Indian readers have long known William Dalrymple as the chronicler nonpareil of India in the early years of the British raj. His latest book, The Golden Road, is a striking departure, since it takes him to a period from about the third century BC to the 12th-13th centuries CE. “What Greece was first to Rome, then to the rest of the Mediterranean and European World,” argues Dalrymple, “so at this period India was to southeast and central Asia and even to China.” That this argument is not commonly associated with a foreign scholar—and has been assumed, wrongly, to be the sole domain of the vishwaguru school of hindutva history—makes it all the more compelling reading.
It is fair to say that conventional wisdom tends to focus on ancient India—the glories of the Vedas and the Puranas, the flourishing of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, and the triumphs of a handful of emperors, notably Chandragupta, Ashoka, Kanishka and Vikramaditya—from a fairly insular perspective, confining their impact to the subcontinent and largely omitting their influence on the rest of the world. It is also widely assumed that by the sixth or seventh century CE a national decline had set in, leaving India vulnerable to the Islamic conquests that began with the invasion of Sind by the youthful Arab general Mohammed bin Qasim in 712 CE.
Dalrymple transforms this narrative by focusing on India’s external relations. And rightly so: trade between the Roman Empire and India was so considerable that, he says, customs revenues generated perhaps a third of the total income of the Roman treasury. Roman senators debated the fondness of their women for Indian muslins, jewels and spices, lamenting that Rome’s fortunes were largely sunk in India—indeed, Indian museums contain more Roman coins than any country outside the Roman Empire. Recent excavations of Roman amphorae and artefacts at Pattanam in Kerala point to extensive trade relations between Rome and the southern tip of India well before the birth of Christ.
William Dalrymple | PTI
So what is “the Golden Road”? Dalrymple conceives of it not as a land route but a number of sea lanes, which Indian sailors used, aided by strong seasonal monsoon winds, to cross westwards to the Arab world or eastwards to Sumatra and Java in today’s Indonesia. They took with them goods, intellectual discoveries like mathematics, philosophy and astronomy, and, of course, religion and spiritual ideas. Their travels spread Buddhism to Sri Lanka, Tibet, China, Central Asia and beyond, and Hinduism to southeast Asia, where its impact is still to be found, not just in the Hindu island of Bali, but in cultural practices and references in countries that today practise other faiths.
So to this day, the kings of Thailand are crowned in the presence of Brahmin priests, and are named Rama in continuation of the Ramayan tradition; the current monarch, Vajiralongkorn, is styled Rama X. Similarly, the Muslims of Java still bear Sanskritised names, despite practising Islam; Garuda is Indonesia’s national airline, and the Ramayana its best-selling brand of clove cigars; the largest Hindu temple in the world, Angkor Wat, is in Cambodia; and even the Philippines has produced a pop-dance ballet about Rama’s quest for his kidnapped queen.
If the world speaks of “Arabic numerals”, it is because the Golden Road took Indian mathematical concepts to the Caliphs in Baghdad, from where Europeans got them. Dalrymple quotes the Qazi of Toledo, in then-Islamic Spain, writing in an intellectual history of the world in 1068: “Over many centuries, all the kings of the past have recognised the ability of the Indians in all the branches of knowledge. The Indians… are the essence of wisdom… the Indians have made great strides in the study of numbers and geometry… they have surpassed all… in their knowledge of medical science.”
These are points I have often tried to make, while arguing that there is much to be proud of in the accomplishments of our ancestors without needing to buy into hindutva delusions about pushpak vimans and other fantasies. There’s much more in The Golden Road to reward the Indian reader; this column barely skims a fraction of Dalrymple’s findings. It is a must-read.
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