The Golden Road: Dalrymple revives a forgotten India for modern readers

The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

Author: William Dalrymple

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Price: Rs 999   

Pages: 608

The Wonder That Was India would have been the most appropriate name for William Dalrymple’s rich and enriching book had it not been the title of A L Basham’s classic work. All serious students growing up in the 1960s and 1970s and wanting to learn about ancient India read Basham’s book. Dalrymple takes up some of the themes covered by Basham and adds to them greater depth, more themes and new evidence. He complements all this by an analysis of how the cultures of ancient India were transmitted across a wide geographical space that Dalrymple calls the Indosphere. This is a book that should not be missed by anyone interested in the world of ancient Indian cultures.
 

At one level, Dalrymple’s book is a comprehensive rebuttal of the contempt that colonial administrators and intellectuals displayed towards India’s past. Thomas Babington Macaulay, that great panjandrum of the British Empire, (in)famously wrote: “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia”. Others of Macaulay’s ilk expressed similar prejudices and ignorance. Dalrymple has put such opinions where they belong – in imperialism’s ever-growing dustbin.
 

Dalrymple’s project has been made possible by a radical shift in the focus of Indian historical scholarship. Even the nationalist riposte to the Macaulay trope leaned too much towards dynastic and political history. Dalrymple writes briefly about the nationalist response but in the process writes of Kailas Nag. I think this should be Kalidas Nag. Only very recently has the spotlight shifted towards culture, its fashioning and its transmission. To take one example, a historian like Richard Eaton, when he writes of the history of India from roughly the 12th century to the early 18th century, he does so not with reference to the kings who ruled (although they are not altogether omitted) but in terms of the overarching cultural and political discursive space that spanned these centuries. He calls it the Persianate age whose geographical coordinates stretched from West Asia to India. Similarly, Dalrymple is looking at – both through a telescope and a magnifying glass – a geographical space that radiated from India to east Africa to the Arab world (and thence to Europe) to Central Asia to China and down southwards to south-east Asia. India was the centre of this world and its fountainhead of knowledge and culture.
 

The transmission of culture and commodities was over vast and hazardous land routes and over the seas. The sea lanes form Dalrymple’s golden road. The Asian monsoon winds had a recursive pattern, which placed India at the centre of navigable sea roads and maritime sea trade routes and enabled sailors to move to their destinations and return. Indian traders looking westwards used the trade winds in early summer to travel to the east coast of Africa and to the rich kingdoms of Ethiopia. Some of them moved northwards and via the Persian Gulf reached Iran and Mesopotamia, the doab of the Tigris and the Euphrates.
Some others went further south via Aden to the Red Sea and Egypt. With the summer monsoon, these traders could bring their ships back home to the Indian ports. Other sailors crossed, as Sunil Amrith has shown — and Dalrymple uses his work — the Bay of Bengal to reach the new emerging urban centres in Myanmar and south-east Asia. These sailors and traders used the eastward monsoon. By the fifth century, they were pushing along the Straits of Malacca towards China. India was thus, in the ancient and early medieval period, an “economic fulcrum”.
 

These ships did not carry only commodities for exchange. On board were human beings, many of whom were carrying new ideas – religious, philosophical, scientific, literary. Monks, mathematicians, missionaries and merchants went out of India into the Indosphere as carriers of transformative ideas. Dalrymple’s “golden road” was a vista for ideas and commodities. India was economically rich and intellectually profound. The Indosphere benefitted from both kinds of wealth.
 

The first ideas to travel, as Dalrymple points out, were those associated with the teachings of Gautam Buddha. The latter in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE taught in Prakrit (a hold-all name for many local non-Sanskrit languages and dialects) as he travelled in north India, in present-day eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. His teachings and his persona acquired prominence in the third century BCE when emperor Ashoka embraced Buddhism and sent emissaries across India and outside India to spread the teachings of the Buddha. This transmission reached China and Tibet to transform the cultures of those regions. And many centuries later, in the seventh century CE, Xuanzang would trek over 6,000 miles to learn about Buddha’s homeland and to conduct research in the Indian centres of learning. His writings and recollections form an important source for the intellectual and cultural world of ancient India.
 

But by the seventh century CE, and especially afterwards, intellectual traffic on the golden road was not confined to the travels of outstanding individuals and their experiences. Anonymous merchants and sailors had become the carriers of cultural ideas, amazing scientific discoveries and complex mathematical calculations across the oceans. India’s contribution to science and mathematics was appropriated by the West with little or no acknowledgement. Thanks to Dalrymple, this contribution will be known to the entire English-speaking world, and the West’s almost deliberate obliviousness exposed. Dalrymple’s account of the golden road also adds a different perspective and dimension to the celebration of the “silk route”.
 

There are a few aspects of Dalrymple’s riveting narrative – and he writes with enviable elegance and lucidity – that demand to be drawn out. One is that there is a history outside politics, palaces and battlefields. The power of ideas does not necessarily always flow from the barrels of guns. Ideas have their own momentum and trajectory that can be tracked, as Dalrymple does with immersive research and reading. Two, ideas do not need kings, pace Ashoka, for their transmission: ordinary human beings, Dalrymple’s sailors, merchants and travellers on the golden road, were influential carriers. Three, the network of ideas had roots in the ancient world. The discoveries of the great mathematician, Aryabhata (476-550 CE) – among his many astounding calculations was the value of the pi at 3.1416 – travelled across time and geographies to be translated into Arabic by scholars in Baghdad. Aryabhata is the best known of ancient Indian mathematicians but there were others as well.
Fibonacci, the Italian mathematician of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries who introduced the modus Indorum (known today as the Hindu-Arabic numeral system), was probably influenced by the ideas of Pingala, an Indian mathematician of the second and third centuries BCE. Ideas of architecture and sculpture and stories travelled eastwards into south-east Asia. Visiting south-east Asia in 1927, Rabindranath Tagore wrote – and Dalrymple quotes him – “Everywhere I could see India, yet I could not 

recognise it.”
 

There are pitfalls of course, especially in the precarious age in which we are forced to live, that some propagandists will use Dalrymple’s book to say everything existed in ancient India. That will not be Dalrymple’s fault, neither was that his intention. Dalrymple’s book is a remarkable feat of intellectual retrieval. He has brought to life an India that most people, outside a narrow band of specialists, know little about. For this, I am grateful to him.

The reviewer is Chancellor and Professor of History, Ashoka University. Views expressed are personal