Pushpak Viman: Ravana's Flying Machine, Long Before Da Vinci

A man is at a window, pointing down at the ground and naming what he sees for the woman beside him. That is the causeway we crossed. That is the mountain where the monkey king holds his court. That river is the Godavari, and on the bank are the trees where we built our hut and lived.

They are in the air.

The scene is from the Yuddha Kanda of Valmiki's Ramayana. Rama is flying home to Ayodhya with Sita after the war in Lanka, and the poem gives a long stretch of verses to what the country looks like from above. Somebody imagined the view out of an aircraft window and wrote it down, at a point in history when no human being had ever been up there to check.

Leonardo da Vinci sketched his flapping-wing machine around 1485. Popular histories of aviation usually begin there. The Ramayana was describing flight in detail, with a named vehicle and a passenger list and a route, more than a thousand years earlier.

What Hanuman found in Ravana's palace

Long before Rama boards it, the machine is introduced properly.

Hanuman has crossed the ocean and is searching Ravana's city at night for Sita. He moves through the palace complex, and in the middle of it he comes on something that stops him where he stands.

In the middle of that dwelling Hanuman saw the great aerial car named Pushpaka, studded with gems, fashioned by Vishvakarma, which travels wherever its owner wishes it to go.

Ramayana, Sundara Kanda

What follows is one of the most lavish descriptions in the poem. The Pushpaka has upper storeys and staircases and latticed windows. Its pillars are worked in gold. It carries figures of birds and serpents and flowering trees rendered in silver and coral, and the poet says the whole thing looks ready to rise into the air out of sheer splendour rather than by any mechanism.

Notice what kind of object this is. Vimana, the word used throughout, does not mean chariot. It means a measured-out structure, a mansion, a hall. It is the same word still used in South Indian temple architecture for the tower that rises over the sanctum.

The Pushpaka is a building that flies.

Going where it is told

The poem is consistent about what the thing does, across books composed at different times and by different hands.

It goes at will. The recurring epithet is kamaga, going according to desire. There is no fixed route, no team of animals harnessed at the front, no track. It goes where it is directed, and the direction comes from whoever is aboard.

It carries as many as need carrying. When the war ends, Vibhishana offers the Pushpaka to Rama for the journey home, and the question of who travels is settled by inviting everyone. Rama, Sita and Lakshmana board it. So do Sugriva, Vibhishana, Hanuman, Jambavan and the vanara army that fought the war. Nobody is left on the ground for want of space.

It answers to thought. The Uttara Kanda has Rama send the Pushpaka back to Kubera, its rightful owner, once the journey is done, on the understanding that it will return when Rama needs it. What summons it afterwards is not a shouted order or a signal. Rama remembers it, and it comes.

Kubera's first, and then taken by force

The Uttara Kanda supplies the history, and the history is a theft.

Vishvakarma, the architect of the gods, built the Pushpaka. Brahma held it, and it passed to Kubera, lord of wealth and half-brother to Ravana, who obtained it by long austerity rather than by force. Ravana then took Lanka from Kubera by war, and took the vimana along with the city. Everything about the vehicle in the middle of Ravana's palace is stolen property, which is why Vibhishana can hand it to Rama at the end without anyone treating it as a gift of his own.

There is one more episode in that book, and it is the strangest thing in the poem's account of flight.

Ravana is flying north over a forest near Kailasa when the Pushpaka stops. It will not move. He demands an explanation, and gets one from Nandi, who tells him the mountain is closed to him and curses him to be destroyed by monkeys. Ravana responds by trying to uproot Kailasa entire, and Shiva ends the argument by pressing down with one toe until Ravana is pinned under the mountain he was lifting.

Set aside the theology and look at the stall. The poem's flying machine can be brought to a halt in mid-air by an authority its pilot does not outrank, and the pilot's response is to get out and argue about it.

The flight home, and the view from the window

The long passage is the return journey, and it is the part of the Ramayana that most deserves to be better known.

Behold, Sita, the city of Lanka on the peak of Trikuta, built as if by the gods themselves. Behold the field where the battle was fought. There is the bridge I had built across the lord of rivers, the Nala Setu, by which we crossed.

Ramayana, Yuddha Kanda

He keeps going, and the poem keeps up with him. The ocean, the causeway, Kishkindha where Sugriva rules, the Rishyamuka hill, the lake at Pampa, Janasthana, Panchavati, the Godavari, the hermitages of Agastya and Sharabhanga and Atri, Chitrakuta, the Yamuna, the ashram of Bharadvaja at the confluence, the Ganga, Shringaverapura where Guha ferried them across, the Sarayu, and finally Ayodhya.

