Asian Angle | Did ancient Hindus surf the Web?

Many pushing for a Hindu state in India claim much of modern technology – from airplanes to plastic surgery – amounts to intellectual property theft from the faithful some 2,000 years ago

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The chief minister of the north-eastern state of Tripura, Biplab Deb, said Indians invented the internet some two millennia ago. Photo: EPA

Published: 1:16pm, 21 Apr 2018Updated: 1:16pm, 21 Apr 2018

Among the many ailments inflicted upon India by the Hindu-chauvinist ruling party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the most cringe-inducing (in a rather long list) must be its leaders’ boastfully ignorant atavism. Not only do they claim credit, on behalf of their ancient Hindu forebears, for every invention of the modern era, but they assert their point of view with a certitude that is immune to ridicule, or even common sense.

The latest offender is the newly elected chief minister of the tiny north-eastern state of Tripura, Biplab Deb, who cheerfully declared this week that Indians had invented the internet some two millennia ago. The proof of this particular hasty pudding, he insisted, lay in the fact that in the ancient epic Mahabharata, one of the characters, Sanjaya, was able to provide a detailed narrative to the blind king Dhritarashtra of a battle that was taking place many miles away. This proved, Deb averred, that in ancient times India had both satellite technology and the internet.

India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi has claimed that the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesh was proof of ancient India’s knowledge of plastic surgery. Photo: EPA

The ridicule was swift in coming. US historian Audrey Truschke, author of Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India’s Most Controversial King, a biography of the Mughal emperor, asked wickedly why Sanjaya had bothered to narrate the story when he could have used Siri instead; why Lord Krishna hadn’t streamed the Bhagavad Gita (the sermon on duty that is part of the Mahabharata) on Facebook Live.

Many went to Twitter to mock the assertions by Biplab Deb, the minister of Tripura, for claiming that ancient Hindus invented the internet and other modern tools. Photo: Twitter

Another social media user hoped that ancient Indians had better bandwidth than their spectrum-starved descendants enjoy today. One said the longevity of the internet in India no doubt explained why the country had the largest number of trolls in the world. Another dubbed the ancient invention the “Indra-Net”, a reference to the Vedic god Indra, and said the ancient GPS was the God Positioning System.