Title: The Golden Road – How Ancient India Transformed the World
Author: William Dalrymple
Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2024 (First)
ISBN: 9781408864418
Pages: 482
William Dalrymple has become an Indian writer by now, living near Delhi and almost all his books related to Indian themes and interests. Each of his books lays before us one as yet unseen tapestry of Indian life that is noted for the richness of its warps and wefts tied to a syncretistic culture and firmly rooted in the popular mind. This book presents a refreshing change from others in the author’s oeuvre. No fewer than eight books in that eminent collection were based on an Islamic setting or theme. ‘The City of Djinns’ which showcased life in Delhi could as well have been penned about Baghdad or Samarkand – so completely was the Hindu element filtered out of the narrative like a noise-cancelling earphone cuts out background noise. This book examines how ancient India transformed the world before the Islamic occupation began in the tenth century or so. It is heartening for Indian readers to witness the change in which that ‘noise’ is now transformed into the ‘signal’. It aims to highlight India’s often forgotten position as a crucial economic fulcrum and civilizational engine, at the heart of the ancient and early-medieval worlds and as one of the main motors of global trade and cultural transmission in early world history, fully on a par with and equal to China. A sphere of influence – called Indosphere by the author – was created in Asia where its religion, art, music, dance, textiles, technology, astronomy, math, medicine, mythology, language and literature reigned supreme. This coveted position was achieved not by conquest, but instead by sheer cultural allure and sophistication. That’s why Xuanzang, the Chinese scholar, traveller and translator in seventh century CE, remarked: “people of distant places and with diverse customs generally designate the land they most admire as India”. The book covers three stages of the spread of Indosphere – towards China in the form of Buddhist theology, towards Southeast Asia as commerce, architecture and theology and finally to the Middle East and then to Europe in the form of scientific and mathematical wisdom after Islam’s conquest of these regions.
Indian cultural radiance to China is marked by the accounts of Buddhist monks who came to India in search of unadulterated Buddhist texts written in Sanskrit, the sacred language of Mahayana Buddhism. By the first century BCE, great Buddhist monasteries were very wealthy. They worked and exported cotton and operated mines for mineral trade. They lent money at interest to merchant guilds to support themselves who in turn patronized the viharas like no other. As the paintings in Ajanta caves show, India was already a cosmopolitan and surprisingly urban society full of traders from all over the known world. Outside Europe and parts of the erstwhile Roman empire, India was the place where most Roman coins were unearthed. When Xuanzang entered India at Jalalabad, he remarked that he was entering a holy land, ‘the five Indias made up of more than seventy kingdoms’. But for all its political fragmentation, the idea of India as a single cultural, sacral and geographical unit was still clearly understood from the very earliest times (p.21). The author tells the story of Xuanzang’s sixteen-year trek to India which achieved its aim of transporting a treasure of valuable information on the liturgy of Buddhism which also earned the monk an exalted status at the Tang court. The alliance of him and Empress Wu Zetian transformed Buddhism into the Chinese state religion and having a great sway in the court. Never again would India have such influence at the heart of the Chinese world. Immediately on his footsteps came another monk Yijing in 671 CE. He notes that fifty Chinese monks were studying at Nalanda. Regular translation of authentic Sanskrit texts into Chinese was carried out at the prestigious university. A great maritime Buddhist empire of Srivijaya had prospered at this time in Sumatra based on naval contacts from the shores of Bengal.
