The Flying Machines: Vimanas Between the Ramayana, a 1918 Manuscript and ISRO

The chariot in the sky

In the Ramayana, after Rama defeats Ravana and reclaims Sita, he returns home to Ayodhya not on foot, not by chariot, but through the air. He travels in the Pushpaka Vimana, a wondrous flying vehicle that originally belonged to KuberaKubera The god of wealth, Ravana's half-brother, from whom Ravana seized the Pushpaka., the god of wealth, and was seized by Ravana. The epic describes it as vast, beautiful and swift, moving at the will of its master, carrying Rama, Sita, Lakshmana and their companions over the landscape they had crossed on their long journey. From the air, Rama points out to Sita the places where they had suffered and fought.

It is one of the most beloved passages of the Ramayana, and one of the most imaginative pieces of ancient literature anywhere. Indian texts are full of such flying vehicles: the aerial chariots of the gods, the palaces that float in the sky, the vimanas of kings and sages.

In recent decades, these images have become the basis of a modern claim: that ancient India possessed real aircraft, built on scientific principles, and that a Sanskrit text called the Vaimanika Shastra contains the technical details. The claim is repeated in forwarded messages, on television, and occasionally even at scientific conferences.

This essay sets that claim beside the evidence. The answer is clear, and it is not the one the forwarded messages want. But the real history of Indian ideas about flight turns out to be richer, and in places far more consequential, than any flying chariot.

What does "vimana" mean?

Before we look at the evidence, it helps to understand the word itself.

The Sanskrit word vimāna comes from a root meaning "to measure out". In early texts it can mean something measured, laid out or traversing space. Over time, it came to have several meanings: a celestial chariot, a palace of the gods, and, in South Indian temple architecture, the tower that rises above the sanctum.

Readers of our essay on Thanjavur will remember that the great tower of the Brihadeeswarar temple is called the vimana. In the language of Indian temples, a vimana is a structure that "measures out" sacred space: a model of the cosmic mountain, a palace for the god. When a Purana describes a deity travelling in a vimana, the image is of a divine palace in motion, not a machine with wings and an engine.

That matters, because many modern claims begin by assuming that every appearance of the word "vimana" in an ancient text refers to an aircraft. It does not.

The text at the centre: the Vaimanika Shastra

The single most important source for the modern "ancient aircraft" claim is a work called the Vaimanika Shastra, "the science of aeronautics". It is often described as an ancient text, written by the sage BharadwajaBharadwaja A Vedic seer, one of the seven great rishis, to whom many later texts are attributed. thousands of years ago. Its history is quite different.

The text was dictated between about 1918 and 1923 by Pandit Subbaraya Shastry of Anekal, near Bangalore. Shastry said that the contents had been revealed to him by the ancient sage Bharadwaja, through psychic channelling. He dictated the verses to an associate, G. Venkatachala Sharma, who wrote them down. A draughtsman in Bangalore, T. K. Ellappa, prepared drawings of the aircraft under Shastry's guidance.

The material was first published in Sanskrit with a Hindi translation in 1959, and in 1973 G. R. Josyer of Mysore published an English translation with the title Vymanika Shastra.

So there is no ancient manuscript of the Vaimanika Shastra. There is no evidence that the text existed before the early twentieth century; the IISc engineers concluded that it "cannot be dated earlier than 1904". It describes itself as a revelation from an ancient sage, received some fifteen to twenty years after the Wright brothers had flown at Kitty HawkKitty Hawk The windy dunes in North Carolina where the Wright brothers made the first powered flight in 1903. in 1903, at a time when aeroplanes were already appearing in newspapers around the world, including in India.

None of that, by itself, proves the text wrong. Its claims could, in principle, still be tested. And they were.

Five engineers and four aircraft

In 1974, a team of five researchers at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, one of India's most respected scientific institutions, decided to study the Vaimanika Shastra seriously, as engineers. Four of them, including H. S. Mukunda and S. M. Deshpande, were from the Department of Aeronautical Engineering; the fifth was from Mechanical Engineering. They published their findings in a journal called Scientific Opinion under the title "A critical study of the work Vymanika Shastra".

