In October 2014, five months after Narendra Modi was first elected as the prime minister of India, he claimed that the legend of the Hindu god Ganesha – whose elephant head was affixed to a human body – proved that cosmetic surgery existed in ancient India. Not long after, a retired pilot instructor, Anand Bodas, presented a joint research paper at the Indian Science Congress in Mumbai asserting that the repeated mentions of chariots and flying machines in ancient Sanskrit epics proved that aircrafts and drones were being developed in the Indian subcontinent 7,000 years ago.
Over the past decade of Modi’s rule, the country’s history has been embellished with visions of a fantastic, and technologically advanced, Hindu past. For the ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), history and mythology are one and the same: the land south of the Himalayas was once a prelapsarian Hindu arcadia, which led the world in economic growth and scientific research. Our temples were apparently awash with gold; and 20th-century breakthroughs of western science such as stem-cell research and nuclear fission were all pioneered in India millennia ago. This fabled paradise was inevitably sullied by the arrival of “outsiders”: Hindu supremacists have consistently maintained that bloodthirsty Muslim invaders ran riot across the country from the 11th century onwards, massacring millions, destroying temples and universities.