Dalrymple notes a subtle shift in Indian maritime trade from Roman empire to Southeast Asia around the fifth century CE. He claims that instead of China, India was the greatest trading partner of Rome. Sea travel was the fastest, safest and most economical way to move people and goods in the pre-modern world. Land travel was risky due to brigandage and inhospitable terrain. The intervening Persian empire was often at war with the Romans, adding to the difficulty in caravan trade. He declares that the term ‘Silk Road’ was coined only in the nineteenth century and did not have such a great provenance in the ancient world as it is portrayed nowadays. This book envisages fervent interaction with Rome after the Battle of Actium in which it conquered Egypt and Cleopatra committed suicide. Many ports sprang up along Red Sea on the Egyptian coast. Roman painters and sculptors also sailed along with the traders and travelled to Kushan kingdoms in the northwest of India. This facilitated mixing of Roman artistic ideas with Indian themes. Dalrymple assigns the origin of Gandhara style sculpture to these Roman artists which is quite in variance to traditional consensus which credits the Bactrian Greeks – who were the descendants of Alexander’s entourage – for the creation of this splendid hybrid art culture. The switchover from West to East for trade probably began with the sacking of Rome and Persian trade blockade of Byzantium in the sixth century CE. Volumes dropped, profits plummeted and Indian traders refocussed to Southeast Asia. Islamic conquests in the seventh century further disrupted trade with Egypt for another two centuries.
While Buddhism was thriving in China, a harmonious blend of it along with Hinduism was finding the ground fertile in Southeast Asia. In the seventh century CE, under the rule of Mahendravarman Pallava and his son Narasimhavarman, trade with Southeast Asia and Suvarnabhumi (Indonesia) burgeoned. Works of the court poet and playwright Dandin began to be read throughout the Indosphere. Indian epics and books began to be read, copied and recited. Indian plays and dances were performed to Indian music. Reliefs of Ramayana and Mahabharata began to be carved on temple walls in Southeast Asia. Free mixing of Hinduism and Buddhism is a striking feature of the region from the fifth century CE (p.181). People learned Brahminical writings and revered the law of the Buddha. These two accommodated each other and often appeared coexisting with local belief systems. The new empire in Southeast Asia grew rich on the spice and gold trade and amassed the resources to develop Indic ideas more extravagantly than any of the relatively small kingdoms which then divided India between them. The vastly bigger architectural plans of Borobudur and Angkorwat attest to this. No Indian import had a deeper or more long-lasting impact than the deeds of the heroes of the Ramayana and Mahabharata. From the fifth century to today, these remain a major feature in the art and culture of Southeast Asia. In Khmer, Hinduism seems to be the favourite choice of the elite, while commoners continued with local deities and beliefs such as ancestor worship. When the kingdoms collapsed, the temples fell into disuse and eventually the jungle reclaimed the land. Was this the same fate of Buddhism in India, where some scholars say it was nothing more than an aristocratic curiosity until the very modern times? The author does not pose this question as well as the enigma of why Hinduism went totally off the board in Cambodia – modern Khmer.
In 2001, I was pleasantly surprised when I heard the name of the new Indonesian president – Megawati Sukarnoputri. I was flabbergasted a few moments later when I learned the name of Indonesia's national airline – Garuda! None of my earlier school textbooks had informed me of the strong ties which once existed between the two nations and the deep cultural bonds. Dalrymple provides the answer to this quirk with historiography in modern India. The Marxist orientation of most of the Indian historians until recently, led to a lack of interest in matters of religion and art, which meant there was little or no pushback from Indian academia against post-colonial Southeast Asian scholars negating Indian influence. Another myth spread by these same historians is the persecution of Buddhism by Hindu kings in India. The author also appears confused about ancient Buddhism as a monolithic cult in the modern sense. This is however contradicted by many facts which he describes at other places in the book. Durga was worshipped at Mes Aynak Buddhist monastery in Afghanistan. Relics of Hindu worship were also found alongside Buddhist remains in Berenike, Egypt. The three great scholars of Buddhism – Asanga, Vasubandhu and Kumarajiva – on whose shoulders once rested the entire theological underpinnings of Mahayana Buddhism, are recorded to be Brahmins. The Jataka tales also indicate that the varna order had some relevance to Buddhists also. Chinese texts of 400 CE talk about a thousand Indian Brahmins living at a small coastal court in the Malay peninsula to whom the locals gave their daughters in marriage (p. 203). Where was the much trumpeted taboo on overseas travel then? These cultured emigres carried with them their epics, literature, mythology, theology, and spiritual and yogic methods. Not only Brahmins, other castes also migrated to Southeast Asia. The author then points out that caste system as well as concepts on ritual purity made no impact on that society. He however assumes that these customs were part of Indian society of that period.
