The Golden Road: How ancient India transformed the world by William Dalrymple

Indosphere: Can India do it again?

Have you wondered why the main international airport serving Bangkok, capital of Thailand is called Suvarnabhumi [Sanskrit: land of Gold] Airport? And the Thai King is called Rama? The incumbent King is the tenth monarch of the Chakri dynasty, and is titled Rama X (The Tenth). The city of Ayutthaya (Ayodhya), now well within the rim of modern day Bangkok is home to one of the King’s palaces. Are you aware that the inhabitants of the island of Bali in Indonesia are Hindus, and the national airline of Indonesia is called Garuda [Vehicle of Vishnu] Indonesia? The currency notes of Indonesia carry the images of Hindu gods, and Buddhist temples. The largest Hindu temple in the world is not in India but at Angkor Wat in Cambodia, and the largest Buddhist temple in the world is at Borobudur in Indonesia. How did this all come about?

William Dalrymple- in this, his latest book, provides all the answers. Between 200 BCE and 1200 CE, the region encompassing greater India (modern day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan) was an economic powerhouse generating 33% of the global GDP. This was made possible by peaceful trade across the Indian Ocean rim. The Deccan Peninsula is located in the middle of the Indian Ocean rim facilitating trade with sea ports dotted along the horn of Africa, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf on the West, and the Bay of Bengal, Malaccan straits and the South China Sea on the East. The West Coast of India from Surat in the North down to the Muziris in the South, and the East Coast of India from Tamralipti (near modern day Kolkata) in the North to Nagapattinam in the South were dotted with ports too numerous to be listed. From all these, ships set off towards the Byzantine empire in the West, and the Kingdoms of modern day South East Asia, collectively called Suvarnabhumi, in the East. And what was the currency of this trade? Gold.

Gold poured into India from all directions, giving this book its title. On the wings of commerce flew culture, art, religion, and language. Hinduism and Buddhism spread in both directions, carried by learned Brahmins from India, and itinerant scholars from abroad. The most famous among the latter was Xuanzang (Hiuen Tsang) from China. He was typical of the hundreds who came to India to study at the famous Universities of India, Nalanda being the largest among them. Through them Buddhism reached China and became the latter’s state religion. Buddhist thought also travelled by land northwards through Kandahar and Bamiyan (in modern day Afghanistan), across the Pamirs to the Tarim basin (modern day Xinjiang), and travelled along the northern and southern rims of the Taklamakan desert (read my review of the biography of Aurel Stein). This path coincided with the famous Silk Road. Along with religion, the Sanskrit language spread over the whole region, making it the language of scholarship. And with language spread Hindu names, explaining in part the observations made at the beginning of the Review.

What is the evidence for all this? Just read the 200 pages of citations and bibliography!

And what of numbers?

We are familiar with the Roman and ‘Arabic’ numerals. Where did the so called ‘Arabic’ numerals originate? “--- Indian mathematicians first began to think hard about the concept of zero, ‘one of the greatest abstractions that the human mind has ever achieved’.” (page 241)  ---- “Under the influence of revitalised trade and commerce which had taken place under the Kushans and then the Guptas, Indian mathematicians first mastered the decimal system and place-value arithmetic, with separate columns for units, tens, hundreds and thousands.” This greatly facilitated arithmetic calculations for trade, and astronomy. One of the early representations of the decimal system can be traced to Patanjali around 150 CE. The problem of empty spaces in the decimal representation was solved in India by the use of the zero, which traced its origin to the concept of ‘Shunya’, a Buddhist concept representing emptiness or void. Brahmagupta (598-670 CE) formalized the concept of zero with its normative definition – “zero as the answer you get when you subtract a number from itself. --- when zero is added to a number or subtracted from a number, the number remains unchanged; and a number multiplied by zero becomes zero.” From here it was a short step to obtain positive and negative numbers. “Positive divided by positive, or negative by negative, is affirmative, positive divided by negative is negative. Negative divided by affirmative is negative”. In all these developments, Brahmagupta was preceded by  Aryabhata (476-550 CE), who wrote the first definitive treatise on “squares, cubes, square roots, cube roots, triangles, the properties of a circle, algebra, fractions, quadratic equations and sines, --- and a very close approximation of the value of pi- 3.1416.” 

As the first Arab armies of Islam brought down the eastern Byzantine empire and the Sassanian empire of Persia, and arrived at the Indus in 751 CE, the Abbasid Caliph Mansur ruling from Baghdad demanded of the Raja of Sindh tribute of a single handwritten Sanskrit manuscript comprising “in essence a book of complex mathematical theory” and a “group of Brahmin astrologers and sages from the Indian city of Ujjain who had been specially chosen to explain its contents” (page 234). The theory of the decimal system went to the Arabs, who having made “short work” of the Buddhist Viharas of Central Asia built the first Islamic madrassas on the same design. The knowledge was compiled in the famous Islamic centers of learning and their libraries. When the Christian crusades of the late eleventh century began to reconquer what was lost to the Arab armies, the libraries passed on to the Christian kings who preserved the treasure of knowledge, and began to use the decimal system and the numbers believing them to be of Arab origin. However “Fibonacci” who carried the knowledge over to Western Europe wrote “I was introduced to a wonderful teaching that used the nine figures of the Indias. With the sign 0, which the Arabs call zephyr (al-sifr), any number whatsoever can be written” (page 280). Al-sifr is Arabic for ‘Shunya’. Thereby the Indian numerals came to be called ‘Arabic’ numerals. It is time to refer to these again as Indian numerals.

