N.S. Rajaram, known also as Navaratna Rajaram is an Indian-American scientist and engineer who has worked in several fields ranging from mathematical physics, artificial intelligence and robotics to renewable resources and solar energy. He is known also for his work on ancient Indian history and history of science where he introduced methods based on the natural sciences and ancient mathematics in the study of Vedic and other ancient civilizations.
His research, first with the American philosopher David Frawley and later with the Indian Vedic scholar Natwar Jha led to the unification of Indus (Harappan) archaeology and the Vedic literature. His readings of the Indus seals showed their language to be related to Sanskrit and part of the Vedic culture. This discredited the centuries-old race-and-linguistics based theories like the Aryan invasion of India, showing them to be unscientific and politically motivated. This has made him a popular but controversial figure worldwide.
Background and early life
Navaratna Srinivasa Rajaram was born on September 22, 1943 in Mysore City, then in the Kingdom of Mysore now in Karnataka, India. His ancestors were Vedic Brahmins belonging to the Madhva-Deshastha sect who came to Mysore in 1638, accompanying Shahji Bhonsle (father of the famous warrior Shivaji) when he became the Governor of Karnatak. Rajaram’s father Navaratna Srinivasa Rao (1913–2002) was a leading surgeon of his time and his mother was Nanda Devi (1922–1996). Her father Ramohalli Vyasa Rao (1881–1958) was an eminent geologist and industrialist who founded several successful companies and also a scholar of note.
The major early influence on Rajaram was his paternal grandfather Navaratna Rama Rao (1877–1960), a renowned administrator and friend and mentor of leading figures like India’s Governor General C. Rajagopalachari (Rajaji), polymath K.M. Munshi, composer Vasudevacharya, and musician M. S. Subbulakshmi– to name a few. Rajaram spent much of his early youth with his grandfather whose personality, associations and scholarship left a profound and lasting influence on him. Like his grandfather, Rajaram too became proficient in several languages gaining recognition and awards as a writer both in English and in his native Kannada at an early age.
Early career in India
Rajaram’s early schooling was sporadic because of frequent travel and he was tutored privately at home until the age of ten. He later joined the National High School in Bangalore, and, after finishing school, studied electrical engineering in Mysore and Bangalore. After graduation in 1965 he joined the Tata Power Company in Bombay (Mumbai) working in the control room of a distribution station. This, followed by a stint in setting up electrical irrigation sets in the rural areas around Poona (now Pune) gave him intimate knowledge of the practical aspects of electrical engineering. His control room experience proved invaluable when he was involved in the computerized automation of the NASA Mission Control Center at the Johnson Space Center in Houston more than a decade later.
Space program, artificial intelligence
After five years as a working engineer, Rajaram left for the United States to pursue higher studies in science rather than engineering. He went on to get a Ph.D. from Indiana University, Bloomington in 1976, with joint specialization in probability theory and mathematical physics. After teaching mathematics and computer science for four years at Kent State University in Ohio, in 1980, he accepted a research position with the Lockheed Corporation (now Lockheed-Martin) in Houston. For the next twelve years, until he returned to India in 1992, he was primarily an industrial researcher while remaining close to the academic world.
His work with Lockheed called for computer analysis of images from an earth sensing satellite called Landsat that had been launched by NASA to evaluate the world’s agricultural resources. Although the program (known as AgriStars) met with only limited success, it proved a valuable learning experience. It convinced Rajaram, who in turn convinced NASA that NASA needed to develop artificial intelligence (AI) systems to improve accuracy and control manpower costs. Also, going against the then prevailing opinion, he held that such AI systems, known as expert systems, should be developed on personal computers that were then becoming available rather than on specialized platforms. (The manuscript of a book he had prepared on the subject was pirated and later published without his knowledge.) He left Lockheed in 1983 to form his own automation firm while teaching as an adjunct professor of engineering at the University of Houston. His former NASA and Lockheed colleagues, however, continued to consult him on various problems, particularly with regard to AI based automation of the Mission Control Center for Space Shuttle operations. This led to his organizing conferences on Robotics and Expert Systems with the support of NASA and the Department of Defense and their contractors. The proceedings of these conferences, known as ROBEX-85 and ROBEX-87 which he edited, became the standard reference works on the subjects.,
Learning from this experience Rajaram next turned his attention to industrial automation problems. His research looked at ways of integrating Computer Aided Design (CAD) and Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM). This led to another well-known application, done jointly with his student Eric Sullivan, in which they used knowledge based (AI) techniques to simplify demanding tasks like programming industrial robots.
Rajaram’s last work in the AI area was a study of artificial neural networks. It was commissioned by a private research firm on contract to NASA (and the Department of Defense). This was followed by a radically different approach to teaching mathematical subjects using AI methods on networked personal computers, a relatively new idea at the time. Though this was well received and received generous funding from several sources, Rajaram decided to retire from regular work and concentrate on his other interests while staying with his parents in India.