The book illustrates more instances of Hinduism and Buddhism peacefully coexisting side by side and sometimes even indistinguishably in India as well as those places where the Indic culture reached. In fact, it is debatable whether a practitioner of both religions was aware of the miniscule theological differences that separated them. The Kushan period proved to be a great melting pot to fuse civilizations and religions together, mainly Buddhism, Hinduism and Zoroastrianism. In this syncretic world of evolving divine pantheons, at a crossroads where different civilizations and deities merged, different people recognized and worshipped different gods in the same images. Kujula Kadphises, the Kushan king who patronized Buddhism and provided a conduit to its spread to central Asia also issued coins inscribing the earliest pictorial form of Shiva. In the Bimaran reliquary found near Peshawar, the primal figure of Buddha is flanked by the Hindu gods Indra and Brahma.
The author then turns to how Indian knowledge was disseminated first to Islamic world and from there to Europe. After the Muslim conquest of central Asia, the Barmakids of Balkh converted to Islam and rose to the position of hereditary viziers of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad. They encouraged the flow of Indian mathematical and astronomical theories. The place-value notation, usage of the numeral zero and computation of planetary positions assumed significance. This blossoming of Indian knowledge was brief, however, in the Abbasid capital. Jafar al-Barmak was treacherously beheaded by his childhood companion and caliph Harun al-Rashid (of the Arabian Nights fame), possibly to appropriate the Barmakids’ immense wealth and uprooted the entire family. After the fall of the Barmakids, Arab intellectuals focussed more on retrieving ancient Greek learning than on recovering that of India. The Umayyad caliphate was then flourishing in present-day Spain and Indian knowledge reached there through the medium of Arabic. When the Christian kingdoms reconquered this al-Andalus, the knowledge made its way into Christian Europe and kindled the scientific effervescence after the Renaissance. The medieval European universities were inspired by madrassas which in turn were influenced by Buddhist monasteries which typically had apartments and endowed scholarship for its students as well as a good library. The Indo-Arabic numerals – which are in common usage day – were slow at first to gain acceptance in conservative Europe. Its use was banned in Florence in 1299 as they were more easily altered than Roman numerals, for example, by changing 0 to 6 or 9.
The book then turns to address how the Indosphere collapsed in the medieval period with the rise of Islam. 664 CE was the year in which the Indosphere reached the peak of its influence. In that year, the Damascene Umayyad Arab army destroyed the resplendent Naw Bahar Buddhist vihara in Balkh. This monastery was much appreciated by Xuanzang just twenty years earlier on his journey! With the arrival of Persian-speaking elite seeking refuge following Chengiz Khan’s invasions, the court language in India was changed from Sanskrit to Persian. India’s descent into a centuries-long servitude and intellectual eclipse thus began. Also, the Mongols opened up a vast trade route from the Mediterranean to China by obliterating the intervening political boundaries. The marine routes of the Indosphere lost prominence by thirteenth century. The Muslim armies were fired by a ferocious religious bigotry as well, unlike all the earlier invaders of India. The book describes the sacking of the universities at Nalanda, Odantapura and Vikramashila in a carefully sanitised manner. Even then, it becomes evident that these eminent institutions of learning were decimated for no other reason than the religious zeal of the Muslim invaders. In some cases, the stones were carried off to the river and thrown into it as if to preclude any attempt to rebuild them.
