Operation Sanskrit Mill:

The Translation Factory Exposed

(A Short Story)

Sheela’s hands were actually trembling as she opened the document. “Operation Sanskrit Mill” it was called, and someone had done serious detective work. Her advisor, Dr. Dang, leaned over her shoulder as she scrolled through what looked like a complete expose of colonial academic fraud.

“Oh my god,” she whispered. “This is way bigger than I thought.”

For weeks, Sheela had been puzzling over impossible productivity numbers. These Victorian scholars claiming to translate massive Sanskrit works at superhuman speeds. She’d calculated they were producing 1.47 pages every single day for seventy years straight. But this document? This laid out the entire conspiracy.

“Look at this,” she said, pointing at her screen. “They’re calling it a translation factory. Not just collaboration, but actual coordinated deception.”

Dr. Dang was reading over her shoulder. “Wilson died in 1860 but his Rig Veda was published through 1888. Twenty eight years posthumously.”

“Right! And here’s something I missed.” Sheela scrolled down. “Griffith supposedly translated four complete Vedas in just nine years, from 1889 to 1899. While he was retired! At age 63 to 73, he’s cranking out more Sanskrit translation than entire universities produce today.”

The document painted a picture that made her original suspicions look tame. This wasn’t just unnamed assistants helping out. This was systematic industrial scale fraud, with figureheads lending their names to work produced by teams following strict guidelines.

“But here’s what really gets me,” Sheela said, getting excited now. “The anachronistic errors. Griffith translated ‘pishtah‘ as ‘roasted corn.’ Corn! A New World crop that didn’t exist in ancient India. That’s not a translation mistake, that’s someone who doesn’t know basic history doing sloppy work.”

She’d been thinking these were just productivity impossibilities. But the document showed identical errors across different translators, sequential publication dates that left no time for independent scholarship, and circular citations where each scholar referenced the others to create false legitimacy.

Dr. Dang whistled low. “Wilson explicitly credited ‘native scholars’ for his dictionary work. That’s basically admitting ghost writing.”

“And look at the math here.” Sheela pulled up the calculations in the document. “We’re talking about roughly 100,000 pages of dense Sanskrit scholarship. That’s equivalent to 170 books of 600 pages each. The entire Encyclopedia Britannica is only 65,000 to 70,000 pages, and that was produced by hundreds of experts!”

She started doing quick mental math. “Even Stephen King, who’s famously productive, manages maybe 2,000 pages per year. These guys were supposedly doing the equivalent of 50 Stephen King novels annually, but in ancient Sanskrit with complex philosophical concepts, using quill pens.”

The physical impossibility was staggering. No computers, no word processors, no copy and paste functions. Every single page handwritten or laboriously typed. The mechanical act alone would consume years, completely separate from research, translation, editing, and proofreading.

“You know what bothers me most?” Sheela said. “The quality paradox. These weren’t rough drafts. These became foundation texts for understanding Hindu civilization. Supposedly carefully researched, cross referenced, annotated scholarly work. But somehow they maintained consistent standards while producing at assembly line speeds.”

Dr. Dang nodded. “Real scholarship is messy. Researchers argue with themselves, revise their thinking, change course when they discover new evidence.”

“Exactly! But all these translation factory products came out with polished consistency, all supporting the same basic narrative about Hindu texts. That’s not how genuine intellectual work happens. When you have multiple independent scholars on the same sources, you should get passionate disagreements, different interpretations. Instead we get this suspiciously harmonious chorus.”

Sheela scrolled down to the section about systematic destruction of authentic sources. Edward Pococke’s “India in Greece” showing Indian civilizational influence. Kautilya’s Arthashastra surviving in only a single copy. Physical destruction of books presenting alternative narratives.

“This wasn’t just fraud,” she said quietly. “This was social engineering. They needed textual ‘proof’ for colonial justification, administrative control, educational manipulation, missionary support.”

The document laid out how the translations provided evidence for depicting Hindu society as backward and needing British guidance. Rigid caste categories for census and governance. Training Indians to see their own culture through colonial eyes.

“What really scares me,” Sheela continued, “is the modern implications. These corrupted translations became the foundation for academic understanding of Hinduism worldwide. Digital archives, AI systems, they’re all trained on this data. So authentic Hindu voices end up looking ‘problematic’ or ‘biased’ compared to the colonial ‘standard.'”

Dr. Dang was quiet for a long moment. “So your dissertation just became much more complicated.”

