Late C19th Indian Bronze Universal Equinoctial Ring Traveller's Sundial Sanskrit

Description

Original, late nineteenth century, bronze equinoctial ring dial, inscribed in sanskrit. Jaipur, India. Diameter 7.1 inches.
Universal equinoctial ring dials, often highly elegant and ornate, are a common sight in European scientific instrument collections. A type of portable sundial developed in early seventeenth-century Europe, they can be employed to tell the local time at any known latitude. This dial is  similar to specimens in museum collections around the world that challenge the traditional historiography of scientific instruments: Inscribed in Sanskrit with letters and numerals denoting indigenous Indian astrological signs and units of time, they were produced in late nineteenth-century Jaipur, long after clocks and watches became common and sundials supposedly ‘obsolete’.
Rather than having been used as timekeeping devices, these instruments were likely used either as pedagogical instruments to teach astrology and/or astronomy, possibly similarly to British-made dials, such as the Newman dial. Alternately, they may have been produced as ornamental souvenirs for Victorian British tourists who used objects they perceived as ‘authentic’, to reinforce their own constructed narrative of an exotic, antiquated astronomical tradition in South Asia.
Their mixed provenance—made in Jaipur by indigenous artisans, but featuring contributory elements of the astral traditions of both India and Europe—means they belie simple classification as either European or indigenous Indian instruments, or as ‘old’ or ‘obsolete’ devices.
See Whipple Museum of the History of Science collection, University of Cambridge, U.K., for an almost identical example.
This informaion comes from research for MPhil studies by Francis Newman.
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