Essay - Ancient Advances?

“Men who are perfectly satisfied with their own knowledge will never attempt to increase it.”

-         Henry Thomas Buckle

Nuclear power. Electricity. Aircraft. Missiles. Advanced medicine. Ancient India in the Vedic age had them all, if you believe Hindu religious radicals (and some otherwise sensible people).

Noted Sanskrit scholars have yet to detect advanced treatises on nuclear physics or recipes for weapons technology encoded within the verses of the Vedas. Composed orally in Sanskrit between 1500 and 1000 BC, the Vedas are religious incantations formally set down in writing sometime during the 1^st millennium BC. Some of the Vedic verses are hauntingly poetic, while others are intricately sophisticated and subtle in their theology. However, according to Professor Amartya Sen, “Despite the richness of the Vedas in many other respects, there is no sophisticated mathematics in them, nor anything that can be called rigorous science.”

How a civilization, whose education was largely based on rote-learning of Sanskrit Shlokas, managed to achieve any significant scientific and technological advances is yet to be explained. The classic scientific technique of Experiment-Observation-Inference never developed in India. The most common intellectual modes in ancient India were philosophical debate and theological conjecture, not scientific experimentation. Serious scientific study was negligible, and often considered anti-religious by Hindu elites.

As an elitist intellectual caste, the Brahmins developed a well-advertised obsession with ritual purity and refused to sully themselves with hands-on experimentation. "A true Brahmin should never touch a plough" ran a stricture of times past. As a corollary to this, perhaps a true Brahmin should not touch a test-tube either. 

But experimental science and technological innovation involves getting the hands dirty in laboratories, messing around with chemicals or sundry instruments. The stalwarts of the emerging applied sciences in Europe and the USA were quite happy to do so. Thomas Alva Edison, for one, was famed for “rolling up his sleeves and getting down and dirty” in his experimental laboratories at Menlo Park, New Jersey.

The archaeological evidence doesn't support the thesis that ancient India during the Vedic period was highly developed in the physical sciences or technology, either.  Metallurgy in ancient India had not progressed beyond copper, tin, bronze, gold, silver, iron and steel. So it appears very unlikely that the ancients were capable of refining heavy metals like Uranium and Plutonium so necessary for nuclear fission. 

The basic principles of nuclear physics do not change down the ages. Had nuclear power really been harnessed then, some heavy shielding would be needed to contain dangerous gamma ray radiation. The radiation from a critical nuclear pile of Plutonium Pu-239 lasts approximately 240,000 years so the shielding would have to be built to endure, and would, therefore, in course of time, be discovered. But no such structures have been excavated by archaeologists.

The power generated would have to be distributed by a complex system of sub-stations, connected by high-voltage electrical lines. So far, material evidence of the operations of the Vedic Electricity Board remains undiscovered. And what about electrical outlets in the tents and lean-tos of the nomadic Vedic Aryans? Or the machines and devices that would have been powered by that electric supply?

It is amusing to reflect on itinerant pre-industrial Aryan pastoralists engaged in the study of quantum physics and aeronautical engineering as they went off to herd their cattle every day. Modern-day Gujjar and Yadava communities live nomadic pastoralist lifestyles not all that materially different from the early Vedic Aryans. These communities are not noted for high rates of basic literacy, much less advanced studies in the sciences or engineering.

Lightweight aluminum alloys like Duralumin (so necessary for airframes) just did not exist in ancient India, either. The technique of refining Bauxite into Alumina had to wait till the Hall-Herault process in the late 19th century. Credible power sources (apart from Mantras, that don't seem to be able to move anything today) appear to have been in short supply too. The basic physics that governs flight (Bernoulli’s Principle) and aerodynamics in general are also absent from Sanskrit texts of the period.

Any aviation operation would require a ground support infrastructure in the form of fuel farms, maintenance hangars, runaways, ground control units, meteorological offices, etc. There is no material evidence whatsoever for the existence of all these in the early Vedic period. So it seems the flying machines mentioned in the religious epics were wholly mythical and had little, if any, basis in fact. It also appears highly unlikely that a civilization that had not progressed to the basic chemistry needed for manufacturing safety matches, could create the rocket fuels and high explosives used in missiles.