Sheela laughed, though it wasn’t entirely happy. “I started out thinking I’d found some productivity anomalies. Turns out I stumbled onto what might be the most successful academic fraud in history.”

She thought about all the scholars today still citing Griffith’s work as authoritative. MacDonell at Oxford in 1900 was still using these flawed translations as standard references. The pipeline from colonial factory to modern academia had never been broken.

“You know what gives me hope though?” she said, scrolling to the end of the document. “There are organizations now working to restore authentic sources. The Vivekananda Foundation, others. They’re publishing original Sanskrit texts online, doing careful re examination free from colonial interpretations.”

Dr. Dang smiled. “Sounds like there’s a movement you could join.”

Sheela nodded, already thinking about how to expand her research. The productivity analysis had been just the tip of the iceberg. Now she needed to trace the actual networks, find evidence of the translation teams, maybe even identify some of the unnamed scholars whose work had been appropriated.

“The truth is finally coming out,” she said. “Took 150 years, but the numbers don’t lie. Neither do the anachronistic errors, the impossible timelines, the circular citations. When you actually look at the evidence instead of just accepting academic authority, the whole house of cards falls apart.”

She closed her laptop, feeling the weight of what she’d discovered. Tomorrow she’d start digging into archives, looking for traces of the real people behind Operation Sanskrit Mill. Somewhere in colonial correspondence, administrative records, personal papers, there had to be evidence of how this factory actually operated.

The ghost writers deserved to have their names known, even if it came a century and a half too late. And the world deserved to know how completely colonial academia had manipulated the sources of one of humanity’s oldest civilizations.

Sheela was determined to expose not just the fraud, but the entire system that had made it possible and profitable. The translation mill had operated in shadows for over a century. Time to drag it into the light.

What this story is trying to explain?

The Greatest Academic Fraud:

Following facts will explain. “Operation Sanskrit Mill” was a clandestine operation of East India Company. Max Müller, H.H. Wilson and R.T.H. Griffith allegedly translated about forty thousand pages of translations in 69 years. It was humanly impossible. Actual work was done by Ghost Writers and credit was given to these authors who were celebrated as authority the “Brilliant British Scholars” (BBS). 

Pages Per Day Calculation: (with Death Dates)

• H.H. Wilson died: May 8, 1860 (his Rig-Veda 1854-1888 was largely posthumous)
• Max Müller died: October 28, 1900 (lived through most of his publication period)

Time Period Analysis:

• Start Year: 1840 (Wilson’s Vishnu Purana)
• End Year: 1910 (end of Sacred Books of the East series)
• Total Years: 70 years
• Total Days: 25,568 days (including leap years)

Key Issue:

Much of this work was posthumous or collaborative – Wilson’s major Rig-Veda volumes (1854-1888) were published 28 years after his death, likely from manuscripts or by collaborators. Total Output (INCLUDING Sanskrit pages):

• Total Pages: 37,671 pages (includes ~3,000 pages of Sanskrit text)
• Total Words: ~56.6 million words (English translations only)

Total Output (EXCLUDING Sanskrit pages):

• Total Pages: 34,671 pages (English translations/commentary only)
• Total Words: ~56.6 million words

Daily Production Rate:

INCLUDING Sanskrit pages: 1.47 pages per day (37,671 pages ÷ 25,568 days)

EXCLUDING Sanskrit pages: 1.36 pages per day (34,671 pages ÷ 25,568 days)

2,214 words per day (English text only, over 70 years)

Important Note: This calculation too is misleading because much of Wilson’s work (published 1854-1888) was completed posthumously from his manuscripts, since he died in 1860.

Alternative Calculations with active Publishing Years Only:

If we consider only the years when works were actually being published (not including gaps), the rate would be higher.

By Individual Scholar:

• Max Müller (SBE alone, 1879-1910): 22,500 pages ÷ 31 years = ~2 pages per day
• R.T.H. Griffith (1870s-1899): ~7,850 pages ÷ 25 years = ~0.86 pages per day
• H.H. Wilson (major works 1840-1888): 3,200 pages ÷ 48 years = ~0.18 pages per day

Perspective:

This represents an extraordinary sustained scholarly output – nearly 1.5 finished, published pages every single day for 69 consecutive years across this group of scholars.

Considering these were heavily annotated translations requiring deep Sanskrit knowledge, not simple prose, this rate represents one of the most productive periods in the history of Oriental scholarship.

Details of Published Work: