Indian astronomers encoded long numerical tables as words and verses — so they could be memorised like songs.
The Kaṭapayādi system maps consonants to digits, letting any number be written as a pronounceable (often meaningful) word; used for astronomical constants and π.
— Kaṭapayādi system (South Indian astronomy/mathematics)
Data encoding and mnemonic compression.
A genuine, defensible parallel.
Before printing, accuracy of long numbers depended on memory — and a copied digit was easy to corrupt. The Kaṭapayādi scheme solved this elegantly: each consonant stands for a digit, so a string of numbers becomes a word or even a devotional phrase that's easy to chant and hard to garble. Mādhava's value of π, for instance, was preserved as a verse.
This is documented history and genuinely clever — a form of error-resistant data encoding driven by an oral culture. It isn't a 'computer' or cryptography in the modern sense, but as a notation that turns numbers into memorable language, it's a real and underappreciated innovation.