The mythos of ancient India's scientific excellence

Policymakers are obsessed by a fuddled idea of resurrecting a glorious civilisational past, and even IITs have fallen in line

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A FEW days ago, a leading newspaper carried an opinion piece on patents, which championed a baffling proposition: that patents in India should be registered in Sanskrit, too, apart from English and Hindi as is the current practice. The writer claimed this would preserve and protect India’s technological advancements while reaffirming its cultural heritage. Waxing enthusiastic about its role in history, he wrote that complex knowledge systems were codified in Sanskrit with clarity and brevity, because its “unique feature of interpretability allowed a single phrase to hold multiple meanings”. This is a fallacious and facile understanding of a complex process. Patent and other claims on intellectual property rights require precise and detailed descriptions today; a phrase and sometimes even a word, if misplaced or omitted, can lead to damaging lawsuits and stall operations of companies. The misconceptions—and there are many—could be forgiven if the writer were a layperson. What can one say when the author is a visiting professor at the India Institute of Technology (IIT),

Delhi? Does Sanskrit have the vocabulary and symbols for complex chemical reactions that, for instance, would be needed to explain a new drug formulation? Or the language to describe a new molecule? Or the string theory? I would not know since I am not one of the 24,821 Indians who are listed as Sanskrit speakers (as per the 2011 Census). This, apparently, works out to 0.002 per cent of the Indian population. That is an irrelevant detail. If the Lok Sabha Speaker can ram through a proposal to have simultaneous Sanskrit translation of parliamentary proceedings despite members objecting to it as a waste of taxpayer money, why should an IIT professor not call for patent filings in Sanskrit? One of the charming reasons the academic offers is this:

“Picture a courtroom debate over whether a Sanskrit