A few had asked me to dig through our ancient texts and see if there are any genuine references to what we would today call robotics / automata. Just a small caveat: robotics and automata are modern terms, so do not expect the texts to use those exact words. With that in mind, let me tell you what I found (WIP).... In 7th century Kanchi, a machine was made to say "this one is hungry" in Sanskrit. The man who wrote it down was Dandin / Dandi, poet at the Pallava court. His great grandfather Damodara had come south from the Vakataka desha and served Simhavishnu at Kanchi. 4 generations of court poets, and Dandin was the last of them. In the opening chapters of his prose romance, the Avantisundari (also called Avantisundarīkathā), he tells his own life story. That is where 2 engineers walk in. An architect comes to meet the young Dandin. Page 12 of the Trivandrum edition introduces him: Lalitalaya, master of the 96 kinds of temple and of the 6 classes of yantra, the Sanskrit word for machine. His father was a sthapati named Mandhata, whose kalpavriksha, an artificial wish-fulfilling tree, had once astonished a man named Durjaya. Then Dandin reports what the town gossiped about the son. He showed machine-men fighting a mock duel. He built an artificial cloud that brought down real rain. He had an engine that split the foreheads of enemy elephants with shafts as thick as pestles. He composed a life of Shudraka in Tamil. Then comes the line about the father.... "asya kila pitra yavanan apy atishayanena kshudhito'yam iti yantrenabhidhapitam" By his father, they say, the words "kshudhito'yam" were made to come out of a machine, surpassing even the Yavanas. And the son, they say, is greater still. Kshudhito'yam means "this one is hungry". Michael Rabe reads the machine as a starving ascetic figure saying it of itself, I am hungry. That is Rabe's reading. Dandin's sentence gives only the words and the machine. Yavana meant the Greeks, and Greek automata were the world standard then. Philo of Byzantium wrote a manual for building them around 250 BCE. Heron of Alexandria made model birds sing with hidden air pipes in the 1st century CE. Dandin is claiming a Pallava artisan beat that. This was not one stray reference. Kautilya's Arthashastra, centuries older, already sorts war machines into fixed and mobile. Somadeva, in the 10th century, describes a mechanical fountain house with automaton women spraying sandalwood water. In the 11th century, King Bhoja gives machines a full chapter and then refuses to reveal how they work, saying it would ruin the wonder. How the hungry machine worked, nobody wrote down. The text survives in one damaged manuscript, and even the editions do not read this line the same way. Everyone knows Heron of Alexandria. Who has heard of Mandhata? Sources: Dandin, Avantisundari, Trivandrum edition, pp. 12-13 (scan: Internet Archive, Digital Library of India); V. Raghavan, "Yantras or Mechanical Contrivances in Ancient India", 1952; Michael Rabe, Artibus Asiae 57 (1997) Photo: Dandin, Avantisundari, ed. K. S. Mahadeva Sastri, Univ. of Travancore, 1954, pp. 12-13. Scan: Internet Archive, Digital Library of India. Public domain in India.