Golden route from India: exploring the ancient world

British historian William Dalrymple maps the vast arc that encompassed the Greek and Roman empires, much of Central Asia and eastwards as far as China, Korea and Japan.

The Golden Road by William Dalrymple

In 1938, the Swedish explorer-turned Nazi sympathiser Sven Hedin published The Silk Road, a narrative of his 16,000km journey through Central Asia.

It was the first time the term “Silk Road” had appeared in English — though the routes that Hedin followed and documented had been trading in valuable textiles, spices and gemstones since before the reign of Alexander the Great.

More than eight decades later, British historian William Dalrymple has laid out the case for a new moniker, the Golden Road to describe the period between c.250 BCE to c.1200 CE when Indian artistic, architectural and cultural influences spread across a vast arc that encompassed the Greek and Roman empires, much of Central Asia and eastwards as far as China, Korea and Japan.

In a bold, sweeping narrative that draws on the accounts of Buddhist pilgrims searching for spiritual nirvana, the diaries of Indian ship captains ferrying precious cargos to Red Sea ports, inscriptions left by stone masons on the walls of Khmer temples and a wealth of primary sources, Dalrymple puts India at the centre of a highly globalised Eurasia.

Evidence of this is still visible today. Thousands of tourists visit Cambodia to see the ruins of Angkor Wat, the largest Hindu temple complex in the world, as well as the magisterial mandala-shaped Buddhist stupa of Borobudur in the highlands of Java. The Indonesian island’s name derives from the Sanskrit Yawad-dvipa which means “the island shaped like a yawa” or grain of barley.

The Golden Road by William Dalrymple

Dalrymple is not the first historian to map the interlocking trails of this Golden Road. In the 1990s, Sheldon Pollock coined the term ‘Sanskrit cosmopolis’ to describe India’s political and cultural projection into Southeast Asia. More than a thousand years ago a Baghdad bookseller compiled the Fihrist al-Ulum or Catalogue of the Sciences, a compendium of three centuries of Arab literature that refers to a striking number of translations from Sanskrit including treatises on everything from mathematics to magic.

Where Dalrymple’s scholarship breaks new ground is to link the eastern and western branches of this Indosphere in a coherent and highly readable narrative. He also brings the story up to date citing recent archaeological discoveries that continue to rewrite history such as the marble statue of Buddha unearthed at Berenike on the shores of the Red Sea, the first ever found west of ­Afghanistan.

Dated to the 2nd century CE, the statue was probably commissioned by a wealthy Indian sea captain in gratitude for his safe arrival. At the time hundreds of ships laden with ivory, spices, tortoise shells, aromatic oils and other luxury goods used the monsoonal winds to make their way from the western coasts of India to ports such as Berenike. By the end of the first century Indian pepper was so plentiful that the spice was recommended in 80 per cent of the 478 recipes included in a Roman cookbook.

The bulk of the Golden Road’s mercantile and cultural exchange was by sea. Transporting goods over water was faster, more economical and avoided the wars and political instability that periodically shut down the Silk Road. The trade winds that carried Indian sailors towards the coast of Africa, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf in the winter months, turned eastwards during the summer monsoon, accelerating their vessels across the Bay of Bengal to the ports of Southeast Asia, the so-called ‘Lands of Gold’.

In the 3rd century BCE, the Indian emperor Asoka convened a Buddhist conclave at his capital Pataliputra where he ordered monks to disseminate the religion beyond the borders of his empire. Buddhism took root in countries such as Sri Lanka, Thailand, Korea and Myanmar. Hinduism came later, spreading throughout Cambodia and Indonesia where rulers took the names of Hindu gods. Aside from a brief naval campaign by the Chola king Radjendra in 1025 that saw the occupation of ports in Sumatra, Malaysia and Thailand, this cultural and political expansion was built on soft power which owed its strength to Indian dynasties such as Mauryas and the ­Guptas.

Today the Gupta period which lasted from the 4th to 6th century CE is known as India’s Golden Age for its affluence, cultural richness and scientific advances. The fifth-century mathematician Aryabhatta posited the theory that the Earth was a sphere that rotates on its axis and calculated the length of the day to within less than a second of its actual value. His successor Brahmagupta was the first to define zero as the result of subtracting a number from itself. What we think of as Arabic numerals were Indian in origin as were concepts such as algebra, trigonometry and the algorithm. Many of these first passed through Abbasid Baghdad before being disseminated throughout Europe.

Surprisingly, India has not exploited this soft power legacy in the same way China has utilised — and weaponised — the Silk Route in its Belt and Road Initiative. Its relations with its immediate neighbours are often strained. It has belatedly reached out to Southeast Asian nations to forge closer strategic and economic ties, while its links with West Asia have focussed on trade and ­security.

Amid the shrill rhetoric of illiberal Hindu nationalism being played out today, Dalrymple’s book is also timely. Cultural and religious pluralism drove the ideas and innovations that sustained the Golden Road — raising the question, as Dalrymple does in his conclusion: can India do so again?

John Zubrzycki is the author most recently of Dethroned: The Downfall of India’s Princely States