A drawback of the book is the lack of an analysis on why the fabled Indosphere vanished from the daily lives of the people in Southeast Asia and China so suddenly. The author perhaps deliberately omits to point out the spread of Islam in the Malayan and Indonesian archipelagos which might have had a distinct role in its extinction. Or more crucially, he does not dwell on the possibility that the Hindu and Buddhist influence we see plainly in architecture and folk art did not filter down to the ordinary man in the street like Buddhism in ancient India. It might have remained an aristocratic fad while the common man cared little. This aspect requires further study. The text is an effortless read and very appealing as any of Dalrymple’s works. Several beautiful colour and monochrome plates of people, sculpture and temples are included in the book. Pictures of lesser known temples in Cambodia and Indonesia are unique for the richness of sculpture. Besides all these, the book is gratifying to read, with the claim on its flap that ‘India is the forgotten heart of the ancient world’. The book is mind-bogglingly well-researched, with 100 pages of Notes and 50 pages of bibliography. Even with the absence of an objective analysis of the role of Islam in destroying Indic culture and influence, this book is a must-read for all Indians and other enthusiasts of the Asian way of life.
Indian cultural radiance to China is marked by the accounts of Buddhist monks who came to India in search of unadulterated Buddhist texts written in Sanskrit, the sacred language of Mahayana Buddhism. By the first century BCE, great Buddhist monasteries were very wealthy. They worked and exported cotton and operated mines for mineral trade. They lent money at interest to merchant guilds to support themselves who in turn patronized the viharas like no other. As the paintings in Ajanta caves show, India was already a cosmopolitan and surprisingly urban society full of traders from all over the known world. Outside Europe and parts of the erstwhile Roman empire, India was the place where most Roman coins were unearthed. When Xuanzang entered India at Jalalabad, he remarked that he was entering a holy land, ‘the five Indias made up of more than seventy kingdoms’. But for all its political fragmentation, the idea of India as a single cultural, sacral and geographical unit was still clearly understood from the very earliest times (p.21). The author tells the story of Xuanzang’s sixteen-year trek to India which achieved its aim of transporting a treasure of valuable information on the liturgy of Buddhism which also earned the monk an exalted status at the Tang court. The alliance of him and Empress Wu Zetian transformed Buddhism into the Chinese state religion and having a great sway in the court. Never again would India have such influence at the heart of the Chinese world. Immediately on his footsteps came another monk Yijing in 671 CE. He notes that fifty Chinese monks were studying at Nalanda. Regular translation of authentic Sanskrit texts into Chinese was carried out at the prestigious university. A great maritime Buddhist empire of Srivijaya had prospered at this time in Sumatra based on naval contacts from the shores of Bengal.
Dalrymple notes a subtle shift in Indian maritime trade from Roman empire to Southeast Asia around the fifth century CE. He claims that instead of China, India was the greatest trading partner of Rome. Sea travel was the fastest, safest and most economical way to move people and goods in the pre-modern world. Land travel was risky due to brigandage and inhospitable terrain. The intervening Persian empire was often at war with the Romans, adding to the difficulty in caravan trade. He declares that the term ‘Silk Road’ was coined only in the nineteenth century and did not have such a great provenance in the ancient world as it is portrayed nowadays. This book envisages fervent interaction with Rome after the Battle of Actium in which it conquered Egypt and Cleopatra committed suicide. Many ports sprang up along Red Sea on the Egyptian coast. Roman painters and sculptors also sailed along with the traders and travelled to Kushan kingdoms in the northwest of India. This facilitated mixing of Roman artistic ideas with Indian themes. Dalrymple assigns the origin of Gandhara style sculpture to these Roman artists which is quite in variance to traditional consensus which credits the Bactrian Greeks – who were the descendants of Alexander’s entourage – for the creation of this splendid hybrid art culture. The switchover from West to East for trade probably began with the sacking of Rome and Persian trade blockade of Byzantium in the sixth century CE. Volumes dropped, profits plummeted and Indian traders refocussed to Southeast Asia. Islamic conquests in the seventh century further disrupted trade with Egypt for another two centuries.
