Cannons in the Canon: Looking for Modern Science in Ancient Indian Texts

Soon after the sad demise of Stephen Hawking, the Indian Union Minister for Science and Technology Harsh Vardhan referred to the famed scientist during the Indian Science Congress by claiming that:

Each and every custom and ritual of Hindus is steeped in science and every modern Indian achievement is in fact a continuation of our ancient India’s scientific achievements. We recently lost a renowned scientist, renowned cosmologist Stephen Hawking. He also emphatically said on record that our Vedas [earliest known collections of hymns to gods composed in Sanskrit] might have a theory which is superior to Einstein’s theory of E=mc^2.

There are books and articles that aim to prove even more: not only is modern technology the continuation of ancient Indian spiritual thought, but modern technology actually existed in ancient India (come to think about it, in that case we should not call it “modern” at all).

The Science of Sacrifice or the Sacrifice of Science?

A treatise in Sanskrit, Vymaanika Shaastra, describes the ancient Indian art of constructing aircraft. Moreover, Indian gods, such as Rama, are often described as traveling in flying chariots (called vimanas in Sanskrit). Those had to be the ancient predecessor of modern aircraft, claim a few. And what to make of the battle scenes in the epics such as Mahabharata where heroes and their foes possess powerful weapons (called astras or by other names) such as arrows capable of burning hundreds of men with one strike? Some say these had to be the world’s first rockets. An Indian military officer chanced upon during a wedding in Delhi told me that he wrote his thesis on how the technology for the German V2 rockets came from India. According to him, that knowledge had been first described in ancient Sanskrit scriptures, which the British took from India but subsequently German spies managed to steal that knowledge from the British. And here is a more recent case: among the three official “ambassadors of culture” which the current Indian government has sent to the United States, one recently spoke of yagna chikitsa (the healthcare of Vedic sacrifice) and claimed that “If a patient experiences the environment of yagna [the ancient Indian religious ritual of offering to gods], it could be therapeutic in many cases.”

The only trouble is, these are all hoaxes.

As far we know, Stephen Hawking did not say “on record” that the Vedas might contain a theory that could compete with Einstein’s. Only the Indian minister, Harsh Vardhan, went on record to claim such a thing.

The Indian epics do describe a number of fantastic weapons and powers, but so do many other ancient epics and religious texts. There is no reason to understand them literally without archaeological proof, or to treat them selectively by picking only those magical items that seem to be similar to the arms of modern warfare. How about giants – did they exist as well? To claim that a flying chariot or an exploding arrow from an epic had to correspond to real technology is to deny the immense imagination of the authors of these epics and to ignore the symbolic dimension of their narratives.

But looking for modern inventions in religious hymns such as Vedas or in the epics is only a reinterpretation. There is no denying that the epics do include such descriptions – the rest is the matter of how we understand them. A more dangerous process, I believe, is when people deliberately speak and write falsehood (and others unwittingly repeat it). While it is a marginal occurrence, one finds people who invent false treaties or attribute nonexistent quotes to real sources to support their claims.

For example, after Harsh Vardhan’s recent speech netizens promptly pointed out that no such quote by Stephen Hawking is available, and that the claim about Einstein and the Vedas was made by a fake Facebook site run in the name of Hawking by an Indian person. I also know of no evidence to support the story about the V2 rockets. Similarly, while the Vedas and the epics such as Mahabharata and Ramayana do exist and are verily ancient, the treaty on aircrafts called Vymaanika Shaastra was possibly written in the 20th century.

The Plane Truth: The Vymaanika Shaastra Hoax

The Vymaanika Shaastra, let me stress again, is a rather uncommon example of a deeply entrenched hoax. While its origins are obscure, some people – including a few crazy “UFO scholars” of the West – do believe it really is an ancient treaty on aircraft technology.

The Vymaanika Shaastra, published in 1959 and in 1973, mentions aircrafts called vimanas and some of their technology, and is said to originate from an ancient Indian sage named Bhadwaja. The editor of one of the versions, G.R. Josyer, claimed that in 1951 he was given millennia-old manuscripts, of which Vymaanika Shaastra was a part. The text was said to be dictated by a holy man named Subbaraya Shastry to his disciple, G. Venkatachala Sharma, between 1918-1923. The original text contains only a handful of short and obscure verses but it comes with a commentary by a certain Bodhananda.

