<strong>Shivkar Talpade: The untold story of the man who flew India's first aircraft</strong>
As a child, you might have wished to fly like a bird. So did our ancestors, centuries ago. So, our ancestors made feathers or light wood wings connected to their arms to see if they could fly. It took patience, tenacity, passion, and creative brains to enable humanity to finally take to the skies.
Wilbur and Orville Wright, famously known as the Wright brothers, are recognised as the first people to fly an aircraft. However, Shivkar Bapuji Talpade from India remained unrecognised. His legacy has been depicted in a film Hawaizaada (released in January 2015), directed by Vibhu Puri, starring Ayushman Khurrana and Mithun Chakraborty. Let’s discover the untold story of Talpade.
The Indian who invented airplane before the Wright Brothers
In 1864, a boy with extraordinary vision was born in the Pathare Prabhu family of South Bombay. His name was Shivkar Bapuji Talpade. With his roots in the Arya Samaj, Talpade had immense knowledge of Sanskrit. A scholar of the Vedas and Sanskrit, he was fascinated by books on Indian aeronautics. Since his childhood, Talpade dreamt of flying and exploring space. Driven by his passion, he began to look for mentions of flying in the Vedas.
Meanwhile, Talpade met Pandit Subbaraya Shastry, the author of Vaimanika Shastra. Shastry learnt the art of plane-making from an ascetic in Kolar, Karnataka. He requested a trainee engineer, T K Ellapa, to make drawings of it. He also hired a local priest, G. V Sharma, to write instructions in the manuscript. Shastry gave Talpade scriptures for making an aircraft.
He claimed that they were the teachings of Bharadwaja, an ancient sage. However, this assertion is merely based on textual references and has not yet been verified.
Birth of the first Indian aircraft
Talpade built his flight in 1895, named ‘Marutsakh’, with Shastry's instructions. Marutsakh is a portmanteau of two words, Marut, which means a stream of air, and Sakha, which means friend. Talpade named his aircraft after the the Goddess of Knowledge, Saraswati, mentioned in the Rigveda.
Unmanned and heavier-than-air, Marutsakh flew 1,500 feet above Bombay's Chowpatty. It reached a modest height before colliding with the ground. The aircraft was a bamboo cylinder fuelled by a mercury ion engine. It remained in the air for 18 minutes before the Naksha Rasa accumulators ran out of power.
The then Maharaja of Baroda, H H Sayaji Rao Gaekwad, and eminent Indian judge Mahadeva Govind Ranade are said to have witnessed this flight. According to Pt. S. D. Satwalekar, a pupil of Talpade’s, Marutsakh, could sustain flight for a short period. An editorial was also published on this aircraft in Marathi newspaper Kesari, by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, a prominent freedom fighter. Two more English newspapers published the terse accounts of it.. Two more English newspapers published terse accounts of it.
On the day Marutsakh's flight took place, Talpade's techno-savvy wife Smt. Laxmi Bai, was by his side. Laxmi Bai was a Vedic scholar and had immense knowledge on architecture.
A story that never left the Indian shores
Whether Shivkar Talpade was the first man to make and fly aircraft continues to be debated. However, many pieces of literature claim that the Marutsakh was the first cylindrical bamboo plane fuelled by liquid mercury. Hydrogen was released from the mercury when it interacted with sunlight. Also, since hydrogen is lighter than air, the plane flew. However, the aircraft didn't ascend very high or linger too long in air. But Talpade was successful in building and flying an unmanned aircraft centuries before the Wright brothers.
Apparently, due to censorship by the British Raj, the success story never left Indian shores. Till date, no written evidence of either the drawings, the flight or anything connected to it are available to confirm these events.