While Buddhism was thriving in China, a harmonious blend of it along with Hinduism was finding the ground fertile in Southeast Asia. In the seventh century CE, under the rule of Mahendravarman Pallava and his son Narasimhavarman, trade with Southeast Asia and Suvarnabhumi (Indonesia) burgeoned. Works of the court poet and playwright Dandin began to be read throughout the Indosphere. Indian epics and books began to be read, copied and recited. Indian plays and dances were performed to Indian music. Reliefs of Ramayana and Mahabharata began to be carved on temple walls in Southeast Asia. Free mixing of Hinduism and Buddhism is a striking feature of the region from the fifth century CE (p.181). People learned Brahminical writings and revered the law of the Buddha. These two accommodated each other and often appeared coexisting with local belief systems. The new empire in Southeast Asia grew rich on the spice and gold trade and amassed the resources to develop Indic ideas more extravagantly than any of the relatively small kingdoms which then divided India between them. The vastly bigger architectural plans of Borobudur and Angkorwat attest to this. No Indian import had a deeper or more long-lasting impact than the deeds of the heroes of the Ramayana and Mahabharata. From the fifth century to today, these remain a major feature in the art and culture of Southeast Asia. In Khmer, Hinduism seems to be the favourite choice of the elite, while commoners continued with local deities and beliefs such as ancestor worship. When the kingdoms collapsed, the temples fell into disuse and eventually the jungle reclaimed the land. Was this the same fate of Buddhism in India, where some scholars say it was nothing more than an aristocratic curiosity until the very modern times? The author does not pose this question as well as the enigma of why Hinduism went totally off the board in Cambodia – modern Khmer.
In 2001, I was pleasantly surprised when I heard the name of the new Indonesian president – Megawati Sukarnoputri. I was flabbergasted a few moments later when I learned the name of Indonesia's national airline – Garuda! None of my earlier school textbooks had informed me of the strong ties which once existed between the two nations and the deep cultural bonds. Dalrymple provides the answer to this quirk with historiography in modern India. The Marxist orientation of most of the Indian historians until recently, led to a lack of interest in matters of religion and art, which meant there was little or no pushback from Indian academia against post-colonial Southeast Asian scholars negating Indian influence. Another myth spread by these same historians is the persecution of Buddhism by Hindu kings in India. The author also appears confused about ancient Buddhism as a monolithic cult in the modern sense. This is however contradicted by many facts which he describes at other places in the book. Durga was worshipped at Mes Aynak Buddhist monastery in Afghanistan. Relics of Hindu worship were also found alongside Buddhist remains in Berenike, Egypt. The three great scholars of Buddhism – Asanga, Vasubandhu and Kumarajiva – on whose shoulders once rested the entire theological underpinnings of Mahayana Buddhism, are recorded to be Brahmins. The Jataka tales also indicate that the varna order had some relevance to Buddhists also. Chinese texts of 400 CE talk about a thousand Indian Brahmins living at a small coastal court in the Malay peninsula to whom the locals gave their daughters in marriage (p. 203). Where was the much trumpeted taboo on overseas travel then? These cultured emigres carried with them their epics, literature, mythology, theology, and spiritual and yogic methods. Not only Brahmins, other castes also migrated to Southeast Asia. The author then points out that caste system as well as concepts on ritual purity made no impact on that society. He however assumes that these customs were part of Indian society of that period.
The book illustrates more instances of Hinduism and Buddhism peacefully coexisting side by side and sometimes even indistinguishably in India as well as those places where the Indic culture reached. In fact, it is debatable whether a practitioner of both religions was aware of the miniscule theological differences that separated them. The Kushan period proved to be a great melting pot to fuse civilizations and religions together, mainly Buddhism, Hinduism and Zoroastrianism. In this syncretic world of evolving divine pantheons, at a crossroads where different civilizations and deities merged, different people recognized and worshipped different gods in the same images. Kujula Kadphises, the Kushan king who patronized Buddhism and provided a conduit to its spread to central Asia also issued coins inscribing the earliest pictorial form of Shiva. In the Bimaran reliquary found near Peshawar, the primal figure of Buddha is flanked by the Hindu gods Indra and Brahma.
