Who was first? Contested origins
Inventions and ideas whose origin is disputed between India and the West or elsewhere, with the evidence on each side and an honest verdict.
Verdicts follow the published evidence and the view of historians of science. Claims without contemporary evidence are marked as such, whoever makes them.
Technology & engineering (35)
| Invention or idea | Indian claim | Commonly credited to | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| 'India ink' | India had its own black ink, 'masi', made from soot or burnt materials with binders, used to write on palm leaves and birch bark; the English name 'India ink' is sometimes taken as proof of an Indian origin. | The carbon-black stick ink that Europe called 'India ink' (also 'China ink') was a Chinese product; the name came from trade through India. | Earlier elsewhere |
| Ancient nuclear weapons | Popular books, TV shows and social media say the Brahmastra in the Mahabharata was a nuclear weapon, that Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita proves this, and that skeletons at Mohenjo-daro were radioactive from an ancient blast. | The first nuclear explosion was the US 'Trinity' test of 16 July 1945, after the discovery of nuclear fission in 1938. | Indian claim not supported by evidence |
| Colour-fast printed cotton (chintz and calico) | Indian dyers developed mordant dyeing (using alum and iron salts to fix madder reds and blacks) and resist dyeing with indigo, producing bright, washable printed and painted cottons — chintz (from Hindi 'chheent') and calico (from Calicut). | European textile printers in Britain, France and the Netherlands made printed cottons in the 17th–18th centuries, and mordants were known elsewhere (e.g. Egypt) in antiquity. | India first (well documented) |
| Cotton cultivation and cloth | Cotton threads preserved inside a copper bead from a Neolithic grave at Mehrgarh (in the Indus region, today Pakistan) are dated to the early 6th millennium BCE. Harappans grew and wove cotton, and Greek writers such as Herodotus described Indian 'wool from trees'. | Different cotton species were domesticated separately in the Americas (Peru and Mexico) and in Africa/Arabia. | Independent discoveries |
| Crystallised sugar | Indians first made solid, crystallised sugar from sugarcane juice; the Sanskrit words 'sharkara' and 'khanda' gave the world 'sugar' and 'candy'. | Sugarcane was first domesticated in New Guinea, and sugar refining was later improved in Persia, the Arab world, China and the Caribbean. | India first (well documented) |
| Diamond mining | Diamonds were first known, mined, traded and valued in India, mainly from river gravels along the Krishna and Godavari (the 'Golconda' diamonds), and India was the only major source until the 18th century. | Diamonds were found in Borneo in small numbers, and in Brazil from about 1725; South African mines opened in the 1860s. | India first (well documented) |
| Fibre optics | Narinder Singh Kapany, born in Moga, Punjab, in 1926, showed with Harold Hopkins at Imperial College London (Nature, 1954) that images could be carried through bundles of glass fibres, and coined the term 'fibre optics' in 1960. | Others did key work too: Heinrich Lamm sent an image through a fibre bundle in 1930; Abraham van Heel published on clad fibres in the same 1954 issue of Nature; Charles Kao won the 2009 Nobel Prize for showing how low-loss fibres could carry communications. | Disputed: evidence incomplete |
| Guided missiles and Ravana's airports | At the 106th Indian Science Congress (Jalandhar, January 2019), Andhra University's then Vice-Chancellor G. Nageswara Rao said Vishnu's chakra and Rama's astras were guided missiles and that Ravana had 24 types of aircraft and several airports in Lanka. | Guided missiles were first built in the 1940s (e.g. Germany's V-1 and V-2); aviation and airports began in the 20th century. | Indian claim not supported by evidence |
| Indigo dye | Indigo takes its name from the Greek 'indikon' ('from India'); India was the main source of indigo for the Greek, Roman and later European world, and Indian dyers used it for thousands of years. | The oldest known indigo-dyed cloth was found at Huaca Prieta, Peru, dated to about 6,000 years ago (Science Advances, 2016); indigo was also used in ancient Egypt by about 2400 BCE. | Earlier elsewhere |
| Internet and live TV in the Mahabharata | In April 2018 the then Chief Minister of Tripura, Biplab Kumar Deb, said that the internet and satellites existed in the Mahabharata era, since Sanjaya could describe the distant battle to the blind king. | The internet grew out of ARPANET (1969) and TCP/IP (1983); communication satellites date from the 1960s. | Indian claim not supported by evidence |
| Iron-cased war rockets | Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan of Mysore used rockets with iron casings, giving higher pressure and range (about 1–2 km), in organised rocket corps against the East India Company in the Anglo-Mysore wars (notably Pollilur, 1780). | William Congreve developed the Congreve rocket at the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, from 1804, and Britain used it in the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812. Gunpowder rockets themselves were invented in China (by the 13th century). | Indian contribution, later developed elsewhere |
| Lost-wax metal casting | A small copper wheel-shaped amulet from Mehrgarh (Balochistan, in the Indus region, today in Pakistan), about 6,000 years old, is the earliest known object made by lost-wax casting — the method later used for the Harappan 'Dancing Girl' and Chola bronzes. | Lost-wax casting also appears very early in the Near East, for example in the Nahal Mishmar hoard (Southern Levant, 4th millennium BCE). | Disputed: evidence incomplete |
| Millimetre-wave communication | Jagadish Chandra Bose generated and detected millimetre waves (around 60 GHz) at Presidency College, Calcutta, and in 1895 used them to ring a bell and set off gunpowder 23 metres away through two walls. | Most early radio pioneers (Hertz, Lodge, Marconi) worked with much longer waves; millimetre waves were not widely used until the late 20th century. | India first (well documented) |
| Ram Setu as a man-made bridge | Ram Setu (Adam's Bridge) is the bridge built by Rama's army in the Ramayana; some writers, a US science TV programme and former GSI director S. Badrinarayanan have said its upper part looks man-made. | Most geologists explain the shoals as a natural formation of sand, coral and beach rock shaped by sea-level change, currents and waves. | Indian claim not supported by evidence |