That is the entire fourteen years of exile replayed in reverse, at speed, from the air.

The vehicle also lands and takes off again on command. Rama has it set down at Bharadvaja's hermitage so that he can pay his respects, and sends Hanuman ahead on foot to warn Bharata that he is coming.

Sit with what the poet had to work out in order to write that sequence. On the ground, a journey is a series of days, each ending where the walking stops. From the air it becomes a continuous map, with the places you spent months in reduced to features you name and pass. Getting that shift right, without ever having made it, is a real feat of imagination, and the Ramayana performs it at length and in order.

The poem did not copy a bird

Here is the detail that ought to unsettle anyone who has only ever heard the European version of this story.

The Pushpaka has no wings. Nothing on it flaps. Nobody straps anything to their arms and jumps. The Ramayana does not derive flight from birds at all.

Leonardo did, and so did almost everyone in Europe for four hundred years afterwards. His flying machines are bird machines: wings worked by a man lying prone, cranks and pulleys converting human muscle into a wingbeat. He watched birds with enormous care and drew exactly what he saw. One of his notebooks is called the Codex on the Flight of Birds, and the title is the whole method.

That instinct turned out to be a dead end. Human muscle cannot generate the power a flapping wing needs to lift a human body. Flight became possible only when the problem was pulled apart into a fixed surface that provides lift and a separate engine that provides thrust, which is George Cayley's insight from 1799 onward and the inheritance the Wright brothers were working from.

The obvious objection is that the Ramayana offers no aerodynamics. Neither did anyone else for the next two thousand years, and when the aerodynamics finally arrived, they vindicated the poem's picture rather than Leonardo's. The Pushpaka is not a man imitating a bird. It is a structure that moves through the air because that is the kind of thing it is, with people sitting inside it in comfort, looking out of windows at the ground. Of the two images, only one of them resembles what flying eventually turned out to be, and it is the older one.

What Leonardo actually drew

Between roughly 1485 and 1490, in Manuscript B and the Codex Atlanticus, Leonardo drew the ornithopter and the helical air screw that later ages nicknamed a helicopter.

Not one of them was built in his lifetime. Reconstructions have confirmed what the physics already implied, which is that they would not have flown. His notebooks were dispersed after his death and went largely unread for three centuries, and they contributed almost nothing to the actual invention of the aeroplane.

None of that is a criticism, and the reason it is not a criticism is the whole argument of this article. Leonardo is honoured for the reach of the idea and not for a working machine. He imagined flight seriously, in detail, and left a record that survived.

Apply that same standard, without adjustment, to the Ramayana.

The gap, stated exactly

Scholars generally place the core books of Valmiki's Ramayana in the centuries around 500 to 300 BCE, with the Bala Kanda and the Uttara Kanda usually treated as later additions. Take the most conservative date anyone offers for the latest layer, and the distance to Leonardo's sketch is still well over a thousand years. Take the mainstream date for the Yuddha Kanda, which is the book containing the flight home, and it is closer to two thousand.

The tradition's own reckoning places the events in the Treta Yuga, and is not shy about the figure.

There is a second gap that matters as much and gets mentioned even less.

Leonardo's ornithopter sat in a private notebook, in mirror writing, unseen. The Ramayana was memorised, recited aloud, performed on stage, translated into a dozen languages and carried across Asia. If the question is which imagination of flight actually kept the idea alive in human minds, the answer is not close. Children in Java and Thailand and Kerala have been watching Rama fly home for a very long time.

What the record shows

A skeptic will say the Ramayana is a poem, with no specifications, no materials list and no method. Grant the objection in full, and then apply the standard the objection itself accepts, because it is exactly the standard by which Leonardo is honoured. His machine was never built, could not have flown, and taught the men who finally flew nothing at all. He holds his place in the history of flight for one reason, which is that he conceived the thing seriously and left a record. Hold the Ramayana to that same standard and it does not merely qualify. It comes first, and by a distance.

The concept is present in the poem, complete and correct in its essentials. A vehicle that is a made structure rather than an imitated animal. Flight that owes nothing to flapping. Passengers seated inside in comfort, boarding and disembarking, landing and taking off on command. The changed look of the earth from above, rendered in order and at length. That is the concept of the aircraft, whole, set down fifteen centuries before Leonardo at the least and roughly two millennia before the machine itself existed.

An honest history of the idea of flight would say so plainly, near the front, in the same paragraph as the ornithopter and ahead of it. Most of them do not, and the reason has never been a shortage of evidence.

The scene is still sitting there in the sixth book, exactly where it has been for two thousand years. A man at a window, high above the Godavari, telling his wife the name of the river below.