Origin of the Seven Weekdays
The planetary week is credited to Babylon and Rome. The Surya Siddhanta describes the same mechanism — so the piece animates the mechanism.
The Film
A short educational piece produced under Prachyam, investigating how the seven-day week's planetary naming system — commonly credited to Babylonian or Greco-Roman sources — aligns with ancient Indian astronomical texts including the Surya Siddhanta and the Bhagavatam.
How I Made It
The Surya Siddhanta assigns each of the 24 hours of the day to a celestial body in sequence, ordered by perceived speed from Saturn as slowest to the Moon as fastest; the body governing a day's first hour gives the day its name. The claim rests on that mechanism rather than on an assertion, so the piece shows it: I built loop-based animations of how the mapping functions, and of how the system travelled through Greek, Roman and Germanic civilizations before returning to India through colonial education, detached from its origins. The piece also traces the 24-hour day to early Indian texts describing the day divided into 24 horā, from ahorātra, meaning day-night. Research, scripting, editing, voiceover and animation were completed internally.
Where It Landed
The piece presents a reexamination of the origins of a timekeeping structure now in global use.
