Bastion of Free Speech

Have you come across any good nonsense recently? See how this stacks up with what you may have? I have a recent lecture "High Technology in Ancient Sanskrit Literature" by CSR Prabhu, Senior Technical Director, National Informatics Center (NIC), Hyderabad as a part of the three-day Indo-Nepal Sanskrit Conference at the Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeeth. Incidentally the NIC is a part of the Government of India’s Planning Commission and is tasked with the responsibility of collating and analyzing the huge volumes of data the Planning Commission presumably requires go about its work. The lecture is full of the stuff that Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi is full off and I would not be surprised one bit if destiny suddenly gives Prabhu’s career a major lift.

The Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeeth is a quasi-governmental institution being part of the Hindu religion regeneration activities of the Tirupati Tirumala Devasthanam (TTD). The TTD is a supposedly autonomous body, but for all practical purposes an instrument of the AP government to manage the Venkateshwara temple’s affairs and use its large and constantly replenishing coffers foster the Hindu faith, propagate the magical powers of Lord V and persuade people to rely on him for deliverance and for sundry gratifications. Such is the governmental grip on the TTD that even the dimensions, weight and content of the laddu prasadam are matters of state policy. Yet we call ours a secular state?

A goodly part of the spiritual mumbo-jumbo marketed by the TTD has to be around the preservation of Sanskrit, which we have now for long internalized to be the language of the Hindu gods. Convenient brahminical logic favors this, for the gods couldn’t be speaking in Hindi, which we know for that is less than a couple of centuries old. They couldn’t be speaking in Tamil for that is a Dravidian language and our gods are mostly, if not all, Aryan. It must be Sanskrit for it is the oldest Indic language and was in use as long back as 1200 BC and if the universe began in Banaras that’s just fine. And it is only Sanskrit that can open the doors to the rich world of Vedic science.

Since the gods must have existed from the times the universe began transiting from nothingness to initiating atoms, must we presume Sanskrit to be older than 1200 BC? Whatever be the reasons, we are apparently to believe that the gods do not listen to us unless beseeched in Sanskrit. Which is presumably why the TTD propagates Sanskrit by organizing conferences such as the one our Mr. Prabhu of the NIC addressed.

Whatever be its age, today Sanskrit is not only the language of the dead, it is dead as a language if the essential meaning of language is that it is a means of communicating, for hardly anybody communicates in Sanskrit. In fact it ceased to be in common usage even during the Mauryan age when the dominant language was Pali. Today it seems prevalent only in two places. One is in our Hindu temples where the priests use it to propitiate the gods on our behalf. The other is in All India Radio (AIR), which has regular news bulletins in Sanskrit even though there may be no listeners, presumably to remind our non-temple going majority that there are Sanskrit readers certainly if not speakers still in India. If there is a third place it is used, it must be the Murli Manohar Joshi household. Why? Because there is much in common between what this one time Physics professor who is the current HRD minister believes and what our Mr. Prabhu, a senior technical director with the NIC, recently presented in what was presumably a conference of Sanskrit scholars. That he is the HRD minister is not happenstance or even coincidence. It is quite deliberate.

Prabhu’s thesis is that “the pre-Mahabharata period was an age of high technology which was ignored in the medieval period due to reasons not known.” We know the medieval period to be the period from about 1000AD to 1500AD. Mohammed bin Kasim came to Sind in 998 AD and so we have a pretty good corollary to deduce that our past prowess began to be ignored in this country with the onset of the Muslim domination of India. But that is another discussion for another time. The thrust of Prabhu’s lecture apparently was that “India had a treasure trove of hitech warfare technology that even the mighty west does not possess. The Brahmashastra and Vimana used in the pre-Mahabharata period were nothing but the earlier versions of today’s nuclear weapons and spacecraft.” That ignorance apparently persists, for our Light Combat Aircraft has barely begun to fly even after a decade and a half and several thousand crores of rupees.

Prabhu then is reported to have quoted from the texts “of a great scholar, Subbaraya Sastry, who, in a state of yogic trance, is said to have orally dictated the spacecraft technology in a period somewhere between 1875 and 1919, which was recorded by his disciples.” Our scientist from the NIC then helpfully adds that the “text contains technical details on assembling, fabricating and erecting a spacecraft, the metals, semi-conductors, advanced alloys used and other minute aeronautical information.”

