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Hello, if you travel to the city of Jaipur in northern India,

you'll find at its heart a palace,

and at the heart of the palace,

there's something rather unusual,

a plot filled with great sculptural shapes with curved white walls curious niches and

staircases into the sky. This collection of strange and beautiful things may look like

art and indeed may have become art, but it began a science.

It's an observatory and it was built in the early 18th century by the Rajput Prince Jai Singh.

Jai Singh's observatory was the cutting edge of Indian astronomy at the time, but also a repository

for eons of Hindu and Islamic intellectual life and a record of Indian astronomy on the

cusp of colonialism.

With me to discuss the Observatory Jaipur,

I Chris Minkowski, Professor in Sanskrit

at the University of Oxford,

David Arnold, Professor of Asian and Global History

at the University of Warwick, and Chandrika Call

in Modern History at the University of St Andrews. Chandrika Call, the Observatory is to be found in

the city of Jaipur. It was built by Jai Singh. Can you tell us something about him?

Sure. Jai Singh was born in the 1780s to a family of Rajput rulers called the Kachvahas who traced their lineage right back to the

solar dynasty and the house of the god Ram. He himself is considered to have been a child

...