Seventy years ago, historian A L Basham published The Wonder That Was India, a sweeping ode to India’s ancient history, religion, the arts, language and literature. The book was a riposte to negative assessments of the country’s heritage that had persisted from the time of James Mill and Macaulay to the imperial perspective of Vincent Smith.
“India’s contribution to the world’s cultural stock has already been very large,” Basham wrote in the book’s epilogue, urging us to take account of its legacy, “for it is no longer the heritage of India alone, but of all mankind”. Similar views by others provide fodder to those who claim the subcontinent was the source of all that is good and great on the planet, an attitude caricatured by Sanjeev Bhaskar’s character in the British comedy series Goodness Gracious Me: “Christianity? Indian! Leonardo da Vinci? Indian! Royal family? Indian!”
Wild claims aside, William Dalrymple writes in The Golden Road that “the entire spectrum of early Indian influence has always been there, hiding in plain sight”. He finds it in the Buddhism of Sri Lanka, Tibet, China, Korea and Japan, in the place names of Burma and Thailand, in the murals and sculptures of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in Laos and Cambodia, and in the Hindu gods, rituals and temples of Bali.
From about 250 BCE till the founding of the Delhi Sultanate, India was a confident exporter of its civilisation, creating “an empire of ideas” that encompassed religion, the arts, technology, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, mythology, language and literature. Dalrymple’s capacious and absorbing portrayal of this period of soft power blends recent archaeological discoveries with short accounts of his own travels, along with an abundance of archival sources.
Sinocentric framing
The title of the book is an attempt to rebalance the concept of the Silk Roads, the ancient overland trade routes between China and Europe that facilitated the exchange of goods and ideas. For Dalrymple, this is a “Sinocentric reframing and rebranding of history”. He sets out to show how India was at the centre of a web of influence stretching between the Red Sea and the Pacific.
To make its case, the book journeys through various staging posts and destinations over time. For a start, there are accounts of boatloads of Indian goods driven by monsoon winds making their way to and from the Roman Empire.
The process intensified after Emperor Augustus’s takeover of Egypt following his victory over Mark Antony and Cleopatra in 31 BCE. Fleets of merchant ships passed between the two worlds, making India the largest trading partner of the Roman Empire.
From diamonds to rubies, from teak to sandalwood, and of course, from pepper to other spices, they couldn’t get enough. Such commerce caused the puritanical naval commander Pliny the Elder to grumble that India was “the sink of the world’s most precious metals…There is no year which does not drain our empire of at least fifty-five million sesterces”.
The might of the Persians, the ravages of the Goths, and the eventual decline of the Romans in the West ultimately made Indian merchants shift focus to the East. Here, they found a Suvarnabhumi, a land of gold. Dalrymple recounts in immersive detail how the Pallavas dominated lucrative Southeast Asian trade routes, with Mamallapuram emerging as arguably the greatest entrepôt of the region.
Culture travelled hand in hand with trade, as always. Indian thought, epics, plays and dance were widely disseminated all over the newly-extended Indosphere, to use the coinage of Simon Sebag Montefiore. The process would reach a magnificent flowering with the great temple complexes of Indonesia’s Borobudur and Cambodia’s Angkor Wat.
As The Golden Road fluently shows, the Indosphere’s ripples carried even further. Buddhism brought about a metamorphosis in China’s arts, history, society and culture; with time, it was also profoundly changed and moulded by the host country.
And no such account would be complete without mention of how Indian thought in astronomy and mathematics — such as the concept and treatment of the zero — passed to the Arabs, and from them to the wider world. For this, we have the Barmakid family to thank: Abbasid viziers descended from the line of Sanskrit-literate Buddhist abbots in Afghanistan.
These broad historical currents are leavened with engrossing portraits of influential individuals over the ages. Among them are Xuanzheng, the intrepid traveller to Nalanda and tireless disseminator of Buddhist doctrine; Wu Zetian, the only woman who became emperor in her own right in 3,000 years of Chinese history; the Pallava monarch Mahendravarman under whose rule Shaiva and Vaishnava bhakti movements bloomed; and Dandin, the polymathic Sanskrit luminary of his time.
Earlier works like White Mughals and The Anarchy have amply demonstrated Dalrymple’s skill in portraying times of confluence, collaboration and conjunction: eras during which one way of life collides with and blends into another. The Golden Road is another fascinating addition to the list.