This Article First Appeared In The Print On May 25, 2023
One of the most fascinating, and least understood, aspects of South Asia’s history is the evolution of its technology. With so little evidence surviving from secular contexts, we often have to speculate about how engineering operated in the medieval period. This is all the more frustrating because many sources attest that medieval courts had some truly surprising and wondrous devices: automata, or what we might call robots today.