Today's date, September 14th, has been firmly imprinted in the minds of the GT1588 team thanks to the work of a remarkable astrophysicist at the world's foremost space agency.
Back in 2008, the team was busy with the painstaking process of fact-checking the manuscript of a book that was due to be released on the tercentary anniversary of Guru Gobind Singh's passing away in October 1708.http://punjabiturban.com/videos.php
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The book was titled 'In the Masters Presence: The Sikhs of Hazoor Sahib', and it told the hidden history of the Sikhs of Central India, where Guru Gobind Singh spent his last days.
The authors had come across the traditional account of how the Tenth Guru went to the camp of a Bairagi holyman, Madho Das, nestled in the jungle on the banks of the Godavari River near the village of Nanded. This remarkable man would later become famous as the Guru's disciple, Banda Bahadur.According to the tradition, Banda had briefly left his camp shortly before the Guru arrived there unannounced. While waiting for him to return, the Guru ordered his warriors to slaughter some of the holyman's goats. These were to be cooked for a meal, and the poor locals were invited to partake alongside the Sikhs.
The cracks of the Sikhs' rifles attracted Madho Das' attention. When he returned to his dwelling, the blood-soaked scene that presented itself naturally shocked him.
Significantly, the traditional account aligns this event with a solar eclipse, a factor that would have made the killings even more ominous in 18th-century India.
The authors of 'In the Master's Presence' had been unable to pin down a date for this historic meeting. They had, however, come across references that placed it sometime in the middle of September 1708.
When our resident cynic, Amandeep Singh Madra, reviewed this part of the manuscript, he immediately raised a red flag. It was suspected that the traditional account - which would probably have been transmitted orally before being reduced to writing several generations down the line - had been intentionally 'sexed' up by an over-zealous Sikh devotee with the inclusion of a dramatic astronomical incident.
Given the rarity of these solar events, the limited visibility of eclipses and the fact that the Guru was only in Nanded for a few months, it seemed to be a relatively simple case of proving whether or not the event occurred by finding out if a solar eclipse visible in India actually happened in September 1708. If it didn't, then the entire account of the meeting was potentially corrupted and, hence, difficult to rely upon.
Hampered somewhat by being located in an Italian hotel room during the fact-checking phase, Amandeep turned to the internet in his search for answers.
He discovered that 300-year old eclipses are not widely reported. However, through a sereis of phone calls to various Californian universities and research institutes, he was eventually put in touch with an amazing NASA astrophysicist, Fred Espanak.
Fred was leading a project to map 5,000 years of eclipses around the world. Buried deep within his arcane research lay a truth that was simultaneously stunning and spine-chilling.
On 14 September 1708 a solar eclips was seen in Eastern and Northern India. Standing in Madho Das's encampment on the banks of the Godavari River in Central India, Guru Gobind Singh would have seen it as a partial eclipse.
When the discovery was shared with the team, jaws quite literally dropped. The traditional account had proved accurate in this important detail, so it remained in the book. In the footnote on page 6, we credited Fred Espanak's work. Today, we would like to thank him again for his role in bringing the often distant worlds of astrophysics and Sikh history together.
