The Forgotten Father
A documentary on the accidental discovery of the Bower Manuscript, Sushruta's surgical works, and how they reached the West. Best Documentary, Adani Indology Conclave 2026.
The Film
The Forgotten Father is a documentary film produced by Folk Sutra. It explores the accidental discovery of the Bower Manuscript and of Sushruta's works, and the subsequent propagation of Indian surgical techniques to the western world.
The Subject
Sushruta is the figure to whom the Sushruta Samhita is attributed — one of the
foundational texts of Ayurveda and, more particularly, the foundational surgical
text of the Indian tradition. It describes some three hundred procedures and
around a hundred and twenty instruments, and organises surgery into eight
branches. Among its procedures is the forehead-flap rhinoplasty: a nose
reconstructed using a pedicled flap of skin rotated down from the patient's own
brow.
That technique is the thread that runs to the West. In 1794 the Gentleman's
Magazine in London carried an account of an Indian practitioner rebuilding the
nose of a bullock-cart driver named Cowasjee, mutilated as a punishment. The
report was read by the English surgeon Joseph Constantine Carpue, who spent two
decades studying it before performing the operation himself in 1814. The method
entered European practice as the Indian rhinoplasty, and the forehead flap is
still in the reconstructive surgeon's repertoire today.
The Bower Manuscript enters the story by accident, and it is a genuine accident.
In 1890 Lieutenant Hamilton Bower was in Kucha, in Chinese Turkestan, pursuing
the men who had murdered the explorer Andrew Dalgleish. While there he bought a
bundle of birch-bark leaves from a local treasure hunter. Sent to Calcutta and
deciphered by the philologist Rudolf Hoernlé, the leaves turned out to be among
the oldest surviving Sanskrit manuscripts then known, written in Gupta-era
Brahmi and containing substantial medical material in the Ayurvedic tradition.
Its age mattered beyond its contents. The manuscript arrived at a moment when
European scholarship was inclined to date Indian texts late, and a physical
object of demonstrable antiquity is a harder thing to argue with than a
transmitted text. Its discovery helped open Central Asian archaeology, and it
remains in the Bodleian at Oxford.
Where It Landed
The film won the Best Documentary Award at the Adani Indology Conclave 2026.