Even this account is internally incoherent. Josyer, on one hand, claimed that he had received manuscripts which were thousands of years old, and at the same time wrote that the text was dictated between 1918 and 1923. If the latter is true, how does it make the text ancient? Moreover, the original treaty consists of only a few dozen verses. Why, therefore, did it take five years to dictate them? These lines, moreover, do mention vimanas, but their meaning is mostly opaque. It is mostly Bodhananda’s commentary that is more outspoken about ancient aircraft technology. Yet we do not know anything about Bodhananda and his work. The Vymaanika Shaastra came with figures, but Indian aviation experts had long ago analyzed the pictures and the text and came to the conclusion that such machines would have been unable to fly. Still, the hoax of the Vymaanika Shaastra found fertile ground in the minds of a few people.

Blame Britannia

Such claims appear not only in India and not only with regard to the Hindu religion; they are also much older than the 20th century. I am in possession of a book by a Turkish writer who made equally fantastic and false claims about inventions in the world of Islam. A few centuries back, there was also at least one Christian writer (if not more) who came to terms with Copernicus by claiming that his theory about the Earth orbiting the sun is in fact reflected in the Bible.

Apart from the obvious hoaxes, aren’t we all prone to look at the past through a contemporary lens? In the 17th century, Nilakanatha Chaturdhara, a learned priest from western India, wrote a commentary on the Mahabharata epic. He understood some of the magical weapons to be muskets and cannons.

Somehow, those that look for modern technology in ancient sources always seem to find what they already know, and not what will be invented later. In the 17th century, Indian epics and religious compositions were said by Nilakantha to contain descriptions of cannons; in the 19th century, it was claimed that ancient Indian civilizations possessed the telegraph; it is only in the 20th century that the claims about planes and rockets appeared. As paradoxical as it may sound, in these interpretations the ancient age always follows in the footsteps of the modern one.

Why, in the case of India and many other countries, do such fantastic claims or deliberate hoaxes appear more often since the 19th century? I believe we should blame colonial rhetoric.

In India, one of the stronger declarations of this sort was made by Dayananda Saraswati closer to the end of the 19th century. Not only did Saraswati claim that ancient India possessed a number of inventions and solutions (such as gunpowder), he also offered a unique vision of India’s ancient, global empire. In Saraswati’s narrative anything that in reality came from the West was already known to Indians millennia ago, and his vision of ancient India mirrored the colonial rhetoric about Great Britain: a benign, global power.

It seems clear that this was the way Saraswati wanted to digest and deal with the feeling of British supremacy and the British narrative, which claimed that India was technologically backward and needed foreign rule. While Saraswati claimed that everything good was to be found in ancient India, some biased British writers like T.B. Macaulay were of the opinion that the Indian civilization had hardly anything valuable to offer.

Saraswati initiated one of the Hindu reformist movements (the Arya Samaj) but some of his ideological legacy was also later shared by Hindu nationalists. In the long run, this line goes all the way up to modern Hindu nationalists (such as Harsh Vardhan). Some of these people, at times, tried to infuse “Vedic mathematics” (yet another hoax) in schools, or, more recently, promote the “healthcare of sacrifices.”

But while refuting such claims we should not ignore the real, outstanding achievements of the Indian civilization. It is true, for example, that zero as a symbol in the decimal system, an important milestone in global mathematics, was invented in India. Many Christians had for centuries refused to use zero in this way because of their narrow-minded religious orthodoxy. Moreover, the Indus Valley civilization was one of the first and most advanced civilizations of the ancient era. Indians have enough real, historically proven discoveries and ideas of which they can be proud. I think it is largely due to paternalistic colonial rhetoric, and the post-colonial psyche left by it, that a few Indians, instead of just being proud with the glory of their civilization, feel unnecessarily pressed to look for other “inventions,” or invent them in the process.

This, however, is still a minority. When Harsh Vardhan made his claim, it were his fellow Indians who quickly debunked it.