ISRO and the Myth of Civilisational Greatness
The media reports reveal that S. Somanathan, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) while addressing the students of Maharshi Panini Sanskrit and Vedic University at their convocation said that the concepts like algebra, square roots, concepts of time, architecture, the structure of the universe, metallurgy and also aviation originated in the Vedas, which later came to be celebrated as the discoveries of Western civilisations.
According to the reports, the ISRO chairman also said that the rules of Sanskrit grammar and structure, an ancient Indian cultural product, are suitable to be used for developing languages for computers and artificial intelligence (AI), possibly basing his argument on the statements made in a 1985 paper written by Rick Higgs, a researcher who was attached to NASA’s Ames Research Centre in California. But despite the initial ambitious claims made in that paper, no one has made any progress in devising computer codes written in Sanskrit. If Sanskrit is an ideal language candidate for software, why wouldn’t there be software based on it by now? Why wouldn’t the ISRO itself take the initiative for such a potentially noble endeavour? The story of how two software engineers in Poland developed Polish speech synthesizers sometime back in 2000 for the purpose of communicating with virtual assistants for a commercial company could be treated as a harbinger of such technologies of the future.
The intention of this article is not to dwell on the usability of Sanskrit as an AI language, but to highlight the irrationality of the notion of “civilisational greatness” that is alluded to in the statements made by the ISRO chairman.
The ISRO chairman, of course, is following the trend of the times. In recent years, we have been seeing this tendency among the new elites in the power echelons of the country to be xenophobic at the slightest provocation. Such pronouncements imply that our ancient counterparts, more specifically the Vedic Aryans, for some fortuitous genetic reasons or by the virtue of covenant with God, developed a special faculty for science, the arts and literature (for unknown reasons the ingenuity of the pre-Vedic people of the Indus Valley in town planning, water management and in introducing weighing systems are never considered in these discussions on India’s past greatness). The Vedic people thus endowed with special intuitive powers, prepared the earliest Indian religious scriptures, including the Vedas that have been propagated orally, since the 2nd millennium BCE, facilitated by elaborate mnemonic techniques.
For many, Vedas became a source for all facts that modern science now stands to represent, including technological marvels like airplanes, television, satellites, surgery and robotics. While speaking at the 105th edition of the Indian Science Congress held at Manipur University in 2018, the then Union minister for science, for instance, asserted that the cosmologist Stephen Hawking had said that an ancient Hindu text might have had a theory superior to the idea of mass-energy equivalence as expounded by Albert Einstein in the theory of special relativity. Hawking had never said such a thing. I like to imagine that the minister must have made the statement with all good intentions. It can be argued that it is one way of promoting scientific temper in the country: that modern Indians are descendants of a great intellectual culture that promoted critical inquiry and developed many ideas, many of which are now simply being rediscovered by modern science. That we must reclaim this lost world’s scientificl
