Among the bestselling historians bestriding the literary festivals and blogospheres, few have more eminence than William Dalrymple and Peter Frankopan. The former has written a string of thick, rippingly readable yarns about the rulers and holy men of India, where he spends much of his time. The latter, after early studies of Russia, Persia, Turkey and Arabia, wrote an equally thick and colourful book about the ancient Silk Roads that sold a million copies, and then followed up with another, The New Silk Roads, about developing trade routes across Eurasia.
A friendly rivalry has played out between these two history lions in the halls of Oxford. Dalrymple acknowledges that his new book, The Golden Road, emerged partly from discussions and “very agreeable disagreements” with Frankopan. While he loved Frankopan’s Silk Roads he also felt India’s role “needed emphasis in counterbalance to that of Persia, Central Asia and China.”
Dalrymple’s new book, The Golden Road, sets out to highlight what he calls India’s “often forgotten position as a crucial economic fulcrum, and civilisational engine, at the heart of the ancient and early medieval worlds.” It was, he insists, “one of the main motors of global trade and cultural transmission in early world history, fully on a par with and equal to China.”
All this has been obscured by the “seductively Sinocentric concept” of a well-traversed overland trade route linking China with Europe. Yet, he says, the idea of a Silk Road was completely unknown in ancient or medieval times: “Not a single ancient record, either Chinese or Western, refers to its existence.” The term wasn’t invented until 1877, when Prussian geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen (uncle of the Red Baron) was sent to plan a rail route from Berlin to Beijing.
Little was traded by land across Eurasia until the frontierless thirteenth-century Mongol empire enabled Marco Polo’s journey to the Xanadu of Kublai Khan in 1271. Chinese silk mostly came to Rome via India, and even then it was always exceeded in value by Indian spices, ivory, gems, teak and sandalwood and cotton.
“In contrast with India, China has become very good at telling the story that it was always the centre of the Asian world,” Dalrymple sniffs. Xi Jinping has vigorously pursued the notion with his trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative, which involves a lot of railway-building along the old camel routes of Central Asia. “It is now clear that historians have been looking at entirely the wrong place when they thought about ancient trade routes,” Dalrymple declares. They should be looking earlier at what he calls the Indosphere, a term he borrows from historian Simon Sebag Montefiore.
As with Dalrymple’s earlier books, The Golden Road is full of adventurous tales — of East India Company soldiers stumbling into the Ajanta caves, their walls painted with Buddhist frescoes; of lonely monks like Xuanzang, who almost died of thirst before his horse scented an oasis in the Gobi. Woven into the text are some of his own travels, lushly described: the rubies adorning the court dancers in the Ajanta painting are not just blood red, but “the colour of peacock’s blood.” He makes it sound quite fun to be in a monk’s cell pouring over Sanskrit scrolls, sustained on lentil gruel, searching for the meaning, or meaningless, of life. Dalrymple doesn’t talk down to his reader, with words like fascicles, quincunx, thalassocracy, voussoirs and grimoire abounding. And the 288 pages of text are backed by a prodigious ninety-two pages of notes and a fifty-six-page bibliography.
From about 250 BCE to 1200 CE, India was “a confident exporter of its own diverse civilisation,” says Dalrymple, “creating around it an empire of ideas which developed into a tangible ‘Indosphere’ where its cultural influence was predominant.” The rest of Asia was an eager recipient of this “startlingly comprehensive mass transfer of Indian soft power, in religion, art, music, dance, textiles, technology, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, mythology, languages and literature.”
After emperor Ashoka (who reigned 268–232 BCE) established peace across a swathe of northern India and Afghanistan, he encouraged the adoption of the teachings of Gautama Buddha in place of early forms of Hinduism that involved a lot of animal sacrificing and other violence. Huge monasteries sprang up, as wealthy as those in Europe, among them a university at Nalanda, in present-day Bihar, that for centuries drew in monks and scholars from across the known world.
Among those scholars was a Chinese monk named Xuanzang, who evaded a ban on foreign travel and crossed the Gobi desert to reach India. When he returned sixteen years later, in 645 CE, he became adviser to the empress Wu Zetian, a former concubine who by murderous plotting had become the only woman emperor in her own right in 3000 years of Chinese history. Wu promoted Buddhism as the state religion, an antidote to paternalistic Confucianism, and ruled until 705 CE after this “esoteric Buddhist coup d’etat.”
Science, medicine and mathematics flourished. The nine numerals we know as Arabic (from the Arab caliphates that transmitted them to Europe) were first written in Bihar in the third century BCE, with the crucial zero added later. The Indian mathematician-astronomer Aryabhata (476–550 CE) worked out the main branches of modern mathematics and anticipated some of the work of Copernicus and Galileo a thousand years later. A later Indian mathematician, Brahmagupta (c. 598–c. 668 CE), came up with positive and negative numbers.
