An Illustration from the Sanskrit scripture Vymaanika-Shaastra ascribed to the great sage of ancient India, Maharshi Bharadwaja

by B B Singh

The Indian Science Congress is holding its annual meeting in Mumbai with the theme, “Science and Technology of Human Development”, where several Nobel laureates are participating. A great controversy has arisen on a symposium entitled “Ancient Indian Sciences through Sanskrit”. Many Indian scientists believe, and not unreasonably, that ancient India was far advanced in sciences, be it aviation technology, missiles and rocketry with far more devastating and more accurately targeted devices than the today’s thermonuclear bombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles or preventive and curative medical sciences and biotechnological achievements like interspecies organ transplant and reproduction, in vitro fertilisation, and human cloning. These are described in Indian scriptures as stories.

There are a large number of Indian scientists who are willing to accept these only as stories or fiction and no more, but they ignore the fact that the ancient scriptures now available in the present written form are not technical scientific journals but records of incidents described for the public much like reporting in today’s dailies, weeklies and monthlies that are read to learn what is happening in the scientific fields. They hardly bother to read the scientific journals with technical details. For instance, when on July 5, 1996, Ian Wilmut and his colleagues at the Roslin Institute announced that an ewe named Dolly has been asexually born (cloned) from a somatic cell nuclear transfer technique, the public came to know of it through newspapers and magazines in a non-technical story-like manner. The technical aspect was published for the scientific community in the most prestigious peer-reviewed journal Nature 380, 1996. The public never knew nor would bother to know the details of the technology or the science behind it but the event was well-publicised as a story.

In this particular context, one must remember that Indian scriptures have been put to writing on the basis of verbal descriptions of the incidents as stories passed on from generation to generation to instill public faith in religion. Unfortunately, the technical details behind those incidents have been lost in antiquity being way back in time when there were no scripted documents and became part of mythology. Furthermore, those were the days of secrecy and knowledge was transferred in the guru-shishya tradition. Nonetheless, it will be hard to deny those incidents and harder to believe. Consider the case of cloning itself. We find Ramayan describing cloning of Rama’s ancestor King Nimi into king Mithi who was the ancestor of Sita; the Mahabharata describes Prithu and Nishad as the clones of King Venu. As per the Markandeya Puran the demon Raktabeej produced numerous clones from his blood and for Durga to win over him, the goddess Kali was summoned to gulp the blood to stop it from falling on earth. God Ganesha is described to have been produced from the sweat with skin tissues of his mother Parvati—a real achievement for a male clone from a female donor. None of these writings describe the technical details of the process but provide imagination on cloning being perhaps prevalent in ancient India. These writings are far back in history. Lord Ganesha is also an example of interspecies organ transplant. The birth of the learned sage Gokarna from a cow is a case of interspecies reproductive process. The Mahabharata fame sage Dronacharya is believed to have been born from an artificial womb.

Why any controversy should appear if Capt. Anand J Bodas presents a paper on “Ancient Indian Aviation Technology” and describes that the ancient aeroplanes could fly forward and backwards as well as sideways and from planet to planet? On the contrary, it should provide inspiration to think in new dimensions. Didn’t the Wright brothers derive the imagination to design their flying machine after watching the flying birds? Thomas Edison developed the electric bulb guided by the light coming from burning wood, coal and oil. The idea of steam engine came from the kettle lid that rattled when the water started boiling inside. Apples had been falling from the trees for millennia, but it was Newton’s imaginative mind that worked. They were original thinkers whose imagination was triggered by small incidents leading to major scientific advances.

It appears that there are basically two types of scientific innovators. The first ones are innovators in totality who conceive the idea that may have never existed before. They derive inspiration from events, incidents and traditions occurring in their surroundings or even from folk stories floating around. The other ones are the incremental innovators who work on existing objects and ideas to bring some newness therein. Development of several modern drugs from Ayurvedic texts and folklores fall in this category. Many Indian scientists belong to this category. They prefer to follow what they have learnt in their colleges or is published in journals. They consider knowledge as the ultimate and the habit of loose adventurism, ingenuity and originality. This happens even in contemporary subjects like cold-fusion or low-energy nuclear reactions which is still searching a respectable acceptance in the scientific community, particularly in India. Such incremental innovators often overlook that there could be many more things to be explained or experimented upon beyond the existing in scientific literature. The stories that have existed for thousands of years and the events that have been occurring ever since the Earth was created fail to trigger their imagination to explore novelties. The events described in Indian scriptures remain a pseudo-science for them till some one from the Western world proves otherwise. Human cloning is an example which was merely a story or a pseudo-science till Dolly was cloned.

It cannot be denied that some scientists have tried to test the ancient claims using the presently available instruments and methodologies. They invariably fail because the scriptures do not provide the details for testing or manufacturing. This encourages them to proclaim that science is being mixed with politics and ideology. How long our Indian scientists will wait for others to discover something new which we will follow up claiming to be frontline researches? Why everything in ancient Indian scriptures is only superstition and fails to trigger our imagination? Edison, the Wrights, Newton and others alike did not have access to any such trigger in their scriptures. They had to hunt for it from nature. The Indian scientists are lucky.

The author is a practising lawyer and a retired scientist formerly with BARC, Mumbai, and IAEA, Vienna.