| Shampoo | The word comes from Hindi 'champo' (to press or massage, from 'champna'); Sake Dean Mahomed from Patna opened 'shampooing' baths in Brighton in 1814 and became 'Shampooing Surgeon' to George IV and William IV. | Washing hair with soap and later bottled liquid shampoo developed in Europe and America in the 19th and 20th centuries. | Indian contribution, later developed elsewhere |
| Standard weights and graduated rulers | Harappans used cubical chert weights in a fixed series (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, then 160, 200, 320, 640 units; the commonest weight is about 13.7 g) across a huge area, and graduated scales such as a Mohenjo-daro shell ruler and the Lothal ivory scale with divisions of about 1.7 mm. | Egypt and Mesopotamia also had standard weights and cubit rods in the third millennium BCE. | Independent discoveries |
| The 'Agastya battery' | A passage said to be from the Agastya Samhita describes placing a copper plate, copper sulphate, wet sawdust and amalgamated zinc in a clay pot, which websites and some speakers call an ancient battery ('mitra-varuna shakti'). | Alessandro Volta built the first electric battery, the voltaic pile, in 1800. | Indian claim not supported by evidence |
| The 'Persian wheel' (araghatta) | The araghatta ('spoke' + 'pot'), the rahat of North India, is mentioned in early Indian texts, and some historians have suggested the device may have begun in India. | Other historians (e.g. John Peter Oleson) place the invention of the animal-driven saqiya in Ptolemaic Egypt around the 3rd century BCE; the name 'Persian wheel' points to an Iranian origin. | Disputed: evidence incomplete |
| The beginning of iron smelting | Excavations led by Rakesh Tewari (UP State Archaeology) at Malhar, Dadupur, Raja Nala Ka Tila and Lahuradewa found iron objects, furnaces and slag radiocarbon-dated to about 1800–1000 BCE, suggesting India was an independent centre of iron-working. | The traditional view is that iron smelting was first mastered in Anatolia and the Near East (Hittite region) in the second millennium BCE and spread from there. | Disputed: evidence incomplete |
| The button | Shell and stone 'buttons', carved and pierced with holes, have been found at Indus sites including Mohenjo-daro; Ian McNeil's Encyclopaedia of the History of Technology (1990) calls a curved shell piece from Mohenjo-daro the earliest known button. | Buttons used as fasteners with buttonholes appear in Europe (Germany) in the 13th century and spread from there. | Indian contribution, later developed elsewhere |
| The cotton gin | India used a single-roller gin from early times (shown in an Ajanta cave painting, c. 5th century CE) and later a two-roller worm-gear gin, the charkhi or churka, to separate cotton fibre from seed. | Eli Whitney patented a cotton gin in the USA in 1793–1794 that used wire hooks and brushes to clean short-staple cotton quickly. | Indian contribution, later developed elsewhere |
| The earliest ploughed field | B.B. Lal's ASI excavations at Kalibangan (1960–1969) found a pre-Harappan field with criss-cross furrows, described as the earliest ploughed field revealed by excavation, about 2800 BCE. The same cross-ploughing is still used locally for mustard and gram. | The plough (ard) was used earlier in Mesopotamia, and ard marks have been found under Neolithic burial mounds in northern Europe. | Disputed: evidence incomplete |
| The first powered aeroplane | Shivkar Bapuji Talpade, a Sanskrit scholar and teacher at the J.J. School of Art, is said to have flown an unmanned craft called 'Marutsakha' at Chowpatty beach in 1895, before a crowd that some versions say included the Gaekwad of Baroda. | Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first controlled, sustained, powered flight of a heavier-than-air machine with a pilot, at Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk, USA, on 17 December 1903. | Indian claim not supported by evidence |
| The rust-resistant Delhi iron pillar | The iron pillar in the Qutb complex, about 7 metres tall and over 6 tonnes, was forge-welded in the Gupta period (inscription of 'Chandra', probably Chandragupta II) and has hardly rusted in about 1,600 years — evidence of advanced Indian metallurgy. | Some popular writers present the pillar as an unexplained mystery or 'lost technology'; others say it survives only because Delhi's air is dry. | India first (well documented) |
| The semiconductor crystal detector | J.C. Bose applied in 1901 for a US patent on a galena (lead sulphide) point-contact detector for radio waves (US patent 755,840, granted 29 March 1904), often called the first patent for a semiconductor device. | Karl Ferdinand Braun discovered rectification at metal–sulphide contacts in 1874; G.W. Pickard developed the practical silicon 'cat's whisker' crystal radio detector (patent 1906). | Indian contribution, later developed elsewhere |
| The spinning wheel (charkha) | Many Indians see the charkha, made a national symbol by Mahatma Gandhi, as an ancient Indian invention, and some scholars have argued it was used in India in the first millennium CE. | Historians Irfan Habib and Arnold Pacey argue that the spinning wheel was invented in the Islamic world (or China) by about the 11th century and reached India later; the earliest clear Indian reference is in Isami's Futuh-us-Salatin (1350). | Disputed: evidence incomplete |
| The USB port | Ajay Bhatt, an engineer from Vadodara who studied at M.S. University, led the Intel team that designed the Universal Serial Bus, and is often called the 'inventor of USB'. | USB was created by a group of engineers and released in 1996 by a consortium of companies including Intel, Compaq, IBM, Microsoft, DEC, NEC and Nortel. | Indian contribution, later developed elsewhere |
| The word 'navigation' and sea-faring | Widely forwarded messages say 'the art of navigation was born in the river Sindhu 6,000 years ago' and that 'navigation' comes from Sanskrit 'navgatih'. | Etymologists derive 'navigation' from Latin navigatio, from navis (ship) and agere (to drive). | Indian claim not supported by evidence |
