Editorial slams attempt to create ‘false history’of Indian science at meet

During a session on “Ancient Indian sciences through Sanskrit” on January 4 at the Congress hosted by Mumbai University, the retired principal of a pilot training centre, Captain Anand Bodas, presented a paper, claiming that the science of building and flying a plane was recorded by Maharishi Bharadwaj in Brihad Vimana Shastra, several millenia before the Wright Brothers built an aeroplane. This paper hogged the headlines and created a lot of controversy at the cost of other scientific breakthroughs and findings.

“The debates surrounding the Congress generated specific controversies. The first concerned ancient Indian aviation technology. A presentation made on the subject based on Bruhat Vimana Shastra attributed to Maharshi Bharadwaj and Vaimanika Sastra (VS) by G R Josyer, described four types of ‘vimanas’ from these ‘ancient’ books. One of these vimanas was supposed to fly around Mach 10, another had a base exceeding 300 m in diameter; but curiously there is not a word on the crucial question of weights.

These designs have been shown to be scientifically unsound in a critical analysis of VS (Scientific Opinion, 1974) by a group of reputed scientists in the Departments of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. For example, the designs violated Newton’s laws and even got the sign wrong for the thrust of their engines,” read the guest editorial by Prof Roddam Narasimha, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research. He is at present DST Year-of-Science Professor 2013-2017.

It goes on to say that the work seems traceable to an original, “dictated by a self-taught, impoverished but serious Sanskrit scholar in Karnataka”, sometime during 1900-1922, and could not have been Vedic by any criterion. “This effort at creating a false history of Indic science is a spectacularly bad example of the absurd lengths to which attempts at glorification of our past can go,” the editorial said.

In a telephonic interview with the The Indian Express, Narasimha said, “The history of Indian science, especially early Indian science, is fascinating, provided we can learn to look at it objectively. “There are, however, two camps. One claims that our ancients knew all about the branches of modern science and technology, ranging from relativity and quantum mechanics to stem-cell biology and aerospace technology. The other camp dismisses any claim about past achievements as dubious, if not absurd. But I believe that both camps have gone too far and are wrong. For instance, surgery did exist in ancient India. But to say that everything from quantum mechanics to stem-cell research was done in ancient India is totally wrong,” he said.

Narasimha said while many institutes claimed that history of science was of no value, it was important in many different ways. “There are reliable accounts of the history of science, but they are usually meant for scholars and do not trickle down to others,” he said.

mihika.basu@expressindia.com