The Silk Road versus The Golden Road

The more famous Silk Road is an ancient trade route spanning over 6400 km connecting Changan (now Xiang) in the east to Damascus in the west, and further to Rome, capital of the Holy Roman Empire. This trade route was opened around the first century BCE and remained operational until the 15^th century CE. The Silk Road touted as a major trade artery completely bypassed the Indian subcontinent, grazing the northern most tip of Greater India at the Karakorum range of mountains.

This book challenges the very logic of the Silk Road. Being an overland route, it was traversed by animal (horse and camel) caravans. These caravans would have taken no less than two years to trundle along each way. Their carrying capacity would also be miniscule compared to that of a ship, especially the giant ships that the early Pallavan kings deployed for their ventures. Once the sailors of the third century BCE, understood the flow of monsoon winds, the sea journeys could be completed in less than a month. The return journey could be undertaken as the monsoon winds reversed directions in the latter part of the year. The trade was conducted between the Indian merchants and their counterparts in Rome directly. What is the evidence for all this? The recently discovered giant hoards of Roman coins found all along the Western and Eastern coasts of the Deccan peninsula and Sri Lanka. In contrast there is no evidence of Roman coins on the eastern towns of the Silk Road. The Silk Road far from being a global trade route was at best a provincial street along which animal borne goods travelled short distances of barely a few hundred kilometers either way marking out the trade between the oases cities of the Tarim basin. Remnants of this relay trade could have possibly reached Rome, but never in sufficient quantities to qualify as a global trade. The entire concept of the Silk Road appears to be a political construct of the current Chinese oligarchy to impose its hegemony on contemporary global trade with little foundation in history.

Dalrymple’s research methodology 

In all his earlier writings of Indian History, most notably the ‘Company Quartet’, Dalrymple has accessed original material from the archives, much of it for the very first time to construct his narration. This material often in archaic Persian, Urdu, or Hindi is accessible only to a multilingual scholar. In The Last Moghul, writing about the mutiny in Delhi, he observes, “---[as] it became obvious that most of the material had not been accessed since it was gathered in 1857, or at least since it was catalogued when rediscovered stored in a series of trunks in Calcutta in 1921, the question became increasingly hard to answer was why no one had properly used this wonderful mass of material before. For at a time when ten thousand dissertations and whole shelves of Subaltern Studies have carefully and ingeniously theorised about orientalism and colonialism and the imagining of the Other (all invariably given titles with a present participle and a fashionable noun of obscure meaning- Gendering the Colonial Paradigm, Constructing the Imagined Other, Othering the Imagined Construction, and so on) not one PhD has ever been written from the Mutiny Papers, no major study has ever systematically explored its contents.” What Dalrymple was saying in polite language was that post-independence Indian historians- all mimic men (& women) to use Naipaul’s derogatory term, were extraordinarily lazy to research the original sources, and wrote regurgitated versions of history already available in the English language.

In a departure from his usual methodology, for the theme of the present book is altogether a different beast, Dalrymple has relied mainly on secondary sources, that is primary research of other scholars published in professional journals. Given the subject matter of this book, one that speaks glowingly of India’s (Hindu) past, one should have thought that the bulk of the primary research which this book relies on would be the work of Indian scholars. The reality is quite the opposite. A perusal of the over 200 pages of citations and bibliography shows that the Indian contribution to the primary research on this topic is next to nothing. Even the miniscule number of Indians cited in the footnotes are mostly those affiliated to overseas institutions. This proves two points:

(1)   The colonized mindset of contemporary Indian historians, trained to despise their own past, are too fearful of unravelling facts that unsettle current hierarchies, and too lazy to challenge their received dogma. For more on this see Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing the Hindu Mind.

(2)   The enormous interest that India’s past holds for scholars world-wide.

Since most of the research cited in this book is secondary, it is evident that the conclusions are already well known. One is then compelled to ask: why is the most glowing part of India’s history not taught in India’s schools and colleges?

Nation Building or Minority Appeasement?