| The world's first tidal dockyard | S.R. Rao, who excavated Lothal (1955–1960), identified a large brick basin (over 200 metres long) with an inlet and spill channel as a tidal dock linked to the Sabarmati, the world's earliest known dockyard. The Government of India is building the National Maritime Heritage Complex there. | Other archaeologists (e.g. L.S. Leshnik, 1968) argued the basin was a water tank or reservoir for irrigation and drinking; Egypt's harbour at Wadi al-Jarf (c. 2500 BCE) is also a candidate for the oldest harbour. | Disputed: evidence incomplete |
| Urban drainage and sanitation | Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, Dholavira and Lothal had covered street drains of fired brick, household bathrooms and latrines draining into them, soak pits and inspection points, on a city-wide scale. | Mesopotamian cities and Minoan Crete also had drains and clay pipes in the third and second millennia BCE. | Independent discoveries |
| Vimanas and the Vaimanika Shastra | The Vaimanika Shastra, said to come from the sage Bharadvaja, describes ancient flying machines (vimanas) such as the Rukma, Sundara, Shakuna and Tripura, with their metals, engines and pilot training. A paper at the 2015 Indian Science Congress (Mumbai) repeated that vimanas could fly between planets. | Aeronautical engineers say the text is modern and the machines it describes could not fly; powered heavier-than-air flight dates from 1903. | Indian claim not supported by evidence |
| Who invented email? | V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai says that as a 14-year-old in New Jersey in 1978 he wrote a program called 'EMAIL' with inbox, outbox, folders and attachments, and so invented email. He registered a US copyright for the program's code in 1982. | Historians of computing date electronic mail to time-sharing systems such as MIT's CTSS (c. 1965), and credit Ray Tomlinson with sending the first network email between two computers on ARPANET in 1971, using the @ sign. | Earlier elsewhere |
| Who invented radio: Bose or Marconi? | J.C. Bose demonstrated wireless transmission in Calcutta in 1895, before Marconi's first patent (1896), and chose not to patent most of his work. | Guglielmo Marconi built the first practical radio-telegraphy system, applied for a British patent in 1896, and sent a signal across the Atlantic in December 1901. | Independent discoveries |
| Wootz steel and Damascus blades | South Indian smiths (in present-day Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh) made high-carbon crucible steel, later called 'wootz' from the Telugu/Kannada 'ukku', whose ingots were traded west and forged into patterned 'Damascus' swords. | Some accounts credit the steel to Damascus or Persia, where the blades were forged and sold to Europeans. | India first (well documented) |
| Zinc smelting by distillation | At Zawar, near Udaipur, smelters produced metallic zinc by downward distillation in rows of clay retorts, on an industrial scale, centuries before Europe. | In Europe, William Champion of Bristol patented a zinc distillation process in 1738; China also produced zinc on a large scale from around the 16th century. | India first (well documented) |
Physics & chemistry (9)
| Invention or idea | Indian claim | Commonly credited to | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| 'The Vedas have a theory superior to E = mc²' | Stephen Hawking said the Vedas might contain a theory superior to Einstein's E = mc². | E = mc² comes from Einstein's 1905 work on special relativity, and Hawking never made such a statement. | Indian claim not supported by evidence |
| Bhaskara's perpetual-motion wheel | The idea of a perpetual-motion machine came from India, through Bhaskara's wheel. | Perpetual-motion wheels are associated in the West with Villard de Honnecourt's 13th-century sketchbook. | India first (well documented) |
| Bose statistics and the boson | S. N. Bose created the new statistics; Einstein extended it, but Bose's role has often been underplayed and he never received a Nobel Prize. | The statistics are usually presented as a joint Bose–Einstein achievement, and Einstein predicted the condensate. | India first (well documented) |
| Gravity: Bhaskaracharya and Newton | Bhaskaracharya discovered gravity 500 years before Newton. | Isaac Newton discovered the law of universal gravitation, published in the Principia in 1687. | Indian contribution, later developed elsewhere |
| Kanada's atoms and Democritus | Kanada discovered the atom centuries before Democritus and 2,600 years before Dalton. | Atomism began with Leucippus and Democritus in Greece; scientific atomic theory began with John Dalton (1808). | Independent discoveries |
| Sayana's verse and the speed of light | Sayana recorded the speed of light: 2,202 yojanas in half a nimesha works out to about 186,000 miles per second. | Ole Rømer first showed light has a finite speed in 1676, from timings of Jupiter's moon Io. | Indian claim not supported by evidence |
| The Chandrasekhar limit | Chandrasekhar discovered the white-dwarf mass limit, about 1.4 times the Sun's mass, and was opposed by Eddington before winning the 1983 Nobel Prize. | Wilhelm Anderson (1929) and Edmund Stoner (1930) first showed that relativity sets an upper mass for white dwarfs. | Earlier elsewhere |
| The Raman effect | The Raman effect was discovered by C. V. Raman in Calcutta, and he rightly won the 1930 Nobel Prize, the first for an Asian scientist in science. | Grigory Landsberg and Leonid Mandelstam observed the same scattering at about the same time, and Russian physicists call it 'combinational scattering'. | Independent discoveries |
| Vaisheshika ideas of motion and Newton's laws | Kanada and Prashastapada stated Newton's laws of motion long before Newton. | Newton's three laws of motion were first set out in the Principia (1687) as precise mathematical laws. | Indian claim not supported by evidence |
Mathematics & astronomy (25)
| Invention or idea | Indian claim | Commonly credited to | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| A general rule for quadratic equations | The quadratic formula is Indian: Sridharacharya's formula. | Babylonians solved quadratic problems much earlier, and al-Khwarizmi's algebra (9th century) is the source of 'algebra' in Europe. | Indian contribution, later developed elsewhere |
| Are 'Vedic Mathematics' sutras from the Vedas? | The 16 Vedic Mathematics sutras come from an appendix (parishishta) of the Atharvaveda. | The sutras were composed by Bharati Krishna Tirtha himself in the 20th century. | Indian claim not supported by evidence |