They examined the four main types of aircraft described in the text, with their accompanying drawings:

Aircraft in the text	Brief description	The engineers' assessment
Shakuna Vimana	A bird-like craft with wings and a tail	The configuration could not achieve the lift and stability needed for flight, and the mechanisms described would not work as claimed.
Sundara Vimana	A craft driven by a form of "smoke" or gas jets	Its lift was to come from hot gas sent upwards, which the engineers called "a gross violation of Newton's laws".
Rukma Vimana	A conical, multi-level craft with fans	Its stated speed was impossible for its shape, its stability doubtful, and its size differs between the text and the drawing: "a decided impossibility".
Tripura Vimana	A craft said to travel on land, in water and in the air	The design did not meet the basic requirements of aerodynamics or propulsion for any of these modes.

Their conclusion was blunt. They described the aircraft as "poor concoctions", and found that none of them had the properties or capabilities needed to fly. In their judgement, the shapes of the craft were hopeless from the point of view of flight, and the propulsion principles described would work against flying rather than for it.

The researchers also noted something telling about the drawings, which they said "definitely point to a knowledge of modern machinery": cylinders, pistons, worm gears, pumps and what seem to be electric motors. The draughtsman, they pointed out, worked at a local engineering college. The drawings reflect the technology of the early twentieth century, not any genuinely ancient conception.

The IISc study was done by Indian scientists, at an Indian institution, with no reason to be hostile to Indian tradition. They approached the text with an open mind and tested it as engineers. It failed.

Why anything flies at all

To see why the IISc engineers were so certain, it helps to understand what an aircraft actually has to do. Any flying machine heavier than air must manage four forces.

Weight pulls it down.
Lift must push it up, at least as strongly as weight.
Thrust must drive it forward.
Drag, the resistance of the air, holds it back.

Lift is the hardest part. A wing produces lift because of its shape and angle: as air flows past, the wing deflects air downwards and creates lower pressure above it than below. Engineers capture this in a simple relationship. The lift a wing produces grows with the density of the air, the area of the wing, the wing's efficiency (which depends on its shape and angle), and, most powerfully, with the square of its speed. Double the speed, and you get four times the lift.

That relationship explains why real aircraft look the way they do: long, thin wings, carefully shaped cross-sections, light structures, and engines powerful enough to push them through the air fast enough for the wings to work.

It also explains why the Wright brothers succeeded where so many before them failed. They did not simply build a machine and hope. In 1901 they built a small wind tunnel in their bicycle workshop in Ohio and tested about two hundred different wing shapes, measuring lift and drag, because they had discovered that the published data of the time were wrong. They designed their own propellers, treating them as rotating wings. They built a light engine of about twelve horsepower, and they spent years learning to control a glider before adding power. The first powered flight, on 17 December 1903, lasted twelve seconds and covered about 37 metres. It was the product of measurement, not inspiration.

Now look again at the craft of the Vaimanika Shastra. The Rukma Vimana, for example, is a heavy, multi-storey conical structure, with fans that the text says provide lift. To lift such a mass with fans, the craft would need enormous engine power and an extremely light structure. The text provides neither. Its materials, often described with invented names, are not specified in any way that can be checked. Its engines, where described, rely on principles that do not produce the required power. In fact the IISc engineers could not even run the basic numbers: the text gives no weight for any of its craft, and no unit of mass anywhere, though weight is the very first thing a flying machine has to overcome. Where it does say how lift is made, the principle breaks Newton's laws.

This is what it means to test a claim. Not to ask whether a text sounds impressive, but to ask whether its machines obey the same laws of physics that every successful aircraft, from the Wright Flyer to the rockets that carried Chandrayaan, has had to obey.

The controversy that would not die

Despite the IISc study, the claim of ancient Indian aircraft has persisted. In January 2015, it reached the Indian Science Congress, the country's largest annual gathering of scientists, held that year in Mumbai. A paper on "Ancient Indian Aviation Technology" presented in a session on ancient sciences claimed that Vedic-era aircraft could fly between planets, and drew on the Vaimanika Shastra.

