Bhavishya Purana

Long before AI-generated content, there was the Bhavishya Purana. This post explores how the ancient Hindu text's startlingly accurate 'prophecies' of Queen Victoria and the British Raj are a masterful example of post-diction—history rewritten to legitimize the present.

7/27/2025

These days there is a certain flavour of panic du jour circulating, a sort of polluting digital miasma thick with the fear of “AI slop.” We envision a future—or maybe even a present—where the internet is a landfill of algorithmically generated, soul-less content. Veritable mountains of text and images, all plausible-looking yet utterly devoid of human intent or experience, created for no reason other than to exist and clog the arteries of information. We fret about this as if it were a uniquely 21st-century affliction, a problem born of silicon and sprawling server farms.

But what if I told you that humanity mastered the art of generating convincing, large-scale, authoritative-sounding “slop” centuries ago? Before there was ChatGPT, there were scribes with a keen sense of contemporary politics and a very loose definition of the word “prophecy.”

Permit me to introduce you to one of the most wonderfully audacious texts you may ever encounter: the Bhavishya Purana.

Now, the Puranas are a genre of ancient Hindu texts, a sprawling corpus of cosmology, mythology, and royal genealogies. The name Bhavishya Purana literally translates to the “History of the Future,” which is, by any measure, a bold claim. And for much of its early strata, it reads like you’d expect—tales of gods, ages of humanity (Yugas), and the cyclical nature of existence. Standard stuff.

But as you read on, something astonishing happens. The text begins to make predictions of breathtaking specificity. It speaks of the coming of the “Mlecchas” (foreigners) and a teacher of a “demoniac” religion named Mahamada (Muhammad). It describes the Tughlaqs, the Mughals, and even zeroes in on specific rulers with uncanny accuracy. It’s the sort of thing that makes you lean back in your chair and wonder if the ancient seers really did have a crystal ball.

Then you get to the British.

The text foretells the rise of the East India Company, the establishment of factories, and the growth of a great city called “Kalikata” (Calcutta). It gets better. The Purana speaks of a great queen who will rule from a distant island. Her name? Viktavati. She of the Viktoria lineage, of course. The text details her reign, the industrial advancements, and the administrative structures of the British Raj. It’s all there, laid out with the dispassionate clarity of a prophecy fulfilled.

So, how did the ancient sage Vyasa, the traditional author, know about Queen Victoria’s Jubilee? Did he have a temporal telescope? A TARDIS disguised as a banyan tree?

The answer, of course, is a spectacular and hilarious “no.”

The Bhavishya Purana is a masterpiece not of prediction, but of post-diction. It is a living document that was continually updated. The sections on Islamic rule were likely penned sometime after the Delhi Sultanate was well-established. And the astonishingly accurate bits about Queen Viktavati and the British Empire? Indological scholarship places their composition squarely in the 19th century, right in the thick of the Raj itself.

What we are looking at is not divine foresight. It is history, written in the future tense, and then retroactively inserted into a sacred text to give it the unassailable patina of ancient wisdom. It was a form of intellectual and cultural legerdemain of the highest order.

Think about it from the perspective of the colonial-era bard who wrote it. This was the generative AI of its day.

The ancient prompt was… write in the style of an ancient Purana, write a sacred prophecy that legitimises the rule of the British and integrates Queen Victoria into the cosmic timeline of India. Ensure it sounds ancient and authoritative etcetera. And the output was the Pratisarga Parvan, the third part of the Bhavishya Purana, complete with Viktavati and the rise of Calcutta.

I as a bengali have a place in this, and had to share it. You see the motive is identical to the one driving much of today’s AI slop: to generate equivocal content that fits an ensemble of needs and appears authentic to the rustic commoners. In their case, the need was to make sense of their present reality, to absorb the seismic shock of foreign rule into a familiar Hindu cosmological framework which hadn’t anticipated the plot would go so awry. By “predicting” the British, they made their dominion seem fated, an inevitable chapter in an eons-long story. It was a coping mechanism, a political tool, and a brilliant act of literary forgery all rolled into one.

Whence comes our modern panic, then? We see AI-generated text and fear a loss of authenticity, a deluge of fakery that will drown out truth. But the Bhavishya Purana reminds us that the human impulse to manufacture plausible realities is as old as time. The tools have merely changed. We’ve swapped the palm leaf and stylus for silicon and transformers, but the game is the same. The challenge has never been about stopping the production of “slop”—be it Puranic or programmatic. The challenge has always been to cultivate the wisdom to tell the difference.

So the next time you encounter a vapid, AI-generated listicle about “Ten Surprising Uses for Footsies,” don’t just despair for the future of the internet. Smile, and give a little nod to the 19th-century scribes of the Bhavishya Purana.