Much has been made of Ayurveda as a cure-all to rival modern western Allopathic medicine. Yet the historical record indicates that it seems to have been singularly ineffective against the plagues that periodically ravaged India in ancient times. It wasn’t much use against such dreaded contagions as cholera, typhoid, hepatitis and malaria either. Smallpox was a feared killer that Ayurveda signally failed to tame. It took Dr. Edward Jenner and his cowpox-based vaccine to make it the only disease that is now practically extinct.

In addition, Ayurveda is based on an outmoded (and now discredited) theory of an imbalance of elements or "humors" as the source of disease. This has long been superseded by "germ theory" in modern medicine. The herbal treatments that are part of Ayurveda do provide cures for a spectrum of minor ailments, yet there is nothing very unusual about this. Medicinal plants have long featured in the pharmacopoeia of modern allopathic medicine. The earliest pharmaceuticals were laboratory-synthesized versions of organic compounds originally derived from plants e.g. aspirin, quinine, penicillin, etc. And today's biochemistry goes beyond nature in developing new molecules that are often more effective in treating disease than anything found in the plant kingdom. 

Ayurveda doesn't seem to have appreciably extended life for the majority of the population, either. Analysis of skeletal remains recovered from archaeological sites (cremation of the dead was a relatively late innovation) indicate that average life spans in ancient India were in the region of 32-35 years. Thanks to improvements in healthcare and nutrition, most modern-day Indians live for much longer on an average today, despite adverse factors like emotional stress, obesity, industrial and automotive pollution, substance abuse, violent crime, traffic accidents, etc.

Admittedly, the available archeological evidence may be incomplete. Not all historical sites have been wholly excavated and all their contents analyzed. However, even with all the limitations under which the Archeological Survey of India labours, enough has been uncovered to provide a rough overall portrait of ancient India in the Vedic age.

Science and technology are products of a civilization prepared to experiment, to question the established order of things and with a marked unwillingness to take everything on faith alone. All these factors characterized Western Europe in the 18th century, "the Age of Enlightenment". It was questing minds like those of like Sir Isaac Newton, Amedeo Avogadro, Evangelista Torricelli, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, et al. who contributed to the explosive development of the physical sciences then.

And India had no such equivalent talents. If India never produced any world class scientists, it was because we were constrained by our own religious and anti-scientific dogmas. Perhaps the prevailing faith-obsessed climate of the country did not encourage people with such a dangerous mindset. For doubt, not faith, is the greatest driver of progress…

Ancient India during the later Gupta and Mauryan periods had a number of real achievements in different fields of knowledge; mathematical equations, the concept of the zero, geometry, etc. etc. India produced some of the world’s greatest astronomers between AD 100 and 900 and is credited with the introduction of the binary system, that is the basis of modern mathematics. But these discoveries came centuries after the Vedic era which produced little of scientific value.

However, these later developments were eventually constrained by an increasingly insular and conservative religious orthodoxy that held that all possible knowledge was contained within a limited number of religious texts in Sanskrit. This narrow pietism effectively extinguished the spirit of enquiry and promoted stagnation in the study of the sciences. The arrogant conviction of the Brahminical caste that they were the sole possessors of all ultimate knowledge was extensively commented on by later visitors to India like Ibn Battutah.

"A Sanskrit system of education is best calculated to spread ignorance." The source of this quote, ironically enough, was Raja Rammohun Roy, himself a noted Sanskrit scholar. In a case of what might be called “cultural envy” the Indian votaries of reversion to a "purer" Sanskritised way of life are only too happy to appropriate the benefits of modern science and technology developed in Western Europe and the United States, while claiming “civilizational” credit for these innovations. It is ironic that the ancient civilization they extol was ideologically incapable of providing a viable base for these developments. And, further, as Professor Sen points out, “the rules of scientific evidence are universal, so it makes no more sense to talk of science as ‘Vedic’ than it would be to label Newtonian physics as ‘Christian’”.

Another disingenuous argument advanced by the votaries of “Vedic science” to explain away the absence of any material proof is that the ancients employed methods beyond the comprehension of modern science. There really is no satisfactory answer to this, except that this so-called super-science seems to be equally beyond the ken of present-day religious divines.

For anything to be called a science, it should be able to stand up to rigorous examination and analysis. As a defined process with certain results, it should also be readily replicable under laboratory conditions. “Vedic science”, alas, does not meet either criteria and consists mostly, to date, of unsubstantiated claims that cannot be practically tested or do not have any empirical support.