| Baudhayana and the 'Pythagorean' theorem | The theorem should be called the Baudhayana theorem: the Sulba Sutra stated it before Pythagoras. | The theorem is named after the Greek Pythagoras, and Euclid gave the classic proof around 300 BCE. | Independent discoveries |
| Bhaskara II, the derivative and Rolle's theorem | Bhaskaracharya knew the derivative and Rolle's theorem more than 500 years before Europe. | Michel Rolle stated the theorem in 1691, and the derivative as a general concept comes from Newton and Leibniz. | Indian contribution, later developed elsewhere |
| Dating the Vedas by astronomy | Astronomical references in the Vedas, such as the spring equinox in Orion (Mrigashira) or the Pleiades (Krittika), prove the Vedas are thousands of years older than Western scholars said. | Indologists such as Max Müller dated the Rigveda to around 1500–1200 BCE using language and historical evidence. | Disputed: evidence incomplete |
| Decimal place-value numerals ('Arabic' numerals) | The so-called Arabic numerals are Indian: the nine digits plus zero in a decimal place-value system were created in India. | The numerals are often called Arabic because Europe learned them from Arabic books, and other cultures had place-value systems too. | India first (well documented) |
| Did ancient India know the Earth goes round the Sun? | The Vedas, or Aryabhata, taught that the Earth and planets orbit the Sun, before Copernicus. | Aristarchus of Samos proposed a Sun-centred system in the 3rd century BCE, and Copernicus developed it in 1543. | Indian claim not supported by evidence |
| Did Kerala mathematics reach Europe through Jesuits? | Kerala's infinite series reached Europe through Jesuit missionaries in Kochi and influenced European calculus. | European mathematicians reached these results on their own; there is no record that they saw Kerala texts. | Disputed: evidence incomplete |
| Infinite series for pi, sine and arctangent | The series known as Gregory's, Leibniz's and Newton's were found first by Madhava and the Kerala school. | Newton (sine and cosine, 1669), James Gregory (arctangent, 1671) and Leibniz (series for pi/4, 1673–74) discovered these series in Europe. | India first (well documented) |
| Kuttaka and the 'Chinese remainder theorem' | Aryabhata's kuttaka solved these problems in general before anyone else. | The problem is called the Chinese remainder theorem because the Sunzi Suanjing posed and solved a remainder problem first. | Independent discoveries |
| Meru Prastara and 'Pascal's triangle' | Pascal's triangle is the Meru Prastara of Pingala and Halayudha. | The triangle is named after Pascal, who wrote a full treatise on it; in Iran it is called Khayyam's triangle and in China Yang Hui's triangle. | Independent discoveries |
| Negative numbers | Negative numbers were first used and understood in India by Brahmagupta. | The Chinese Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art used red and black counting rods for positive and negative numbers several centuries earlier. | Earlier elsewhere |
| Nilakantha's planetary model and Tycho Brahe | Nilakantha's Tantrasangraha gave the 'Tychonic' system before Tycho Brahe. | Tycho Brahe proposed the geo-heliocentric system in 1588, and it is named after him. | India first (well documented) |
| Pingala and the binary system | Pingala invented the binary number system that computers use. | Gottfried Leibniz invented binary arithmetic, written up in 1679 and published in 1703. | Indian contribution, later developed elsewhere |
| Second-order interpolation | Brahmagupta discovered the Newton–Stirling interpolation formula a thousand years before Newton. | Interpolation formulas are named after Newton and James Stirling, who developed the general theory of finite differences. | Independent discoveries |
| The 'Fibonacci' numbers | The Fibonacci sequence should be called the Virahanka or Hemachandra sequence because Indian scholars found it first. | Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci) introduced the sequence in his rabbit problem in Liber Abaci (1202). | India first (well documented) |
| The 'Pell' equation and the chakravala method | Indian mathematicians solved the so-called Pell equation centuries before Europe, with the chakravala method. | Fermat posed the problem in 1657, Brouncker and Wallis solved cases, and Lagrange gave the complete theory; Euler wrongly named it after John Pell. | India first (well documented) |
| The Earth spins on its axis | Aryabhata discovered that the Earth rotates on its axis, long before Copernicus. | Copernicus (1543) put the rotating Earth at the centre of modern astronomy; Heraclides of Pontus taught rotation in the 4th century BCE. | Independent discoveries |
| The formula for combinations (nCr) | The combinations formula used in every school today was first written by the Jain mathematician Mahaviracharya. | European textbooks credit combinatorics to writers such as Levi ben Gershon (1321), Hérigone (1634) and Pascal. | India first (well documented) |
| The Hanuman Chalisa and the distance to the Sun | Tulsidas' Hanuman Chalisa states the distance to the Sun: 1 yuga (12,000) × 1 sahasra (1,000) × 1 yojana (8 miles) = 96 million miles, close to the real value. | The distance to the Sun was first measured with reasonable accuracy by Cassini and Richer in 1672 using the parallax of Mars. | Indian claim not supported by evidence |
| The oldest written zero symbol | The Bakhshali manuscript has the world's oldest recorded zero symbol, from the 3rd or 4th century CE. | Babylonian astronomers used a placeholder sign much earlier; and some scholars question how the Bakhshali dates should be read. | Indian contribution, later developed elsewhere |
| The sine function | Trigonometry's sine and cosine were invented in India; even the word 'sine' comes from Sanskrit. | Trigonometry began with Hipparchus and Ptolemy, who made tables of chords in a circle. | India first (well documented) |
| The value of pi | Aryabhata was the first to calculate pi accurately, and he knew it was irrational. | Archimedes bounded pi between 223/71 and 22/7 in the 3rd century BCE, and Zu Chongzhi in China found 355/113 in the 5th century. | Earlier elsewhere |
| Who invented calculus? | Calculus was invented in India: Bhaskara II and the Kerala school used its methods centuries before Newton and Leibniz. | Newton and Leibniz invented calculus as a general method, with the fundamental theorem linking derivatives and integrals. | Indian contribution, later developed elsewhere |
