The mythos of ancient India’s scientific excellence
A few days ago, a leading newspaper carried an opinion piece on patents, which championed a baffling proposition: that patents in India should be registered in Sanskrit, too, apart from English and Hindi as is the current practice. The writer claimed this would preserve and protect India’s technological advancements while reaffirming its cultural heritage. Waxing enthusiastic about its role in history, he wrote that complex knowledge systems were codified in Sanskrit with clarity and brevity, because its “unique feature of interpretability allowed a single phrase to hold multiple meanings”. This is a fallacious and facile understanding of a complex process. Patent and other claims on intellectual property rights require precise and detailed descriptions today; a phrase and sometimes even a word, if misplaced or omitted, can lead to damaging lawsuits and stall operations of companies.
The misconceptions—and there are many—could be forgiven if the writer were a layperson. What can one say when the author is a visiting professor at the India Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi? Does Sanskrit have the vocabulary and symbols for complex chemical reactions that, for instance, would be needed to explain a new drug formulation? Or the language to describe a new molecule? Or the string theory? I would not know since I am not one of the 24,821 Indians who are listed as Sanskrit speakers (as per the 2011 Census). This, apparently, works out to 0.002 per cent of the Indian population. That is an irrelevant detail. If the Lok Sabha Speaker can ram through a proposal to have simultaneous Sanskrit translation of parliamentary proceedings despite members objecting to it as a waste of taxpayer money, why should an IIT professor not call for patent filings in Sanskrit? One of the charming reasons the academic offers is this: “Picture a courtroom debate over whether a Sanskrit shloka describes a wind turbine or a ceiling fan—it could be both enlightening and entertaining.” Indeed.
An obsession with cultural symbols and the conflating of religious mythology with India’s scientific prowess in the past are symptomatic of all that is so terribly wrong with the country today. Thus, we have something called the Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) that is being imposed on educational institutions and notably the IITs by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in order to get back to India’s “foundational values” that were impacted by modernisation and Westernisation, as one learns from a seminar on IKS held at IIT, Delhi. According to a leading light of this school of thought, “the industrialization from the mid-19th century had disrupted the cultural and social structures that had helped in sustaining our communities for generations.”
Thus, we also have a new breed of academics as directors at IITs, the premier technological institutions in the country, men chosen in the image of the political leadership and who make the headlines for visiting gaushalas (cattle rescue centres) and exorcism. If the director of IIT, Madras, sings the praises of cow urine and its ability to cure a range of diseases with its supposed anti-bacterial and anti-fungal properties, the head of IIT, Mandi, is warning his students against meat-eating, which he says caused the disastrous landslides in Uttarakhand in 2023. This being the state of IITs, which are the premier institutes of technological education, one can only wonder what is happening in universities. These worthies, however, are just a small part of the problem.
The All India People’s Science Network (PSN), a collective of over 40 people’s science organisations that aims to promote a scientific temper and rational thought in the country, has been dismayed by the imposition of the ill-conceived IKS in the education system—from schools to universities, centres of excellence like the IITs and research organisations—under the government’s ideologically minted National Education Policy. These institutions are implementing courses that “misrepresent, simplify and distort” the rich history of India’s traditional knowledge, warns PSN, and it has opened the door for individuals with naive or pseudoscientific views on Indian science and mathematics to gain influence. The incursion of “regressive IKS-related concerns” into research institutions and universities has become commonplace, says the network, and creates a persistent challenge for rational and scientific inquiry.
India’s hubris about its past glory, mostly imagined, under the BJP regime has turned it into a country that prefers to look backward. It might have its Chandrayaan moments, but that’s about it. By the way, the narrative in India that it was the first to reach the dark side of the moon is strictly not true; China had done it years earlier. In 2019, it became the first country to land a spacecraft on the far side of the moon when its Chang’e 4 mission carried the rover Yutu-2 to the Von Kármán crater. We do not recognise such facts in this country because it tends takes the shine off our me-too achievements, which are hyped beyond the pale by the media.
The truth is that in terms of scientific breakthroughs, India has become irrelevant in the world. When was the last time we unleashed a frontier technology, such as 6G, artificial intelligence, bullet trains that zip at 350 km per hour, sodium batteries or futuristic aviation models that made the world sit up? China comes up with cutting-edge technology with such stunning regularity that no one questions its supremacy. In January, aviation experts were overawed with China’s “bullet in the sky”, the prototype of a futuristic ultrafast aircraft that cruises at a mind-blowing Mach 4, that is, four times the speed of sound. It was unveiled in Chengdu on January 20.
China’s trailblazing breakthroughs come from its forward-looking education system. Universities are crucibles of innovation, churning out focused young people, many of whom obtain doctorates on forward engineering concepts. In this system, new or nascent scientific and technological knowledge is acquired in university laboratories and then applied in a top-down fashion for the development of commercial products. And yes, the Chinese, too, are proud of their cultural moorings; they do not speak about it, but it is never forgotten. The hypersonic jet has cultural weight. It is called Cuantianhou, meaning Soaring Monkey, the name given to Sun Wukong, one of the best-known figures in Chinese literature and mythology. The Soaring Monkey, aviation experts have gushed, is a significant leap forward in aerospace technology.
Which is the last moonshot idea Indians had?