Shivkar Bapuji Talpade’s alleged unmanned flight at Chowpatty

Record summary

Shivkar Bapuji Talpade is associated with a late-nineteenth-century claim that he demonstrated an unmanned aircraft, sometimes called Marutsakha, at Bombay’s Chowpatty beach in 1895. Later popular accounts connect the device with Sanskrit descriptions of vimanas and assert that it flew before a public audience. The episode matters because it combines early aviation history, nationalist memory, Sanskrit textual interpretation and later UFO-oriented retrofitting. The event’s date, machine, witnesses, performance and even whether a public flight occurred remain disputed, with much of the surviving narrative appearing substantially later.