| Zero as a number | India gave the world zero as a number: Brahmagupta wrote down rules for calculating with zero in 628 CE. | Babylonian, Greek and Maya astronomers already used signs for an empty place or empty value, so zero was not one culture's invention. | India first (well documented) |
Culture, games, language & ideas (32)
| Invention or idea | Indian claim | Commonly credited to | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aesop's fables and the Jatakas | Several of Aesop's fables came from India, as the Indian versions in the Jatakas and Panchatantra are older in spirit and fuller in form. | Aesop, a storyteller of the 6th century BCE, is the source of the Greek fables, and similar Indian stories were either independent or borrowed from the Greeks. | Disputed: evidence incomplete |
| Badminton and the game of 'Poona' | Badminton was born in India, in Pune (Poona), where its first rules were made. | Badminton is an English game, named after Badminton House in Gloucestershire, where it was played in about 1873. | Indian contribution, later developed elsewhere |
| Can anyone own a yoga sequence? | Yoga postures are traditional Indian knowledge, open to all, and cannot be owned by any person or company. | Bikram Choudhury, founder of 'Bikram Yoga' in the US, claimed copyright over his sequence of 26 postures and sued other studios; others sought patents and trademarks on yoga methods. | India first (well documented) |
| Did European fairy tales come from India? | India was the great source of the world's folk tales, which travelled west through books like the Panchatantra. | Folk tales arose in many places, and similar stories can be invented independently or spread in many directions. | Indian contribution, later developed elsewhere |
| Did India shape Greek scepticism? | Pyrrho learned his key ideas, such as suspending judgement to reach peace of mind, from Indian (possibly early Buddhist) teachers he met in India. | Pyrrho's scepticism grew out of Greek philosophy, especially the school of Democritus, which he studied under Anaxarchus. | Disputed: evidence incomplete |
| Did Indian theatre come from Greek drama? | Sanskrit drama and its theory, set out in Bharata's Natyashastra, grew from Indian roots: Vedic dialogue hymns, epic recitation, dance and ritual. | Albrecht Weber and Ernst Windisch (1882), among others, argued that Indian drama was inspired by Greek plays performed for Greek rulers in north-west India; they pointed to the stage curtain's name, yavanika ('Greek thing'). | Independent discoveries |
| Did Jesus live in India? | Jesus travelled to India in his youth and studied with Hindu and Buddhist teachers, as told in a Tibetan manuscript said to be kept at Hemis monastery in Ladakh. A separate tradition holds that he survived the cross and is buried at the Roza Bal shrine in Srinagar. | Christian scripture and historians place Jesus's whole life in Roman Palestine; the India stories are modern inventions. | Indian claim not supported by evidence |
| Did Pythagoras learn from India? | Pythagoras visited India or learned from Indian teachers, which is why he taught transmigration of souls and vegetarianism. | Pythagoras's ideas came from Greek, Egyptian or other Mediterranean sources, or were his own. | Indian claim not supported by evidence |
| Is Sanskrit the mother of all languages? | Sanskrit is the mother of all languages, or at least of the European languages. | Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian, the Germanic and Celtic languages all descend from an older lost language, Proto-Indo-European. | Indian claim not supported by evidence |
| Kalaripayattu, Bodhidharma and Shaolin kung fu | Bodhidharma, a monk from south India, taught Indian martial arts such as Kalaripayattu to the monks of Shaolin, so kung fu and the East Asian martial arts descend from India. | Chinese martial arts grew in China itself; Shaolin fighting traditions developed later and the Bodhidharma story is a legend. | Indian claim not supported by evidence |
| Ludo and pachisi | Ludo, and the American game Parcheesi, come from pachisi, an Indian race game played on a cross-shaped board with cowrie shells. | Ludo was patented in England in 1896 as a new game, using a cubic die and a shaker cup, and is often thought of as a British family game. | India first (well documented) |
| Mindfulness and its Indian roots | Mindfulness is the Buddhist practice of sati, taught by the Buddha in India and preserved in vipassana meditation. | Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) was created in 1979 at the University of Massachusetts by Jon Kabat-Zinn as a secular, scientific programme. | Indian contribution, later developed elsewhere |
| Panini and computer languages (Backus–Naur form) | Panini's method of rules and meta-rules is the ancestor of the notation used to define programming languages, which some call 'Panini–Backus form'. | John Backus and Peter Naur created the notation (Backus–Naur form, BNF) to describe the ALGOL programming language around 1959–1960. | Independent discoveries |
| Panini's grammar and modern linguistics | Panini created the first scientific grammar, and modern linguistics, including generative grammar, owes a direct debt to him. | Modern linguistics was founded in 19th- and 20th-century Europe and America by scholars such as Franz Bopp, Ferdinand de Saussure, Leonard Bloomfield and Noam Chomsky. | Indian contribution, later developed elsewhere |
| Playing cards and ganjifa | Card games such as ganjifa, with their beautiful round hand-painted cards (including the Dashavatara ganjifa of Odisha and Mysuru), are claimed by some to be an ancient Indian invention. | Playing cards first appear in China, then spread west to Persia, Egypt and Europe. | Earlier elsewhere |
| Polo and Manipur's Sagol Kangjei | Polo was born in Manipur as Sagol Kangjei, and the Imphal polo ground (Mapal Kangjeibung) is the oldest in the world. | Polo is an ancient Persian game (chovgan) which spread to Central Asia, Tibet, China and India; the modern rules were drawn up by the British. | Indian contribution, later developed elsewhere |
| Shampoo | Shampoo comes from India: from the Hindi word champo ('press, knead'), a head and body massage, brought to Britain by Sake Dean Mahomed of Patna. | Shampoo is a modern Western product, invented by European and American soap makers. | India first (well documented) |