What these details are is even more interesting. For instance one of the alloys is said to be made by using a cactus called “Vajrathundam”. And why not? After all did not that other great homegrown scientist, Ramar Pillai from near Coimbatore, extract petrol from herbs and which feat several of our great leaders like the self-styled rationalist, Karunanidhi, and the former physics professor from Allahabad hailed as a great triumph of indigenous science and native scientific achievement? Apparently in Vedic science, like in Swadeshi economics, all sorts of convenient miracles are possible!

The newspapers recently carried an item that the Mazagaon Docks is incorporating stealth technology for the next generation of warships for the Indian Navy. Instead of wasting huge amounts of public money on development costs, the Indian Navy would probably be better off if it consulted our Mr. Prabhu of the NIC who says “the spacecraft could become invisible on its own. The lead alloy (Thamogarbha loha) used in making the body of the spacecraft would absorb light around it in a photo chemical reaction that would make it disappear.” Methinks that a warship made of lead alloy would become invisible to the naked eye and to surface radar because its leaden weight would pull it down into the dark bottom of the ocean. But then I did not study Physics at Allahabad University.

There is much more of this stuff from where it comes. I have heard some of it before. Our former physics professor from Allahabad is known to be full of these instances of our former greatness. What was the Brahmashastra, if not a hydrogen bomb? Arjuna on a horse drawn chariot wielding nuclear weapons is perhaps the inspiration for our nuclear ready armed forces, which also has the worlds only horse cavalry in active deployment.

Whatever did happen to this great country of the past then? Didn’t you know that it was a nuclear holocaust reduced us to our current state, an impoverished, backward and suffering country that was occupied by foreigners for most of the past two millennia? Uranium and plutonium isotopes have half-lives of more than 40000 years and surely some of it should be sending Geiger counters into a ticking frenzy. But logic is of no use to the believer, particularly if you were educated in the Physics Department of Allahabad University, which can boast of not one but two Vedic physicists Prof. Rajendra Singh being the other one. Now we can perhaps understand why their former student, VP Singh, is so addled?

Many of us would have heard sometime or the other that Hanuman, the android god, could go to the Himalayas to fetch sanjeevani to revive the stricken Lakshmana and return in a flash because he had a hypersonic plane. It's this kind of a plane that Dr. Kalam wants to build all over again spending zillions when it might be far more cost effective to get a team of paleontologists and archeologists to dig it out from the former ground zero. And Rama’s Vimana was nothing but a helicopter! The clincher usually is that we had to be great for did we not give the world the zero! Does that account for our predilection for that numeral which seems the usual sum product of our national endeavors?

These difficult times seem just right for magical solutions and our friends in the RSS have once again discovered the tabula rasa for our economic problems. They have resurrected that old con man, Ramar Pillai, the inventor of “herbal petrol”. Now we are told that Ramar Pillai was not given a fair shake because of the bias of our scientists who, with a few notable exceptions like Prabhu of the NIC and Joshi of Allahabad University, are slaves to western methods of scientific inquiry. The RSS also has another solution to our energy problems up its sleeves and this involves the development of million of hectares of wasteland into sugarcane plantations to produce gasohol. I know that at one time no less personages than the Prime Minister and the RSS Sarsanghchalak were having serious discussions on just and the funds were to be secured by monetizing Iraqi IOU’s given to Indian exporters and contractors. Now the whole thing seems to fit in. With herbal petrol available in good quantities, there would be no constraints on the production of gasohol and Yashwant Sinha can kiss his blues away!

My problem is not that such nonsense is believed and parroted around. We will always have people who will interpret the past differently and try to live out their fantasies. The problem is when such people begin to surface on state-provided pulpits. Then the nonsense gets official sanction and consequently some currency. As a nation we seem to have a problem separating mythology from history. As a society with a long tradition of oral history, facts get embellished, enlarged and exaggerated with each telling. When truth gets laden with layers of poetic license, history tends to become mythology.

Mythology makes good reading and often is the most effective means of highlighting moral dilemmas and providing moral benchmarks to guide us through life, as is the Mahabharata. But to take the Mahabharata or the Ramayana and all that grew in between to be our history would be straining credulity to the utmost. Or in other words it's just plain foolishness.

Copyright(c) Mohan Guruswamy, 2001. All rights reserved.