Subaji Bapu was a Marathi-speaking astrologer (jyotisha) of Central India, and enjoyed the patronage of the British civil servant and Orientalist Lancelot Wilkinson.
During the 1830s, when Wilkinson served as the East India Company's political agent in the Central Indian cities such as Bhopal and Sehore, Orientalist journals featured Subaji prominently.
According to him, the ancient Indian astronomers greatly admired "the learned men of the West" (the Yavanas), unlike the Puranas which denounced those foreigners as the lowest of the low.
His main aim was to spread an accurate understanding of physical science among the Indians; a secondary benefit of this would be to showcase the Puranic cosmography as inaccurate, thus leading to a decline in the prestige of the Brahmins and the popularity of Hinduism.
[5] According to Wilkinson, Subaji "lamented that his life had been spent in maintaining foolish fancies, and spoke with a bitter indignation against all those of his predecessors who had contributed to the willful concealment of the truths".
According to an Asiatic Society meeting record, he was also given two silver inkstands "representing a jotishi pandit seated between two globes, expounding their use from the Siddhāntas — and around the stand, richly embossed, the twelve signs of the zodiac — a Sanskrit couplet on each expressing that it was presented by the Governor General in Council".
Wilkinson's work was published with the title The Wujra Soochi: or Refulation [sic] of the Arguments upon which the Brahmanical Institution of Caste is Founded".