| Snakes and ladders | Snakes and ladders is the Indian game gyan chaupar ('game of knowledge'), also called moksha patam, in which ladders stand for virtues and snakes for vices, and the last square is liberation (moksha). | British and American toy makers sold it as a children's game ('Snakes and Ladders' in Britain from the 1890s; 'Chutes and Ladders' by Milton Bradley in the US from 1943), and many players assume it is a Western invention. | India first (well documented) |
| The Arabian Nights and India | The idea of a frame story with tales inside tales, and some of the stories themselves, came from India. | The Nights are a work of Arabic literature, built on the Persian Hazar afsana ('A Thousand Tales'), with names that are mostly Persian and Arabic. | Indian contribution, later developed elsewhere |
| The Buddha as a Christian saint | The medieval Christian legend of Barlaam and Josaphat is the story of the Buddha, carried west and retold as a Christian tale. | Barlaam and Josaphat were long treated in Christian tradition as real early Christian saints of India. | India first (well documented) |
| The first democracy: Vaishali or Athens? | The Vajji (Vrijji) confederacy led by the Licchavis, with its capital at Vaishali, was one of the world's first republics, where an assembly debated and voted. | Democracy was born in Athens with the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508/507 BCE, which gave citizens power through an Assembly, a Council of 500 and popular courts. | Independent discoveries |
| The first universities: Takshashila and Nalanda vs Bologna | India had the world's first universities: Takshashila (Taxila) and, above all, Nalanda, which drew students from across Asia. | The university as a self-governing corporation of students and teachers granting degrees began in medieval Europe, with Bologna (1088) usually named the oldest that is still running. | India first (well documented) |
| The Indian origin of the Romani people | The Romani people of Europe have their roots in north-western India, and their language is an Indian (Indo-Aryan) language. | For centuries Europeans believed the Romani came from Egypt (the word 'Gypsy' comes from 'Egyptian') or elsewhere in the Near East. | India first (well documented) |
| The origin of chess | Chess began in India as chaturanga, a war game named after the four arms of an ancient army: infantry, cavalry, elephants and chariots. | Some writers say chess began in China as xiangqi (David H. Li, The Genealogy of Chess, 1998, dates it to General Han Xin in 203 BCE). Others give the credit to Persia, where the game was called chatrang and later shatranj. | India first (well documented) |
| The origin of the Brahmi script | Brahmi is an Indian creation, perhaps developed from the Indus script or from early Indian sign systems. | Brahmi was modelled on or inspired by Aramaic, the Semitic script used in the Persian Empire, which also gave rise to Kharosthi in north-west India. | Disputed: evidence incomplete |
| The Panchatantra and the fables of Europe | The Panchatantra, a Sanskrit book of animal fables for teaching princes, travelled the world and shaped European fable literature. | European fables are usually traced to Aesop and the Greek tradition, and La Fontaine's Fables are often seen as purely European. | India first (well documented) |
| Was the Indus script the world's first writing? | The Indus script is the oldest writing in the world, and it has been deciphered as an early form of Sanskrit. | The first writing systems are Sumerian cuneiform in Mesopotamia and Egyptian hieroglyphs, from around 3200 BCE. | Earlier elsewhere |
| Was the Ramayana copied from Homer? | The Ramayana is an original Indian epic by Valmiki, with its own roots in Indian tradition. | Albrecht Weber argued in the 1870s that the Ramayana's plot (the abduction of Sita and the war at Lanka) was shaped by Homer's story of Helen and Troy. | Independent discoveries |
| Where did the Indo-Aryan languages come from? | The 'Indigenous Aryans' or 'Out of India' view: Vedic culture grew in India itself, possibly from the Harappan civilisation, and there was no Aryan invasion or migration. | The migration view: people with ancestry from the Central Asian steppe moved into South Asia in the second millennium BCE and brought early Indo-Aryan speech, which mixed with the existing population. | Disputed: evidence incomplete |
| Where did yoga begin? | Yoga is part of India's heritage: it grew out of Vedic, Upanishadic, Buddhist and Jain traditions and was systematised in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. India proposed International Day of Yoga at the UN in 2014. | On 21 June 2021, K. P. Sharma Oli said that yoga originated in Nepal, when India did not exist as a country, crediting Shiva and Patanjali. | India first (well documented) |
| Where does the swastika come from? | The swastika is an Indian symbol of well-being, whose name comes from Sanskrit (su + asti, 'it is good'). It was taken and misused by the Nazis. | The symbol is found in many ancient cultures across Europe, the Near East, China and the Americas, and its oldest known examples are outside India. | Independent discoveries |
| Who made the first image of the Buddha? | The Buddha image was created by Indian artists at Mathura, growing out of older Indian sculpture of yakshas and kings. | The French scholar Alfred Foucher argued that the Buddha image was invented in Gandhara (today's Pakistan and Afghanistan) by artists trained in Greco-Roman style, modelled partly on Apollo. | Independent discoveries |
Medicine & health (30)
| Invention or idea | Indian claim | Commonly credited to | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plastic surgery of the nose (rhinoplasty) | The Sushruta Samhita describes rebuilding a lost nose with a flap of living skin from the cheek. Indian practitioners were still doing the operation, with a forehead flap, in the 1790s. | Modern plastic surgery is often dated to European surgeons such as Joseph Constantine Carpue, who performed forehead-flap nose repairs in London in 1814. | India first (well documented) |