It is peculiar to our recent history that political independence came together with ethnocide, its ugly irreconcilable twin. In agreeing to the partition of the country on religious lines, but without an exchange of populations, large masses of people found themselves on the wrong side of the religious divide, and came to grief, as real and imagined historical wrongs generated visceral hatreds. Pakistan carried out ethnic cleansing of the minority population without remorse as the Islamic tenets, in so far as they are interpreted in popular culture, do not place any moral restraint on the idea of killing non-believers. In fact this is encouraged to be a good Muslim. On the Indian side, while the Muslims in the border states of Punjab and Bengal were similarly victimized, popular culture as well as State Policy imposed moral as well as legal restraints on perpetration of religious violence. Nevertheless given the atmosphere of the times, the Muslims who stayed behind in India, either by choice, or by the sheer inability to migrate over the large distances, felt vulnerable. A secular State felt called upon to mollify the Muslim community, by down-playing the “Hindu-ness” of the country, and glorifying the Islamic contribution to India’s past in an effort called ‘nation building’. This task devolved on the academic historians to evolve a narrative of India’s history along a path known today as ‘Nehruvian Secularism’. Its main objective was to highlight the positive contributions of Islamic rule, and reinvent the negative as a hidden positive. Some of these reinterpretations turned incredibly regressive, and I point out only a few (see my earlier book reviews for more instances):

(1)   By ordering the demolition of Hindu temples, Aurangzeb delivered ‘justice for all’ on his own terms. (Audrey Truschke)

(2)   The destruction of Hindu and Jain temples, and the construction of mosques with the resulting spoilage is an act of syncretism! (Giles Tillotson)

(3)   The Moghul harem elevated the status of women. (Ruby Lal)

Contemporary critics call this approach ‘pseudo-secularism’ or use an even harsher, if more accurate term ‘Minority Appeasement’.

However historians have now begun to pivot. Speaking about their Empire Podcast, Dalrymple and Anita Anand in a conversation with Bee Rowlatt admit that excavations in Topkapi palace (Turkey) have revealed inscriptions left behind on the harem walls by young girls expressing their desire to go home and see their mothers. There is now no doubt that in these inner chambers of the palace harem, girls as young as eleven or twelve were being abducted and raped. “The whole view of the harem changes”. [Anita Anand, YouTube uploaded 7^th July 2023] For more on the historians’ pivot see my review of Sanyal, The Land of Seven Rivers.

What is nation building?

No nation can be built upon a bed of lies and half-truths. Nehruvian secular history writing has caused irreparable damage to the psyche of the Indian people. The Hindu citizenry has been made to wallow in guilt and shame for nebulous reasons, and live in denial of what the Hindu civilization truly stood for. The Muslim citizenry, sensing the contrast between their current socio-economic condition and their supposed past grandeur, nurse a bitter psyche, and a nameless sense of betrayal. A distant Scotsman finally picked up the gauntlet to tell us the truth.

The current book clearly deals with pre-Islamic India. This book as much as Sanyal’s book, implies that the rise of Islam signaled the beginning of the decline of India, the nadir being reached during the period of the colonial rule.

A stronger nation could have been built by narrating a history based on facts. That all citizens of ancient India were part of a composite culture which not only tolerated, but accepted diversity of religious and philosophic thought (for more on this see Sen, The Argumentative Indian) should have been emphasized in our education. That Islam was the first of the external influences that withstood the mainstreaming forces should have been communicated in a gentle way (for more on this see, Pillai, Gods, Guns and Missionaries). Seen in this light, forced conversion to Islam was a betrayal of the ancestors of the contemporary Muslims. To reverse this betrayal, and redeem their ancestral honour, does not necessarily involve a reconversion to Hinduism, but a recognition of the common ancestry of all Indians. This would bridge the gulf between the two contending faiths by highlighting the fact that the glory of the ancient Hindu society is a common legacy of all Indians, one from which the current day Muslims need not feel alienated. Clearly the Muslim population of South East Asia live in greater comfort with their pre-Islamic past compared to the Muslims in Pakistan or those as we now see, of Bangladesh.

Public response to this book

The public response to this book has been muted. This, despite the fact that copies of this book are disappearing from the shelves of all the book shops in Bangalore at a steady rate. The reading public is quietly devouring the book. However the Left leaning section of the society has been uncharacteristically silent. If this book were to be authored by an Indian, one can only imagine the kind of abuse that might have been vented. RSS. Right Wing. Modi stooge! Hindu Revivalist. Reactionary Radical. These would be the mildest among them. Remember how Vikram Sampath, a founder-member of the Bangalore Literary Festival, was forced to resign in 2015 for his opinion on Tipu Sultan. No one is more aware of this than Dalrymple himself. In innumerable public appearances to promote this book, he is heard prefacing his conclusions “Hindutva myth apart---“ (Express Adda YouTube uploaded 21 Dec. 2019). That is, he is distancing himself from the ‘Hindutva’ lobby, even as he is repeating all that they fervently believe and affirm, presumably because his conclusions are based on research, while their assertions are not!

Equally mystifying is that the traditional ‘Right’ has not yet latched on to this book despite Dalrymple having inadvertently provided them with the much needed research to transmute their ‘propaganda’ into ‘truth’. The reason is simple: The Left reads a lot, and backs up their reading with little action. The Right acts first, and having consumed all the available time on action has none available for reading! In any case, why read about something that you already know about?

Conclusion

“For a thousand years, India’s ideas spread with its traders along the Golden Road and transformed the world, creating around itself an Indosphere, a cultural zone that spread over political borders--- Within this area Indian culture and civilisation transformed everything they touched.

            This poses a question, unthinkable in 1947 at independence from Britain: could they do so again?” (Page 298)

Thus ends the book. Every Indian is welcome to introspect, and contribute towards providing an answer.