The Forgotten Father

Sushruta’s Samhita is the foundational surgical text of the Indian tradition — some three hundred procedures, a hundred and twenty instruments, and among them the forehead-flap rhinoplasty that reconstructive surgeons still use today. The film traces how that knowledge reached the West: a 1794 magazine account of an Indian practitioner rebuilding a cart-driver’s nose, read by the English surgeon Joseph Carpue, who spent two decades studying it before performing the operation himself in 1814.

The second thread is a genuine accident. In 1890, a British lieutenant chasing a murderer through Chinese Turkestan bought a bundle of birch-bark leaves from a treasure hunter. Deciphered in Calcutta, the Bower Manuscript turned out to be among the oldest surviving Sanskrit manuscripts known — Gupta-era Brahmi, dense with Ayurvedic medicine. We built the film on that double discovery: a technique that travelled by journalism, and a text that survived by chance.

The film won Best Documentary at the Adani Indology Conclave 2026 — proof that research-led storytelling can hold a jury as well as an audience.