| Organ and head transplants in ancient India | Some public figures have said that Ganesha's elephant head shows that a plastic surgeon in ancient India could transplant a head. Prime Minister Narendra Modi said this at the opening of a Mumbai hospital on 25 October 2014. | The first successful human organ transplant was a kidney transplant between identical twins by Joseph Murray's team in Boston in 1954. It needed modern understanding of tissue rejection. | Indian claim not supported by evidence |
| Test-tube babies and stem cells in the Mahabharata | At the 106th Indian Science Congress in Jalandhar in January 2019, Andhra University Vice-Chancellor G. Nageswara Rao said the 100 Kauravas were born from embryos grown in pots, showing that ancient India knew test-tube and stem-cell methods. | In-vitro fertilisation was first achieved in humans with the birth of Louise Brown in England on 25 July 1978; India's first IVF baby, Durga, was born in Kolkata about ten weeks later. | Indian claim not supported by evidence |
| The world's second test-tube baby | Dr Subhash Mukhopadhyay and colleagues in Kolkata produced India's first IVF baby, Durga (Kanupriya Agarwal), born on 3 October 1978, using their own methods. | Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards in England produced the world's first IVF baby, Louise Brown, on 25 July 1978. Edwards received the Nobel Prize in 2010. | Independent discoveries |
| Cataract surgery | The Sushruta Samhita describes using a curved needle to push a clouded lens out of the line of sight, the operation called couching, and gives aftercare. | The Code of Hammurabi (c. 1750 BCE) sets fees and penalties for eye surgery with a bronze lancet, which some read as couching. The Roman writer Celsus described couching clearly in about 30 CE. | Disputed: evidence incomplete |
| Smallpox inoculation (variolation) | Practitioners in Bengal and Odisha deliberately infected healthy people with material from smallpox sores to give a mild case and lifelong protection, a practice known as tika. | Lady Mary Wortley Montagu brought variolation from Ottoman Turkey to England in 1721. Edward Jenner introduced safer cowpox vaccination in 1796. | Independent discoveries |
| An ancient Sanskrit text on cowpox vaccination | A verse said to come from an old text (sometimes credited to Dhanvantari) describes taking matter from the udder of a cow to protect people from smallpox, which would mean India knew vaccination before Jenner. | Edward Jenner developed cowpox vaccination in England in 1796 and published it in 1798. | Indian claim not supported by evidence |
| Ayurveda and Greek medicine: which came first? | Ayurveda, with its theory of three doshas (vata, pitta, kapha), is the world's oldest system of rational medicine and predates or inspired Greek medicine. | The Hippocratic writings (c. 430–330 BCE) and Galen (2nd century CE) built a rational medicine based on four humours, which shaped European and Islamic medicine. | Independent discoveries |
| Recognising diabetes by sweet urine | The Charaka and Sushruta Samhitas describe madhumeha, 'honey urine', a disease in which urine is sweet and attracts ants, and separate a form in thin people from one linked to overeating and obesity. | Thomas Willis in England noted the sweet taste of diabetic urine in 1674 and Matthew Dobson showed in 1776 that it contained sugar. | India first (well documented) |
| Learning anatomy by dissecting the human body | The Sushruta Samhita tells surgeons to study a body by placing it in a cage in flowing water for about seven days and then removing the layers one by one with a brush, so that skin, muscle and organs can be seen. | Herophilus and Erasistratus systematically dissected human bodies in Alexandria in the 3rd century BCE. Andreas Vesalius founded modern anatomy with his book De humani corporis fabrica in 1543. | Independent discoveries |
| A full kit of surgical instruments | The Sushruta Samhita lists over a hundred blunt instruments (yantra) and about twenty sharp ones (shastra), many named after the animals or birds they resemble, and says how to hold, clean and keep them sharp. | Surgical tools are known from ancient Egypt and Greece, and dozens of Roman instruments were found at Pompeii (buried 79 CE). Many look much like modern ones. | Independent discoveries |
| Surgery to remove bladder stones | The Sushruta Samhita gives a careful account of perineal lithotomy, cutting through the area between the legs to remove a bladder stone, including warnings about the risks. | Ammonius of Alexandria (c. 200 BCE) was called 'Lithotomus' for breaking and removing stones, and the Roman Celsus described perineal lithotomy in detail in the 1st century CE. | Independent discoveries |
| Anaesthesia for surgery | Sushruta told surgeons to give wine before operations so the patient would not feel pain, and later writers say a drug called 'sammohini' put patients to sleep. | Hanaoka Seishu in Japan removed a breast tumour under oral general anaesthesia on 13 October 1804. William Morton's public ether demonstration in Boston on 16 October 1846 launched modern anaesthesia. | Earlier elsewhere |
| The circulation of blood | Passages in the Sushruta Samhita describe a fluid pumped from the heart through channels to the whole body, which some writers read as blood circulation. | William Harvey proved by experiment in 1628 that blood moves in a closed loop from the heart through arteries and back through veins. Ibn al-Nafis in Cairo had described blood passing through the lungs in the 13th century. | Indian claim not supported by evidence |
| Germ theory of disease | The Atharvaveda speaks of krimi, creatures, some visible and some invisible, that enter the body and cause disease, and gives charms and herbs against them. Some writers say this is germ theory. | Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch proved in the 1860s–1880s that specific microbes cause specific diseases, using microscopes and experiments such as Koch's postulates. | Indian claim not supported by evidence |
| Pulse diagnosis (nadi pariksha) | Nadi pariksha, reading the pulse at the wrist to judge the doshas, is presented as an ancient Ayurvedic method. | Herophilus in Alexandria studied the pulse in the 3rd century BCE, and Chinese medicine wrote about it at length, for example in Wang Shuhe's Mai Jing (3rd century CE). | Earlier elsewhere |
| The physician's oath | The Charaka Samhita sets out an initiation oath for medical students, binding them to serve patients, keep secrets and live with discipline. In 2022 the National Medical Commission recommended a modified 'Charak Shapath' for new doctors. | The Hippocratic Oath, from the 5th–3rd century BCE, is the best known code of medical ethics and the basis of modern versions such as the Declaration of Geneva. | Independent discoveries |
