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

Written by Mihika Basu | Mumbai | Published on:February 25, 2015 2:01 am

Stating that it was “high time” one learnt to distinguish science from mythology, evidence-based reasoning from unthinking acceptance of authority or speculation and the rational from the superstitious, the guest editorial in “Current Science” journal severely criticised certain aspects of this year’s Indian Science Congress. The sessions that were held in Mumbai, according to the journal attempted to create false history of Indian science.
Current Science, published every fortnight by the Current Science Association, in collaboration with the Indian Academy of Sciences, is a leading interdisciplinary science journal from India. It was started in 1932 by the then stalwarts of Indian science, C V Raman, Birbal Sahni, Meghnad Saha, Martin Foster and S S Bhatnagar, and completed 100 volumes in 2011. The guest editorial titled “The ‘historic’ storm at the Mumbai Science Congress” was published in the latest edition.
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 continued…see details