"Vedic Astrology": the Term

The Indian astrological tradition is widely marketed in English as “Vedic astrology”. Its own name is jyotiṣa, or jyotiḥśāstra, the science of the heavenly lights. The English label is recent and makes a claim about age that the textual record does not carry.

What stands in its place

The correction removes an antiquity claim. What it puts in its place is a better story, and one the tradition tells about itself in its own vocabulary.

Jyotiṣa is a translation tradition. It took a Greek technical vocabulary and built something with it that its lenders would not have recognised. It exported its computational astronomy westward to Baghdad in the eighth century, from where it reached Latin Europe; see The Zīj al-Sindhind. From the thirteenth century it absorbed Perso-Arabic technique in turn, under the name tājika, and Sanskrit authors wrote systematic treatises on the imported material ^{2 pp. 79-132}.

A tradition that has repeatedly absorbed foreign material and made it its own is doing something more interesting than surviving unchanged, and it is the same thing the Western lineage did. Martin Gansten has argued in print that treating the two as separate categories is a false dichotomy, one which, as usually drawn, counts Mesopotamia, Egypt, Sasanian Persia and the Arabic-speaking world as western ^{2 p. 79}.

Where the claim comes from

Antiquity inflation has more than one source, and they pull in the same direction from opposite motives. English-language marketing benefits from an ancient and unbroken pedigree. So does a nationalist historiography that prefers indigenous origins to transmitted ones. Neither is the tradition’s own scholarly position, and specialists within India have been among those correcting the record.