| The first state hospitals and public medical care | Ashoka's Rock Edict II (about 258 BCE) says the king provided two kinds of medical treatment, for humans and for animals, across his empire and in neighbouring lands, and had medicinal plants grown where they were lacking. | Greek healing temples of Asclepius treated the sick from the 5th century BCE, and large charitable hospitals were built in the Byzantine and Islamic worlds from the 4th and 8th centuries CE. | Disputed: evidence incomplete |
| The earliest tooth drilling | At Mehrgarh, a Neolithic site in Balochistan in the north-west of the subcontinent (now in Pakistan), people's molar teeth were drilled while they were alive, between about 9,000 and 7,500 years ago. | Simpler dental treatment is older elsewhere: a tooth from Villabruna in Italy, about 14,000 years old, shows a cavity scraped out with a flint tool. | India first (well documented) |
| The first artificial limb | A Rigveda hymn (1.116.15) praises the Ashvins, the divine physicians, for giving the warrior queen Vishpala a leg of metal after hers was cut off in battle, so she could fight again. | The oldest surviving working prosthesis is a wooden and leather big toe found on an Egyptian mummy near Luxor, dated to about 950–710 BCE; a bronze-and-wood leg from Capua in Italy dates to about 300 BCE. | Disputed: evidence incomplete |
| Caesarean birth | A legend says Chanakya cut open the womb of Chandragupta Maurya's queen after she was accidentally poisoned, saving the baby Bindusara. | Roman law required a baby to be cut from a mother who died in pregnancy. The first reported caesarean in which the mother survived is credited to Jacob Nufer in Switzerland in 1500, though that account is also doubted. | Indian claim not supported by evidence |
| The first effective drug for kala-azar | Dr Upendranath Brahmachari synthesised urea stibamine, an antimony compound, at the Campbell Medical School in Calcutta and showed in 1922 that it cured kala-azar (visceral leishmaniasis), which killed most of those infected. | Earlier antimony treatment (tartar emetic), introduced by Gaspar Vianna in Brazil in 1912 for skin leishmaniasis and used by others for kala-azar from 1915, was toxic and only partly effective. | India first (well documented) |
| The first plague vaccine | The first vaccine against bubonic plague was developed in Bombay in 1896–97 in a makeshift laboratory at Grant Medical College, and tested at Byculla jail. The laboratory grew into today's Haffkine Institute in Mumbai. | The vaccine was the work of Waldemar Haffkine, a scientist from Odessa trained at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, who worked for the Government of British India. | India first (well documented) |
| The first cholera vaccine | Haffkine's cholera vaccine was first used on a large scale in Calcutta and Bengal from 1893, and field trials in India showed it cut cholera deaths sharply. | Jaime Ferrán vaccinated tens of thousands of people against cholera in Valencia, Spain, in 1885, seven years before Haffkine first tested his vaccine on himself in Paris in July 1892. | Disputed: evidence incomplete |
| How cholera kills: the cholera toxin | Sambhu Nath De showed in 1959, at Calcutta Medical College, that cholera bacteria release a toxin that makes the gut pour out fluid. This is the true cause of cholera's deadly diarrhoea. | Robert Koch identified the cholera bacterium (Vibrio cholerae) in 1884, working partly in Calcutta, and believed it acted through a poison he never found. Filippo Pacini had seen the organism in 1854. | India first (well documented) |
| Oral rehydration solution (ORS) | Hemendra Nath Chatterjee in Calcutta reported treating cholera with an oral salt and glucose drink in The Lancet in 1953. In 1971 Dilip Mahalanabis used ORS on a mass scale in refugee camps at Bongaon, West Bengal, cutting deaths from about 30% to about 3%. | David Nalin and Richard Cash in Dhaka, and Norbert Hirschhorn and colleagues in Dhaka and Calcutta, proved in controlled trials in 1967–68 that a glucose-salt drink could replace intravenous fluids in cholera. | Indian contribution, later developed elsewhere |
| Treating leprosy with chaulmoogra oil | Oil from the seeds of the chaulmoogra tree (Hydnocarpus) was used against leprosy in traditional Indian medicine long before Western doctors adopted it in the 19th century. | Raw oil was hard to swallow and too thick to inject. In 1915–16 Alice Ball, an African-American chemist in Hawaii, made an injectable form (ethyl esters), the 'Ball method', which became the main leprosy treatment until sulfone drugs in the 1940s. | Indian contribution, later developed elsewhere |
| The first modern drug for high blood pressure | Sarpagandha (Rauwolfia serpentina), long used in India for mental illness and snakebite, was shown by Ganapath Sen and Kartick Chandra Bose in Calcutta in 1931 to lower blood pressure. Dr Rustom Jal Vakil of Bombay published decisive clinical results in the British Heart Journal in 1949. | Scientists at the Swiss company Ciba isolated the active substance, reserpine, in 1952 and it became one of the first widely used blood pressure and psychiatric drugs. | Indian contribution, later developed elsewhere |
| The discovery of ATP, the body's energy molecule | Yellapragada Subbarow, working with Cyrus Fiske at Harvard, found phosphocreatine and ATP in muscle in the late 1920s. He later led work at Lederle on folic acid and the cancer drug methotrexate. | Textbooks usually credit Karl Lohmann in Germany with discovering ATP in 1929. | Independent discoveries |
| Yoga as a health practice and therapy | Yoga began in India, with roots in the Upanishads, Patanjali's Yoga Sutras and later hatha yoga texts. Scientific study of yoga as therapy also began in India, when Swami Kuvalayananda started the Kaivalyadhama research centre at Lonavala and the journal Yoga Mimamsa in 1924. | Some scholars, such as Mark Singleton in Yoga Body (2010), argue that much of today's posture-based yoga was shaped in the 20th century by Indian teachers blending hatha yoga with European gymnastics, and some studios present it as a Western fitness brand. | India first (well documented) |
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