Historian, Indus Script
Rajaram returned to India in December 1992 to be with his parents in Bangalore while continuing to maintain his university contacts in the U.S. and U.K. Shortly before his return he became acquainted with the American Vedic scholar David Frawley and his work on ancient India. Coincidentally, Rajaram was also working on a book on ancient India based on a scientific approach. Now that he was free of professional responsibilities, he decided to pursue his interests in the area. Over the next two decades, while living mostly in India, Rajaram wrote several works on India as well as on the origins of Christianity. It is the work of this period that has made Rajaram widely known to the public as well as a controversial historian. Contrary to some claims, Rajaram has always been an independent writer, and never ‘sponsored’ by Sita Ram Goel and his supposedly ‘nationalist’ publishing house Voice of India (or anyone else). He was a recognized author both in India and the West by the time Goel contacted him in late 1993. Apart from his technical writings, even his book Vedic Aryans and the Origins of Civilization, probably his best known early work on ancient India (with David Frawley) appeared first in America. Only later did Voice of India bring out an Indian edition as the second edition (and a third later). Rajaram wrote only two books for Voice of India—The Politics of History and Profiles in Deception ; his other titles, were compilations by Goel and Ram Swarup of articles and lectures that had appeared elsewhere. Even with his Profiles, nearly half of the book dealt with the material already covered in his work The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Crisis of Christianity that had appeared in the U.K. earlier. Rajaram does, however, acknowledge his debt to Goel and Ram Swarup for pointing the way in his study of Christianity and Islam. Rajaram has not been a prolific writer—either technical or otherwise—possibly because he has worked in several different fields and was never under any ‘pressure to publish’.
Rajaram’s work on history, with Frawley as well as on his own, upset the established version of ancient India whose lynchpin was the Aryan invasion in the late ancient age (circa 1500 – 1200 BC). Frawley had shown its unsoundness by highlighting the Sarasvati River data and the maritime imagery in the Rig Veda. Rajaram followed a different route, building on Abraham Seidenberg’s study of the Sulbasutras (the real ‘Vedic Mathematics’) alongside the mathematics of Old Babylonia and the Egyptian Middle Kingdom. He encapsulated these findings in what came to be known as the ‘Sutra-Harappa-Sumeria equation’— meaning that the civilizations of Harappans and of Sumer-Akkad overlapped with the Sutra period of the Vedic Age.
This was followed by Rajaram’s work with the Vedic scholar and paleographer Natwar Jha (1938–2006) on the study of Harappan archaeology, especially the famous Harappan (or Indus) seals leading to their proposed decipherment of the language and the writings on the seals. This was published in 2000 as The Deciphered Indus Script: Methodology, readings, interpretation which went on to become Rajaram’s (and Jha’s) best known work . It showed that the language (Vedic Sanskrit) used in the writing was simply one piece in a unified mosaic in which Vedic and Harappan Civilizations shared a common fabric: in brief, the Harappans were Vedic Harappans. It demolished both the version of history that had been in vogue for over a century and the historiography on which it was built.
Given how much was at stake, some hostile reaction from entrenched interests was probably to be expected. What Rajaram and Jha were not prepared for was the personal nature of the attacks, the raising of irrelevant issues like the presence of the horse in ancient India, with their adversaries accusing them of fabricating the ‘horse evidence’. By this their critics, notably Michael Witzel of Harvard, sought to divert attention from the real issue— the Vedic nature of the language and culture of the Harappans. (Their claims like ‘No horse at Harappa’ have long been known to be false. It also has no bearing on their book which was not on ancient zoology. Witzel and his supporters ignored Rajaram’s (and others’) appeal for seminars in which all sides could be aired.)
Return to science
Following his work with Jha (who passed away in 2006), Rajaram turned his attention to natural history and population genetics in his quest for the origins of Vedic civilization. Population genetics in the context of ancient human migrations was pioneered by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, a friend and colleague of Rajaram’s own teacher (and the world’s greatest mathematical statistician) C.R. Rao. In a series of articles Rajaram showed that genetic evidence based on mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome data indicate that the Indian people have lived in India for tens of thousands of years and the contribution of Europeans and others to the Indian gene pool was negligible to nonexistent. This lent further scientific support to the work of Rajaram, Frawley, Jha and others who had long argued there was no evidence for any large scale migration or invasion by Aryans or Indo-Europeans in the late ancient age. Attempts by Aryan theorists (like Witzel) to overcome this by using what they called ‘linguistic evidence’ ran against genetic evidence just as it had run against archaeological evidence earlier. Based on all this Rajaram (and others like the Swedish scholar Stephan Arvidsson ) asserted that like the Aryans, Indo-Europeans were also a mythical people speaking a language called Proto-Indo-European that also never existed.