The paper caused an uproar among scientists in India and abroad. Many argued that presenting such claims at a scientific congress damaged the credibility of genuine Indian science. Others defended the right to discuss ancient texts. The episode became a global news story.

What is most striking, looking back, is that the evidence had already been examined forty years earlier, by Indian engineers, and found wanting. The claim survived not because new evidence appeared, but because it was emotionally appealing. It told people that their ancestors had been more advanced than anyone else.

That is a feeling worth understanding, and worth respecting. For centuries, colonial writers dismissed Indian civilisation as backward. It is natural for Indians to want to correct that injustice. But inventing ancient aircraft is not the way to do it. India's real scientific achievements, many of which we have explored in this journal, are more than enough.

The talking machines of King Bhoja

There is a genuine medieval Indian text that does describe flying machines, and it is more interesting than the Vaimanika Shastra precisely because it is real.

In the eleventh century, King Bhoja of the ParamaraParamara A dynasty that ruled Malwa in central India from about the 9th to the 14th century. dynasty, who ruled from Dhar in central India and was famous as a patron of learning, is credited with a vast treatise on architecture and engineering called the Samarangana Sutradhara. Among its chapters is one on yantras, machines. It describes mechanical devices of many kinds: automata that move, water clocks, fountains, mechanical figures that seem to dance or pour water, and devices driven by water, weights and other forces.

The text also mentions a wooden flying bird, driven by heated mercury inside it, and a larger flying vehicle based on the same principle. It does not give enough detail to build such a machine, and the principle described would not produce flight. The author even notes that some details are deliberately left out.

What the Samarangana Sutradhara shows is not that medieval India had aircraft. It shows that Indian engineers and thinkers were fascinated by machines, automation and the dream of flight, just as their contemporaries in the Islamic world, China and Europe were. That is a real and fascinating part of the history of technology, and it does not need to be exaggerated.

The rockets that changed the world

If you want a true story of Indian flight technology that genuinely changed history, look not to the epics but to eighteenth-century Mysore.

In the late eighteenth century, the rulers of Mysore, Hyder Ali and his son Tipu Sultan, fought a series of wars against the British East India Company. Their armies used a remarkable weapon: rockets with casings made of iron.

Rockets had been used in warfare for centuries, first in China. But earlier rockets usually had casings made of paper, bamboo or other light materials. The Mysorean rockets used tubes of hammered iron, which could hold much more gunpowder at higher pressure. That gave them greater range, reportedly up to a kilometre or more, and more power. They were lashed to long bamboo shafts for stability, some fitted with blades, and fired in large numbers, causing fear and confusion in the British ranks. They were used to devastating effect, notably at the Battle of PollilurPollilur A village near Kanchipuram where Hyder Ali's army destroyed a British force in 1780. in 1780, one of the worst defeats the British suffered in India.

After Tipu Sultan was killed at the fall of Srirangapatna in 1799, the British captured a number of these rockets and sent some to England. There, the inventor William Congreve studied them and developed his own improved military rockets. Congreve rockets were used by the British in the Napoleonic Wars and in the War of 1812 against the United States, where they gave rise to a famous line in the American national anthem about "the rockets' red glare".

In other words, Indian rocket technology helped shape the military rockets of the West, which were among the ancestors of modern rocketry. Dr A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, the great Indian rocket scientist who later became President of India, wrote in his autobiography Wings of Fire of his pride at finding a painting of Tipu Sultan's rocket troops in the lobby of NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in the United States, and spoke of the Mysore rockets as part of India's heritage of rocketry.

This is a documented, consequential achievement. It does not need a flying palace.

The claim of 1895

There is one more claim that appears often in discussions of Indian flight: that in 1895, a Mumbai scholar named Shivkar Bapuji Talpade flew an unmanned aircraft called the Marutsakha on Chowpatty beach, eight years before the Wright brothers. The story was popularised by a 2015 Hindi film, Hawaizaada.

