Pushpak Viman was a wooden peacock
Updated On: 21 January, 2024 04:53 AM IST | Mumbai | Devdutt Pattanaik
On this flying vehicle, the carpenter’s son not only went to school, impressing his class, but also on many adventures, eventually marrying a princess.
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Illustration/Devdutt Pattanaik
Pushpak Viman of Ravana was shaped like a peacock. The origin of this idea comes from an old Sri Lankan folk tale. Since a headman gave his son a horse-drawn cart to go to school, a carpenter’s son pestered his father for a vehicle. His father created a wooden peacock (dandu-monara, in Sinhalese), fuelled with mercury, that could fly. On this flying vehicle, the carpenter’s son not only went to school, impressing his class, but also on many adventures, eventually marrying a princess.
Nowadays, in hotels and bars around Colombo, Sri Lanka, one finds images of this flying wooden peacock, but it is not described as a creation of a carpenter. It is described as Ravana’s Pushpaka Vimana. In a recent conference, it was argued that Ravana invented the aeroplane long before the Wright brothers. As in India, mytho-fiction writers are arguing that Ravana was a great king of ancient Sri Lankan—an expert in medicine, engineering, martial arts—whose history has been deliberately erased by later Buddhist chronicles introduced by Indians. The older “Hala-Yakha” civilisation was full of wonderful technologies. In 2019, Sri Lanka launched its first satellite. It was named Raavana 1.
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