SASA Master Class: A Text That Defied Time: Machines, Motion, and Knowledge in the Samarāṅgaṇa Sūtradhāra

This master class explores the extraordinary world of early Indian mechanical imagination as described in the Samarāṅgaṇa Sūtradhāra, an 11th-century CE treatise attributed to King Bhoja. Far beyond its architectural prescriptions, the text contains elaborate descriptions of yantras, automata, movable structures, protective devices, and urban engineering systems.

Through selected translated passages, participants will examine how the treatise conceptualises motion, agency, materiality, and divinity. By approaching the text as a window into “sacred engineering”, the session highlights how ancient India fused architecture, ritual, and technology into a cohesive knowledge system, one in which machines were not merely tools but symbolic, cosmological, and social agents. This discussion will open space for rethinking global histories of technology and the place of Indian knowledge systems within them.

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