Trade was mostly maritime, taking advantage of the fact that the monsoon winds blew one way across South and Southeast Asia at one time of the year, and back the other way at another. Camel trains took three times as long and couldn’t haul as much. Once the Romans brought Egypt under control with the defeat of Mark Antony and Cleopatra in 31 BCE, a port sprang up at the head of the Red Sea. Now, Indian goods came West, Roman gold and silver went East. The Romans grumbled at the outflow of money: Pliny the Elder called India “the sink of the world’s most precious metals.” Still, customs duties on Red Sea imports paid a third of the empire’s running costs.
When Rome’s gold supply ran short in the sixth century CE, Indian traders shifted to the east, connecting to new centres in Cambodia, Malaya, Sumatra and Java. With Brahmanical taboos on seafaring effectively abolished by Buddha’s new teachings, Buddhism burst out of India. By the sixth or seventh century CE, Southeast Asia had become a central part of the Indosphere, with ruling elites adopting Buddhist and Hindu religions and using Sanskrit in literature and politics.
The new Angkor Wat, in present-day Cambodia, was the largest Hindu temple anywhere. The ninth-century Borobudur, in Central Java, remains “the greatest and most philosophically complex Buddhist structure in the world,” Dalrymple says, and “one of the great cultural achievements of humanity.” The tenth-century Hindu temple at Prambanan, also in Central Java, contains “some of earliest and arguably greatest sets of reliefs of the Ramayana ever sculpted, more complete than anything in stone surviving in India.” These complexes were all built under regional sovereigns: there were no Indian conquests or colonies. The sculptures and monuments show local influences, the Southeast Asia craftsmen building them bigger and better than those in India itself.
Still, as Dalrymple has to admit, it all peaked quite a while ago, around the end of the seventh century CE. Even Xuanzang had found Buddhism in decline by the time he traversed the Gobi, with fewer monks in evidence and some monasteries dilapidated. The new Gupta dynasty promoted a different version of Brahmanical Hinduism, with animal sacrifices replaced by idols of deities that worshippers could address directly. Ideas of warrior kingship found in the new Purana texts were more appealing to the rulers than bloodless pacificism.
Then the raids and invasions out of the northwest started and the Indosphere “suddenly and dramatically imploded.” Over the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries Mongols and then Muslims from Turkic lands vanquished Hindu kings, sacked monasteries, and desecrated Hindu and Buddhist monuments. A wave of Persian-speaking refugees came out of Central Asia and established themselves as officials and scribes, their language replacing Sanskrit in government.
The missionaries from India into Southeast Asia were now Muslims of the Sufi mystical variety. The stamp of Indian culture nonetheless remained strong. Though they cherished Sanskrit and the Ramayana and Mahabharata epics, the Southeast Asians hadn’t taken to Hindu notions of caste, purity and vegetarianism. Having recently thrown off European colonial rule, they tend to bridle at implied suggestion of having had derivative cultures.
Dalrymple doesn’t concede much to the Chinese. “Only in northern Vietnam, Korea and Japan had any of the peoples of East Asia adopted the ways, manners, architectural forms and scripts of the Chinese Middle Kingdom,” he says. Most of us would regard that as a pretty substantial cultural realm.
Dalrymple claims a lot for Indian influence, though he only mentions the possibility of Ashoka’s Buddhist missionaries in Alexandria influencing the later non-violent message of Christianity, not taking it further. It can all get exaggerated among the laymen of the Indian diaspora, he says.
No doubt there will be further ripostes in this India vs China argument. And maybe a third party will enter the field. Dalrymple tells us that a lot of the India trade was carried on very big ships from Malaya and Indonesia. As well as ranging far across the Pacific, the Austronesians sailed and traded to the western shores of the Indian Ocean, leaving their ancestral traces in places like Madagascar and Zanzibar. Maybe they had more agency than he reveals.
Amid the current debates about politics, religion and history inside India, The Golden Road may get mixed reviews from proponents of a Hindu raj who draw inspiration from their imagined past. Dalrymple paints the most glorious days as those when wise kings and holy men threw off the strictures of formal Hinduism: “History shows India always at most creative and influential when it is most connected, plural, hybrid, and receptive to new ideas from its neighbours, when it represents the cohabitation not a clash of civilisations.” It’s a brave statement: the present mood guiding India is rather more dogmatic. •
The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World
By William Dalrymple | Bloomsbury | $39.99 | 464 pages
