In this short story 'The last question' written in the 1950s, Asimov dreams about how computers in the future would look like. Computers were still a novel concept in the 50s, mostly owned by governments and big companies and could do little more than a few calculations.
There was no concept of a 'personal' computer. Asimov's computer though was centralized, somewhere in the 'cloud', individual terminals owned by people could connect to it and to each other. People could ask questions naturally using spoken words and the computer would answer their questions. Soon, people liked spending more and more time "hooked up" to the computer and meeting other people "online" instead of talking to each other in the real world. In short, Asimov talked about the Internet, Google, Siri, Cloud Computing and Facebook.
While it is fair to credit Asimov for imagining these technologies, crediting him for inventing them is a bit of a stretch. Asimov talked about these concepts, but did not talk about how the technology which enabled them was built.
Using Asimov as an analogy is quite instructive given the current climate of claims and counter-claims about what ancient Indians invented.
Ancient Indian texts did talk about Vimanas, crafts that could fly through the air, but never talked about how these were built. In short, it would be fair to credit Indian storytellers of yore for their imagination, but not for inventing planes and helicopters.
Making absurd and farfetched claims about the wondrous technologies invented by ancient Indians is quite a disservice due to two reasons.
The believers vehemently believe that every modern technology was invented in India and the hardened skeptics ignore the true scientific advances that were made by ancient Indian scholars. The truth though, is somewhere in the middle.
India is an ancient civilization. With it came some administrative and social needs: A way to measure land, a way to collect and account for revenue, a well defined language to compose epics and poems in that language and so on.
So, ancient Indians did make significant advances in these fields. One such example is Panini. His Ashtadyayi is one of the earliest works on formal grammar. Panini's way of writing down the rules for Sanskrit grammar was at least two millennia ahead of its time. It was so far ahead of its time, that when similar techniques in formal grammar were studied and rediscovered in the early part of the 20th century, it revolutionized how languages could be specified. This kind of formally specifying a language was used in the 1950s to specify computer programming languages.
This technique, originally known as the Backus-Naur Form is called by some as the Panini-Backus Form to credit Panini for his work on formal grammar. The Panini-Backus Form enabled the precise specification of computer languages, and enabled building compilers-the tools that translate human understandable programs to machine understandable programs. Compilers and programming languages are central to the software revolution.
Making wild claims about ancient Indians inventing helicopters or Panini creating the software revolution detracts us from the true scientific achievement of ancient Indians. Knowing this bit of history, it would serve us all well if we celebrated Panini as the architect of generative grammars, rather than calling him the ancient Indian who created the software revolution! More importantly, it would serve us all well if we could strive to capture Panini's scientific and aesthetic spirit and use to create many more scientific discoveries in the future.
The views expressed in the above article are that of Mr. Barathwaj, an independent blogger interested in science and technology.