In his search for Vedic origins, Rajaram next looked at natural history, in particular the ecological changes that accompanied the transition from the Pleistocene (Ice Age) to the Holocene (the present warm period). He concluded that the key to understanding the Vedic origins was the transition from the late Ice Age to the maritime world described in the Rig Veda, a fact that had been noted by David Frawley. Rajaram pointed out that there is strong correlation between changes in the ice caps and mini ice ages (known as the Older and the Younger Dryas) and the Indra-Vritra myths in the Vedas. He further showed that the early Puranic myths carry strong maritime imagery suggesting that they record events during the transition from the Pleistocene to Holocene when rising sea levels caused widespread coastal flooding. Working with Frawley he observed that the expansion of civilization in India, including the Vedic seems to have taken place from the coastal regions to the interior. Further, Rajaram found evidence suggesting that the domestication of rice as well as livestock, which had a major bearing on Vedic origins, might have taken place in Southeast Asia. He pointed to the Mekong-Tonle Sap region (Cambodia) as being a likely candidate. This implies that instead of any Aryan invasion from the northwest, what seeded the Vedic civilization might have been the expansion of agriculture and animal husbandry from the southeast. He published two popular books— Sarasvati River and the Vedic Civilization and Hidden Horizons, the latter with his long time colleague David Frawley.
His latest venture has brought him close to where he began his career— electrical power engineering but with solar energy and other renewable resources. With solar power now reaching parity with conventional sources, Rajaram has shown how the capacity of hydroelectric power generating plants can be doubled by installing floating solar panels on their storage reservoirs. The idea can be extended to rivers and canal networks thereby turning water projects into multipurpose projects. He has suggested that every new power plant built must include a solar component.
Rajaram holds that with solar power technology advancing as rapidly as it seems to be, it is only a matter of time before power will be so cheap that many new applications will open up. He draws analogy with computing and internet that opened up possibilities that were previously undreamt of. He sees many electrochemical processes now thought to be expensive becoming affordable and economically viable. In particular, he sees water recycling, desalination and ultimately the cleaning up polluted rivers as goals that can be achieved using abundant and cheap solar energy. This now happens to be one of his main interests. He is now actively involved in projects that can turn these ideas into reality.
Controversies
Rajaram has been and remains a controversial writer, especially for his writings on ancient India. Part of the problem lies in his unusual position that defies easy categorization; his career spans academia, industry and independent research. While possessing academic credentials, Rajaram was, during his relatively brief working life (of less than twenty years), mainly an industrial researcher. He spent barely four years as a full time faculty member at Kent State University in Ohio. To go with this, his ‘career’ as historian has been as an independent worker, free of the fetters and fashions of academic orthodoxy.
Another contributing factor is his critics’ perception of Rajaram as a staunch, even orthodox Hindu, due in part to his background as coming from a recognized Vedic family, and partly his own credentials, especially his knowledge of Sanskrit and Vedic literature. The truth is he was raised in an Anglophile family, and his upbringing was more English than Indian, while the greater part of his professional life has been spent in the United States. His version of Hinduism is one that fits into his outlook as a rationalist and Western trained scientist and often at odds with other Hindus. He sees dogma, especially religious dogma, if not religion itself as the greatest evil. One of his better known articles on the subject is titled “A scientist looks at Hinduism.”
Finally, no matter how others see him, Rajaram sees himself as less a scholar or researcher than a dilettante and intellectual adventurer whom fortunate circumstances have allowed to indulge in his favorite pastime of studying anything that catches his fancy and likes to share what he learns with others. If some of it has proven to be interesting or useful it is purely accidental.
Designs of Expert Systems on the Personal Computer.
Robotics and Expert Eystems, 1985: Proceedings of ROBEXS '85, the First Annual Workshop on Robotics and Expert Systems, NASA/Johnson Space Center, edited by N.S. Rajaram
Robotics and Expert Systems, 1987: Proceedings of ROBEXS '87, the Third Annual Workshop on Robotics and Expert Systems, University of Pittsburgh, edited by N.S. Rajaram.
Artificial intelligence: the Achilles Heel of Manufacturing. Robotics Engineering, 1986.
A knowledge-based approach to programming welding robots (with Eric Sullivan)
Vedic Aryans and the Origins of Civilization: A literary and scientific perspective (with David Frawley)
The Politics of History: Aryan invasion theory and the subversion of scholarship
Profiles in Deception: Ayodhya and the Dead Sea Scrolls
Secularism: The new mask of fundamentalism
A Hindu View of the World: Essays in the intellectual kshatriya tradition
The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Crisis of Christianity: An Eastern View of a Western Crisis
The Deciphered Indus Script: Methodology, readings, interpretations (with N. Jha)
Stefan Arvidsson, Aryan Idols: Indo-European mythology as ideology and science
Sarasvati River and the Vedic Civilization: History, science and politics
Hidden Horizons: 10,000 years of Indian culture (with David Frawley)