In 1877, a Prussian geographer named Baron von Richthofen (grandfather of the World War I flying ace the ‘Red Baron’) was given the task of planning a railway line between Berlin and Beijing, with a view to expanding German influence eastward. Richthofen plotted a route, which he dubbed die Seidenstraßen, ‘the Silk Roads’. Richthofen may (or may not) have coined the term, but it became a popular one to describe the spread of culture, knowledge, art and commerce that came to be associated with China and its relationship with the west.
In The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World, however, historian William Dalrymple sets out to prove that well before China was regarded as the cultural powerhouse of the world, it was India that claimed this epithet. Moving in roughly chronological order, from the time India was a ‘sinkhole’ for Rome’s gold, to many centuries down the line, through spaces as wide apart as Europe and Cambodia, China and the Middle East, Dalrymple traces India’s impact on the world—through religion, through culture, through knowledge; at times, an impact that literally translated into gold: the gold flowing into India through its flourishing trade with the West, or through the gold India mined in South-East Asia.
Equally often, though, that ‘gold’ is a metaphor, an indication of the preciousness of the knowledge, the aesthetics, the skill that flowed out from India and across the globe—the ‘Golden Road’, as Dalrymple calls it.
After the introduction, Dalrymple begins with a stirring account of the discovery (in April 1819) of the caves of Ajanta near Aurangabad, and uses this to pole-vault into a discussion on the origins and development of Buddhism in India. He ties this into some factors that led to the spread of Buddhism outside India: the travels of Buddhist traders, for instance, and the proselytisation by monks.
This story of Buddhism, as an export, comes into its own later in the book, when Dalrymple discusses the close connections between ancient China and India as a result of Buddhism: the life and times of the famous Xuanzang, who travelled, a fugitive from Tang China to Nalanda to study at the university; and Xuanzang’s later patroness, the ambitious Empress Wu Zetian, whose work to propagate Buddhism was a major factor in its spread in China.
Woven in, too, are descriptions of the trade with Europe: with the Greeks, and with the Roman Empire, importing everything from “Indian ivory mirrors, boxes and carved furniture”, to wild animals, spices and pepper: expensive luxuries that drained (according to Pliny) the Empire of “at least fifty-five million sesterces” a year. India and its goods were all the crack in Rome and in the areas dotting the sea route between India and the Mediterranean.
With the collapse of the Roman Empire, this trade declined, but Dalrymple explains how, in the meantime, India’s links with South-East Asia strengthened, both through flourishing trade networks as well as through the dissemination of Hinduism. This, combined with the impact of Indian influences on art, language, architecture, etc. created an Indosphere that is palpable even to this day.
Among the most interesting, and far-reaching, effects of India on the world, however, is what Dalrymple ends the book with: the gift of mathematics, and of its related field of astronomy; how zero made its way West; how Indians were once acclaimed far and wide as the best mathematicians around; and how, in essence, India’s contribution to accountancy helped facilitate commerce in Europe.
Dalrymple, of course, is known not just as a historian but a storyteller par excellence, and both qualities are on display in The Golden Road. The research is mind-bogglingly wide-ranging, taking into its ambit not just India, but much of the Old World as well: through archaeological evidence, documents, and more.
While the author does an admirable job of collating the facts, his ability to put those facts together in a lucid manner is what makes this book so absorbing.
There are interesting bits of trivia here (Caligula’s consort Lollia Paulina, for example, wore forty million sesterces’ worth of Indian emeralds and pearls, and carried around the receipts to prove it). Of particular note is the way Dalrymple works into his text the lives of key individuals—Xuanzang, Wu Zetian, Mahendravarman Pallava, Khalid ibn Barmak, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II among them—who were instrumental in the spread of Indian knowledge.
At a time when there are many tall claims about India’s glorious past, this book is invaluable: because it shows, through solid historical research, what India’s actual contributions to the world were. And, what we should really be proud of.