William Dalrymple is the closest thing we have to a pop-historian of India. Primarily because he is an established storyteller, a prerequisite for most historians but especially those who want to be read outside of the fraternity. But also because he has a knack for picking subjects and stories that are likely to find a more general audience. In his latest book, ‘The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World’, Dalrymple looks back at ancient Indian exports from Buddhism and Hinduism to astronomical texts, the number zero and the game of chess, and argues that more than the famous Silk Road, it was the waterways connecting India to Europe via Persia, Arabia and northern Africa to the west and China, South-East Asia and Sri Lanka to the east that helped India build its empire of ideas.
Now, a lot of this is already widely known in India. We knew about ancient India’s vast trade networks as far as ancient Rome, and the incredible wealth that India had amassed exporting spices and gems among other things. We knew about the Kushans and the Gupta and the Chola dynasties. We knew about Ashoka and his conversion to Buddhism. We knew about the influence of the Ramayana and Mahabharat as far as South-East Asia, and the architectural legacy of Angkor Wat. We knew that Ashoka sent his children to spread the message of the Buddha and that his son Mahinda’s seminars in Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka drew large crowds. We knew also about Aryabhata’s contributions to maths and the phenomenal astronomical legacy of Indian cities like Ujjain and Udayagiri in present-day Madhya Pradesh that were centres of learning and excellence.
What is less widely understood, and what Dalrymple explains in his book is how this exchange of knowledge happened. How both ancient India’s economic prosperity and enormous soft power owed much to a success formula that continues to be hailed today: location, location, location (Dalrymple explains in ‘The Golden Road’ that it was India’s monsoon winds that made very fast [for the time] and relatively safe sea travel possible off both the east and west coasts of the country).
In ‘The Golden Road’, Dalrymple also puts to work a long and illustrious cast of characters to make this case. Emperors Chandragupta Maurya (ruled 320-297 BC) and Ashoka (304-232 BC) share space in the book with Indian mathematicians Aryabhata (476-550 AD), Brahmgupta (598-670 AD) and Chajaka – the self-declared king of calculations who was interested in metallurgy and weighing metals.
There’s a special focus also on the people and things that helped ideas move from India to the rest of the world. Like, the seventh-century Chinese traveller Xuanzang who visited many Buddhist monasteries in ancient India including Nava Vihara in northern Afghanistan and stayed for many years at Nalanda (in present-day Bihar). Xuanzang, along with Chinese empress Wu Zetian, was instrumental in bringing Buddhist learning and faith to China. As was Kumarajiva (344-413 AD), who translated Mahayana Buddhist texts like the ‘Lotus Sutra’ from Sanskrit into Chinese. (Dalrymple says this only obliquely in the book by charting out the route he took into “India” via present-day Afghanistan, but Xuanzang took the Silk Road to India and not the Golden Road.)
Another example of this crucial, forgotten link in the knowledge transfer from ancient India: The Barmakids in then newly built Baghdad: Khalid ibn Barmak’s father, Khalid, Khalid’s son Yahya and his son Jafar. The Barmakids had moved from India to the Middle-East by a twist of (ill)fate. But once there, they were able to bring Indian learning to the west.
Dalrymple spends a lot of time tracking where these Indian inventions and ideas went and how. This has as many advantages as disadvantages as far as the reading of this book goes. For example, in chasing the story of the rise of Buddhism in China, Dalrymple writes about the court intrigue and politics of Wu Zetian. While interesting in bits, it takes us away from India and Indian scholarship in this period too.
Similarly, as Dalrymple travels west in the book, towards the Abbasid empire and its desire to understand Indian texts like Brahmagupta’s Sindhind – a compilation of Brahmagupta’s guide to astronomy and ‘The Opening of the Universe’ – he’s forced to leave Indian shores for pages on end. When he does return to India and to the Golden Road that is central to his argument, it is usually briefly and towards the end of a long chapter. As a result, the book ends up spending more time with what happens to the intellectual exports once they reach foreign shores than how they came to be in India or even their long journeys by sea.
To be sure, Dalrymple’s storytelling is engaging, and he does a great job of contextualizing how information travelled more than 2,000 years ago. He shows us how the Indian way of doing business took knowledge of maths, astronomy and navigation abroad. How Buddhist monks ran the show from massive monasteries, and how their influence and ideas spread outwards. How the Middle-East became a melting pot of knowledge from India but also Greece, thanks to the patronage of rulers like Caliph Mansur (714-75) and book lovers like Said al-Andalusi. Dalrymple cites histories that show how the gentle outward flow of Indian ideas along with gems and spices was assisted and fast-tracked as kings and caliphates requested or demanded Indian books as part of peace treaties.
Dalrymple’s book is massive in its scale – covering a period from at least the 5th century BC to the 13th century AD when “Indic influence was fast diminishing”. In terms of geographic spread, Dalrymple speaks of an “Indosphere”, which he describes as stretching from the Hindu Kush to the Pacific, with Indic influence, and indeed trade and migration, extending up to Cambodia in the South-East.
Where the book is strongest is when Dalrymple travels to the places of significance. When he shows us the sculpted walls of Borobodur and the gorgeous reliefs depicting scenes from the Mahabharat in the Hindu temples of South-East Asia. When he writes about the Udayagiri caves and Chandragupta II’s celebratory Varaha panel (below).
Where the interest flags a bit is when Dalrymple chases an intellectual export around the world with scarcely a look back at what is happening in India at the same time. To be sure, this can produce some interesting results. Like the description of how Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci) made the Indo-Arabic numeral popular in Europe around the 12th century. The rub comes when these segments take over entire sections and chapters.
One final observation: In a book of 483 pages, nearly 100 are devoted to end notes and more than 50 to a bibliography. By his own admission, Dalrymple spent roughly five years writing this book – a detour from what he has written about before: mostly India during British Raj. In the balance, it feels like you leave the book having reconfirmed things you might have known about ancient India but with more stories and histories to support the claims, but also that this can’t be the definitive or even the only book you read on the subject.
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