The Golden Road by William Dalrymple makes a case for an era (roughly 250BC to AD1200) of an “Indosphere”, when India wielded huge, long-lasting influence both to the East (China, Southern Asia, Japan, Korea, particularly via the export of Buddhism) and to the West (via trade with the Roman Empire and the transmission — often via Arab scholars — of Indian math and astronomy). It’s a dense book, filled with details, names, varied settings, bios of important figures, hard archeological evidence, more abstract evidence from religious/literary sources, and more. I confess to at times wishing for little less detail, perhaps some shorter biographical sketches, but one can’t fault the research and attempt to support the argument here.

A large chunk of the book deals with the rise of Buddhism (and to a lesser extent Hindusim) in India and then its export to other nations where it burrowed deep. We learn for instance, that the greatest temples lie not in India but in Java and especially Cambodia, home to the justly famed Angkor Wat, the largest religious temple in the world. And we also see the long-term impact in China, especially in a lengthy chapter on the Empress Wu Zetian, who used the influence to stay in power (along with a bloody ruthlessness).

Meanwhile, to the west, India engaged in a flourishing and profitable trade with the Roman Empire that took off especially after Egypt became part of the Empire. Soon all sorts of good were flowing across the Red Sea and Mediterranean: pepper, silk, ivory, wild animals for the gladiatorial games, and so much more, all in exchange for Roman gold and silver (several of our food names derive from this trade: pepper, sugar, and ginger being just a few). Not all Romans were pleased however; Pliny the Elder complained, “There is no year which does not drain our empire of at least five-five million sesterces … to enable the Roman matron to flaunt see-through clothes in public.” At its height, Dalrymple tells us, the flow of custom fees was a third of Rome’s total revenue. Dalrymple offers up a lot of convincing evidence for how much this Indian sea-based trade eclipsed the far more famous “Silk Road” (which he points out has little concrete evidence behind it).

The material goods, however, were the least important impact of India’s exports. Instead, Dalrymple points to the transmission — through the Arab states — of Indian mathematics, including the concept of zero, algebra, “Arabic” numbers, algorithms, and more. He also points out how these had a concrete impact on the Renaissance, which led to Western influence. Here (and I should point out I am no scholar of this material), I did feel like the Arab scholars were given some short shrift; they did more than simply “pass on” these concepts. But the point remains a valid one.

In the end, though today “over half the world’s population lives in areas where Indian ideas of religion and culture are, or once were, dominant”, this era of influence came to an end. Dalrymple offers a few possible reasons, including the invasions of Turks and the increasing dominance of the Islamic conquests/Empire.

Beyond content, the writing style is also often vivid, sometimes even lyrical for a popularized academic-light book, especially in descriptions of artwork. There were, as noted, times I could have perhaps done with a little less detail, some of the lengthy bios may have bogged down a bit, but overall the book is deeply informative, dense as noted, well researched, and rife with images. There’s also, despite its focus on centuries ago, a bit of a timeliness to it, as when he describes a series of ancient murals: “Recognizable among the crowds are many foreigners, including Persians, Parthians, Scythians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, and even Greeks and Romans . . . Ajanta was evidently built at the centre of a deeply globalized world.” The lesson here perhaps that our sense of globalization being a modern phenomenon is far from the truth, and also that any desire to go back to a “more pure” and isolationist world hearkens to a past that never really existed. Well-recommended.

In this excellent book about ancient India’s influence on world civilization and history, William Dalrymple explores its diverse and complex art, religions, technologies, sciences, and arts and how these disciplines spread across trade routes across Eurasia. Placing India, its innovations, and history at the center of the narrative, Dalrymple emphasizes the centrality of India and its ideas to the mass global transformation of culture and technology in the ancient and modern worlds. Covering a variety of topics and elements of ancient Indian life and culture, this book is brilliantly written and full of detail, and Dalrymple balances the multiple topics and elements of this book very well. No topic seems to overwhelm the others, and his clear familiarity with the material really shines in the book’s readability and depth of detail, explanation, and research. This new angle to world history and innovation is particularly interesting and offers readers some fascinating insights into India’s role in the ancient world. Similarly, the unique analytic and interpretive angle really offers some fascinating insights into ancient Indian history and the history of science (specifically in the ancient world), and readers will really appreciate Dalrymple’s expertise, conclusions, and explanations in this fascinating new history book.

India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilization, creating around it a vast empire of ideas. Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics and mythology blazed a trail across the world, along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific. My education has always been Western focused and I very much enjoyed seeing the world from another view. Indian ideas and of how Indian thought has had such an impact on the world.

Thank you NetGalley and Penguin Random House SEA! #LettersFromGaza #NetGalley.