The author then turns to how Indian knowledge was disseminated first to Islamic world and from there to Europe. After the Muslim conquest of central Asia, the Barmakids of Balkh converted to Islam and rose to the position of hereditary viziers of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad. They encouraged the flow of Indian mathematical and astronomical theories. The place-value notation, usage of the numeral zero and computation of planetary positions assumed significance. This blossoming of Indian knowledge was brief, however, in the Abbasid capital. Jafar al-Barmak was treacherously beheaded by his childhood companion and caliph Harun al-Rashid (of the Arabian Nights fame), possibly to appropriate the Barmakids’ immense wealth and uprooted the entire family. After the fall of the Barmakids, Arab intellectuals focussed more on retrieving ancient Greek learning than on recovering that of India. The Umayyad caliphate was then flourishing in present-day Spain and Indian knowledge reached there through the medium of Arabic. When the Christian kingdoms reconquered this al-Andalus, the knowledge made its way into Christian Europe and kindled the scientific effervescence after the Renaissance. The medieval European universities were inspired by madrassas which in turn were influenced by Buddhist monasteries which typically had apartments and endowed scholarship for its students as well as a good library. The Indo-Arabic numerals – which are in common usage day – were slow at first to gain acceptance in conservative Europe. Its use was banned in Florence in 1299 as they were more easily altered than Roman numerals, for example, by changing 0 to 6 or 9.
The book then turns to address how the Indosphere collapsed in the medieval period with the rise of Islam. 664 CE was the year in which the Indosphere reached the peak of its influence. In that year, the Damascene Umayyad Arab army destroyed the resplendent Naw Bahar Buddhist vihara in Balkh. This monastery was much appreciated by Xuanzang just twenty years earlier on his journey! With the arrival of Persian-speaking elite seeking refuge following Chengiz Khan’s invasions, the court language in India was changed from Sanskrit to Persian. India’s descent into a centuries-long servitude and intellectual eclipse thus began. Also, the Mongols opened up a vast trade route from the Mediterranean to China by obliterating the intervening political boundaries. The marine routes of the Indosphere lost prominence by thirteenth century. The Muslim armies were fired by a ferocious religious bigotry as well, unlike all the earlier invaders of India. The book describes the sacking of the universities at Nalanda, Odantapura and Vikramashila in a carefully sanitised manner. Even then, it becomes evident that these eminent institutions of learning were decimated for no other reason than the religious zeal of the Muslim invaders. In some cases, the stones were carried off to the river and thrown into it as if to preclude any attempt to rebuild them.
A drawback of the book is the lack of an analysis on why the fabled Indosphere vanished from the daily lives of the people in Southeast Asia and China so suddenly. The author perhaps deliberately omits to point out the spread of Islam in the Malayan and Indonesian archipelagos which might have had a distinct role in its extinction. Or more crucially, he does not dwell on the possibility that the Hindu and Buddhist influence we see plainly in architecture and folk art did not filter down to the ordinary man in the street like Buddhism in ancient India. It might have remained an aristocratic fad while the common man cared little. This aspect requires further study. The text is an effortless read and very appealing as any of Dalrymple’s works. Several beautiful colour and monochrome plates of people, sculpture and temples are included in the book. Pictures of lesser known temples in Cambodia and Indonesia are unique for the richness of sculpture. Besides all these, the book is gratifying to read, with the claim on its flap that ‘India is the forgotten heart of the ancient world’. The book is mind-bogglingly well-researched, with 100 pages of Notes and 50 pages of bibliography. Even with the absence of an objective analysis of the role of Islam in destroying Indic culture and influence, this book is a must-read for all Indians and other enthusiasts of the Asian way of life.
The book is highly recommended.
Rating: 5 Star
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