astronomy) remained niche concerns. For most people, there was no practical impact that these esoteric postulations had on their daily lives — in a primarily agricultural economy, the natural rhythms of day and night, and the coming and going of seasons sufficed as markers of time.
Although church and public clocks started to come up in Britain from the 14th century onwards (they were not terribly accurate), it was in the 18th century, with the Industrial Revolution, that clock-time assumed a central importance in the lives of the common people. This is because of the advent of the modern factory, which not only made it important to keep time, but also to make the most of it.
As British historian E P Thompson wrote: “Indeed a general diffusion of clocks and watches is occurring (as one would expect) at the exact moment when the industrial revolution demanded a greater synchronisation of labour” (“Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism”, 1967).
Thompson further explains in his classic, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), that between 1780 and 1830, “The average English working man became more disciplined, more subject to the productive tempo of “the clock”, more reserved and methodical”.
However, there was still no standardisation — each factory or church clock tower set its own time — nor the need for it.
This changed in the 19th century as technological innovations like the railways, steamships and the telegraph made the world more interconnected.
“Universal and uniform time, hailed as a lubricant for a highly interconnected world, was to permit the seamless flow of people, goods, and ideas,” Vanessa Ogle wrote in The Global History of Time 1870-1950 (2015). “Like uniform weights and measures based on the decimal system…uniform time would establish commensurability and comparability,” she wrote.
The first round of standardisation happened at the levels of nations. National times, which necessitated the creation of national meridians, were seen as means of national unification at a time when nation states were still in their infancy. They were also means of asserting control over colonial possessions.
So France had the Paris Meridian, Germany the Berlin Meridian, Denmark the Copenhagen Meridian, the British, the Greenwich Meridian, and so on. Each colonial power made its own prime meridian the reference point for the rest of the world — symbolically putting itself at the centre of the planet.
The push towards creating a single, globally-recognised prime meridian truly began in the 1870s, born out of the need to standardise ship and railway timetables. In 1884, the International Meridian Conference was organised in Washington DC in which representatives of 26 countries met and agreed to “adopt a single prime meridian for all nations, in place of the multiplicity of initial meridians which now exist”. Ultimately, the British meridian, which passed through the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, was adopted, reflecting the prevailing geopolitical realities of the late 19th century.
Adoption, however, was far from immediate or universal. For instance, Ogle points out that India saw significant nationalist opposition to adopting the Greenwich Mean Time. What paved the way for near global adoption of the Greenwich meridian were the two World Wars in the first half of the 20th century
