पतरकयनतरण — Automata: Moving Dolls, Birds and Gatekeepers

The machines that most delighted Bhoja's audience were figures that moved like living beings: dolls, birds, elephants, horses, monkeys and human attendants. Chapter 31 of the Samarāṅgaṇasūtradhāra gives them a long passage. It lists the movements machines can imitate, including whole scenes from mythology (31.59–64); it describes birds and animals that dance and "recite" in time to music (31.73–77); it gives the construction principle of a humanoid figure built of wooden segments, moved by cords running through its limbs (31.101–103); it lists the courteous actions such a figure can perform — taking a hand, offering betel, sprinkling water, bowing, looking in a mirror, playing the vīṇā (31.104–105); and it describes armed figures that guard a doorway at night (31.106–107). This article collects these passages and reads them in modern terms. Bhoja's figures are automata in the strict sense: self-moving machines whose movements are programmed into their mechanism. His humanoid has the essential architecture of a modern cable-driven robot, and his door-guardian is a triggered security device. The article compares them with the automata of Hero of Alexandria, the Banū Mūsā and al-Jazarī, and with literary accounts of mechanical figures in Sanskrit narrative. Article 8 of the series Yantravidhāna Studies (SSD-31), on chapter 31 of Bhoja's Samarāṅgaṇasūtradhāra. Verses discussed: 31.59–77, 31.101–107. Web version: sanskritmanthan.in/a/ssd-31-08-putrika-yantra