Shivkar Bāpuji Talpade(pronunciationⓘ) was an Indian instructor with an interest inSanskrit and aviation. He lived inMumbai, and is claimed to have constructed and flown anunmanned,heavier-than-air aircraft in 1895. Contemporary accounts of a successful flight do not exist, and no reliable historical records document its existence.[1][2][3]Pseudo-historical narratives about Talpade proliferated in India in the early 2000s among adherents of theHindu-nationalistright-wing. These included the false claim that Talpade had "invented the modern aircraft".[4][2][1][3]
Talpade is claimed to have constructed anunmanned,heavier-than-air aircraft, namedMarutsakhā ("friend of the air"), and flown it above Bombay'sChowpatty Beach in 1895.[1][2] Contemporary accounts of a successful flight do not exist, and no reliable historical records document its existence.[1][2][3]
Talpade's aircraft was reputed to have flown to a height of 1,500 feet (460 m). Pratap Velkar, a local architect who has researched Talpade's life and written a book about him, denies this, stating that it rose to a small height before crashing.[5] The aircraft has been described as a cylinder ofbamboo, with claims it usedmercury or urine as a fuel.[5] Some of Talpade's drawings were said to have been sent toHindustan Aeronautics (HAL), but Anuradha Reddy, a historian of aviation, was unable to trace them.[1] The aircraft itself has been described as being sold toRallis Brothers, or to HAL.[5] Some accounts of the event stated that the flight was watched bySayajirao Gaekwad III, then theMaharaja of Baroda, but direct evidence for this is scant. Velkar states that no royals attended, as it was not well-publicized.[1]
Some versions of the story say that Talpade had advice from Subbaraya Shastry (1866 - 1940), who later wroteVaimānika Shāstra ("Science of Aeronautics"), a text that is frequently associated with descriptions of aircraft in theVedas.[1][5] Shastry claimed the text was delivered to him psychically and was thousands of years old.[3] A 1974 paper by scientists from theIndian Institute of Science declared that the designs in theVaimānika Shāstra itself were technologically unfeasible,[6][2] stating that the text showed a "complete lack of understanding of the dynamics of the flight of heavier-than-air craft". The study also stated that elements of the text were "entirely modern", and that it was definitively not vedic in origin.[3] Shastry himself in his autobiography states that Talpade attempted to construct models of aircraft under Shastry's guidance but was unsuccessful in making any of them fly.[6]
Narratives about the event proliferated in the early 2000s among adherents of the nationalistright-wing.[2] The absence of evidence of its construction is attributed to censorship by theBritish Raj.[2] Talpade developed a reputation as the "first man to fly an aircraft", given that his achievement was supposed to have taken place eight years before theWright Brothers flew their plane in 1903.[1] The aircraft attributed to Talpade was unmanned: unmanned aircraft were already in existence at that time, and were flown successfully decades before Talpade's birth. The first such flight was by English engineerJohn Stringfellow, whose craft flew about thirty yards in 1848.[1][7][8][9]
A film based on life of Talpade,Hawaizaada, starringAyushmann Khurrana, was released on 30 January 2015. The government ofUttar Pradesh exempt the film from taxes in that state.[10] The film states that Talpade had accomplished in 1895 what the Wright Brothers did in 1903.[2] TheHindi News channelZee News aired a piece titled "Wright brothers wrong thhe" (the Wright brothers were wrong).[1][2] The segment claimed that Talpade's craft was the first modern aircraft in the world, and that it was the firstdrone.[2] Also in 2015, acontroversial paper presented at the Indian Science Congress claimed that Talpade had "invented the modern aircraft".[1][2] Ram Prasad Gandhiraman, a scientist working forNASA, described the paper aspseudoscience.[4]
Talpade is believed to have been born in 1864 in the Pathare Prabhu community in a South Mumbai home