In 629 CE, a 29-year-old Buddhist monk from the western Chinese city of Chang'an departed on a perilous journey across the country's west. Braving civil war, murderous bandits and starvation, Xuanzang set on foot towards the Taklamakan desert, crossing the Pamirs through the mountain passes of Central Asia into India. It took him six years of arduous journey to reach his destination - the great monastery university of Nalanda in Bodh Gaya.
Xuanzang, a Mahayana Buddhist who wanted to learn about the roots of his religious tradition, spent five years in Nalanda studying under the "great scholar and metaphysician" Silabadra.
Seventeen years later when Xuanzang returned to his home country, he took back 657 books, a large collection of statues, relics and even saplings. These manuscripts, including the greatest account of his stint in India, 'The Great Tang Records on the Western Region', went on to be translated and recopied across China, Korea and Japan, propagating Buddhism and Indian ideas.
However, India had been exporting its civilisation, in the form of art, mythology, language and much more, long before Xuanzang's arrival, precisely from about 250 BCE to 1200 CE. So much so that Roman philosopher and naval commander Pliny the Elder described India as "the sink of world's precious metals" and rued "there is no year which does not drain our empire of at least 55 million sesterces."
Such was the permeation of Indian influence that an "Indosphere" existed, spanning South, Central, Southeast and Eastern Asia, the Arab world and Mediterranean Europe.
It is this might of ancient India that historian William Dalrymple brilliantly explores in his latest work, The Golden Road – How Ancient India Transformed the World. Dalrymple uncovers India's role as a driver of global change, through its traders, religious missionaries and mathematical and astronomical ideas. He dismisses the concept of China's 'Silk Road' -which he argues is the byproduct of China's attempt at rebranding and reframing its history - in favour of India's 'Golden Road'.
Dalrymple's attempt to retrace this evolutionary journey of the 'Indosphere' is anchored in three focal points; the Indic religions of Buddhism and Hinduism and Indian mathematics.
In India, Buddhism grew prominent under Emperor Ashoka who sent missionaries "East to Burma and Suvarnabhumi, north to steppe nomads in Central Asia; and northwest to the Hellenistic patchwork of Seleucid and Ptolemaic Greek states and from Afghanistan to Cyrene on the North African coast of the Mediterranean." To the west, the religion thrived under the Hindu Kush dynasty's reign. It was under the patronage of Kushans that Indian art flourished as Buddha began to be depicted in human form in Gandhara.
The excavations at Berenike (an ancient town in the Egyptian desert) show how Buddhist ideas and philosophies travelled to the Roman Empire with traders who took diamonds rubies, tusks, rich textiles, pepper, and even wild animals to fight in the Colosseum.
During 630-668 CE, the Pallavas began to reroute the Golden Road to the East of India. Traders, eyeing the rich deposits of gold in Sumatra and Sarawak, set sail from Mammallapuram (Chennai) and by the early 12th century, much of South East Asia became a part of the Sanskrit-speaking world, accepting not only Hinduism but scripts, epics, plays and architecture from India.
This amalgamation climaxed with the construction of the most magnificent Hindu temple in the world, Angkor Wat by Raja Suryavarman II, in Cambodia. To gauge how deep its roots went in Khmer, one has to consider that there was nothing 'Hindu' of the scale of Angkor at that time in India.
The final pages of the book are devoted to India's biggest and most significant import - mathematics.
Indian mathematical traditions' westward journey began in the winter of 773 when a delegation from the Raja of Sindh landed in Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate. The delegation handed over a coveted gift to the ruling Barmakids; the manuscript of 'The Great Sindh', which contained innovative ideas about science, astronomy, astrology and mathematics. The book, authored by India's biggest scientific mind Brahmagupta, was a compilation of his works about the qualities of the number zero, and ideas of Indian astronomy.
These concepts would later spread across the Islamic world and the Mediterranean. Leonardo of Pisa aka Fibonacci popularised the use of Arabic numerals through his book 'Liber Abachi'. However, Fibonacci didn't fail to mention how the 'Arabic numerals' were, actually, Indian.
Despite India shaping global civilisation and world history, why were these achievements never counted? Dalrymple attributes this to colonialism which devalued India's history, culture and knowledge.
He asserts that Southeast Asian nations, fresh from decolonisation after the World War, were in a hurry to dismiss the Indian influence. They did not want to accept that the formative moments of their history were defined by ancient Indian colonialism and shunned evidence of any Indian military activity, calling them illusory.
Back home, much of the evidence of the glorious past was lost in the Turkic invasions that came later. Dalrymple's debatable argument is that post-independence, Indian school textbooks were written by left-leaning, Congress-supporting figures who underplayed the iconoclasm to encourage nation-building after the terrible inter-religious violence during partition.
The book's lustre lies in its exhaustive coverage of ancient Indian history and Dalrymple's true-to-life descriptions. From a historian's point, 'The Golden Road – How Ancient India Transformed the World' is an ode to the forgotten chapters of ancient India and its unparalleled riches.
Book: The Golden Road – How Ancient India Transformed the World
Author: William Dalrymple
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Price: ₹679.00