Talpade appears to have been a real person with a genuine interest in Sanskrit texts and in flight. The 1974 IISc paper records that he tried to build models under Subbaraya Shastry's guidance, and that none of them flew. But no contemporary newspaper report, photograph, technical description or eyewitness account of the claimed flight has been found. The story seems to rest on accounts written much later. Until contemporary evidence appears, the flight must be regarded as unverified, an attractive legend rather than an established fact.

India in the sky, for real

The most powerful answer to the question "did India master flight?" is not in the past at all. It is in the present.

In 1963, a small sounding rocket was launched from Thumba, a fishing village near Thiruvananthapuram, with parts famously carried to the launch site on bicycles. It was the beginning of the Indian space programme, inspired by Vikram Sarabhai.
In 1975, India's first satellite, Aryabhata, named after the great astronomer, was launched.
In 2008, Chandrayaan-1 went into orbit around the Moon, and its instruments contributed to the discovery of water molecules on the lunar surface.
In 2014, the Mars Orbiter Mission, Mangalyaan, reached Mars, making India the first country to succeed on its first attempt, at a fraction of the cost of comparable missions elsewhere.
On 23 August 2023, Chandrayaan-3 landed near the Moon's south pole, the first landing anywhere near that region. India became one of only a handful of nations to land softly on the Moon.
In September 2023, Aditya-L1 was launched to study the Sun from a vantage point about 1.5 million kilometres from Earth.

These are not legends. They are measured, verified, achieved. They were built by Indian engineers and scientists who learned their craft by testing ideas, failing, correcting and trying again. That method, more than any ancient text, is what puts vehicles in the sky.

There is a lovely irony here. If the Vaimanika Shastra had been treated as a real engineering document, the most respectful thing to do with it would have been exactly what the IISc engineers did: build a model, run the numbers, and see if it flies. The same scientific attitude that dismissed the text's aircraft is the one that landed Chandrayaan-3.

The claims, checked

The claim	Verdict	What the evidence shows
"The Vaimanika Shastra is an ancient text by the sage Bharadwaja."	False	It was dictated by Pandit Subbaraya Shastry between about 1918 and 1923, who said it was revealed to him psychically. No older manuscript is known.
"The Vaimanika Shastra describes working aircraft."	False	A 1974 study by five researchers at the Indian Institute of Science found that none of the four aircraft described could fly.
"Every 'vimana' in ancient texts means an aircraft."	False	The word also means a divine palace or chariot and, in temple architecture, the tower over the sanctum.
"Medieval Indian engineers wrote about machines and automata."	True	King Bhoja's 11th-century Samarangana Sutradhara describes many mechanical devices, including an imagined flying bird, though not a workable aircraft.
"Indian rockets influenced modern rocketry."	True	Iron-cased Mysorean rockets used against the British were studied in England and influenced William Congreve's military rockets.
"Talpade flew an aircraft in Mumbai in 1895."	Unverified	No contemporary evidence of the flight has been found.

The flight that matters

There is no shame in the Pushpaka Vimana being poetry. It is magnificent poetry. The image of Rama flying home over the landscapes of his trials, showing Sita the places they had survived, is one of the most moving journeys in world literature. It expresses something deeply human: the longing to rise above the earth and see one's own life from above.

Every civilisation dreamed of flight. Greek myth had Daedalus and Icarus. Persian legend had a king carried aloft by eagles. Chinese stories told of flying chariots and immortals riding cranes. These dreams did not make anyone fly. But they kept the longing alive, until people with the right tools, the right mathematics and the right willingness to test their ideas made it real.

Indian civilisation contributed to that long story in very real ways: in mathematics, in astronomy, in rocketry, and now in space exploration. Those achievements deserve pride. Inventing ancient aircraft does not add to them. It distracts from them, and invites the world to laugh at a tradition that deserves respect.

The Vaimanika Shastra's machines will never leave the ground. Chandrayaan-3 is sitting on the Moon. That is the flight that matters.