It is interesting that the Western perspective of Asia, and India in particular, is generally skewed towards being “lesser than” the West. But way before the West was “westernized,” India and other Asian kingdoms/regions were centers of flourishing intellectual, engineering, architectural, cultural, religious thinking and trade that rival the modern world. The monsoon winds also helped drive trade routes carrying Indian influence far and wide. This book provides an insightful dive into that world in more of a storytelling mode than a historical timeline approach, which makes for a more interesting and intriguing read. There was a lot of information to digest. For those who may have little knowledge of ancient Indian history and culture, it could be daunting and mind boggling or conversely, exhilarating and motivating to be spurred into delving even deeper. For those in the former camp, view this book as dipping your toe, no, your whole foot into ancient India. For those in the latter camp like me, we’ll carry on exploring more of that world, post this book. Many thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book.

The Little-Known Influence India Had on International Intellectualism

The book opens with a unique illustration of this Golden Road: the path it traces is across the Indian Ocean and into the South China and Arabian seas, as opposed to merely by land to cities across the ancient world. This is very deliberate. The “Silk Road” was not a real “road” (this concept was fabricated in the 20th century), but rather it was mostly an oversea passage. And India began trading across the world long before China spread out in the Mongol 13th century. And “silk” was not common for export, as spices were more valuable (19). And unlike China, (I learned) India was never united, but had “more than seventy” distinct kingdoms (21). I knew there were regional rulers that allowed Brittain to “conquer” India by bribing them individually. But this refers too earlier centuries. There are several other great illustrations of maps throughout.
The topic addressed is one I have been pondering about: just how much lying Europe had to do to explain the originality of some of their “discoveries”, if most of these stemmed in India? The Judeo-Christian-Muslim religious texts stem from similar theological texts that were first-published in India. The Middle East is the place between India (and China etc.) and Europe. British colonialism did not merely rob countless trillions in “taxes” and cheapened trade from India, but also changed the history of the world to put itself at the top, and to designate India as forever-developing. So, such texts as this are necessary to regain a truer perspective.
“Sanskrit had been a… tongue for at least a millennium before the Common Era”, and then “between the first century BCE and the first century CE, Sanskrit was reinvented as a literary and political language”. The relationship between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin has not been fully examined, despite clear echoes between their vocabulary: the latter two might be bastardizations or derivatives of Sanskrit. Indian people were great explorers, who “discovered” much of the world long before Europeans built their first ships. “There is growing archaeological evidence that Indian merchants even brought with them skilled artisans to refine” their products “on site and to work the gold they bought in Sumatra, Borneo, and Malay peninsula and Thailand. At the early temple site of Krabi in Thailand, archaeologists recently found a goldsmith’s touchstone etched with the earliest Tamil inscription in South-east Asia…” (7). Such findings hint that the true history of innovation around the world would give a lot more credit to Indian scholars, artisans, and navigators. This book mostly focuses on India’s impact on foreign religions, including Chinese Buddhism, Hinduism, and other Indic religions (as I said Judeo-Christianity should be categorized as Indic as well). Though other chapters address topics such as the Khmers hydraulic engineers. And a chapter addresses Aryabhata (476-550 CE), one of many Indian astronomers who made early calculations. Hundreds of years later, in 1205, Leonardo of Pisa/Fibonacci traveled as a merchant to Bejaia and learned Arabic, before publishing the “Book of Calculation” that popularized the “Arabic numerals”. Though he misnamed these because they were “not Arabic in origin”, but rather “Indian” (12-13).
It is tempting to read this book closely throughout because these are things I and every other intellectual should know, but they have not been appearing in history classes. The information has been out there, but propaganda has silenced or spun these facts. India’s economy should significantly benefit by popularizing histories like this one to explain to the world what it has the potential to offer, if it was less underestimated.
—Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Fall 2024: https://anaphoraliterary.com/journals/plj/plj-excerpts/book-reviews-fall-2024

The Golden Road is a truly fantastic exploration of Indian ideas and of how Indian thought, religion and learning spread throughout the world. Dalrymple is a fantastic writer and, even though I came to this book with no great knowledge of Indian history, I found the book accessible and thoroughly enjoyable.

The author advances the idea of the 'Indosphere.' From antiquity to the Middle Ages, India was influential globally. The influence here is economic, scientific, and religious. India was a major trading partner to Rome, and after Rome diminished India turned that same economic engine towards nations in Southeast Asia. Buddhism, founded in India, is a major religion for China and other Southesast Asian nations, not just affecting culture but also history and politics. Sometimes Hinduism, usually in a Buddhist amalgamation, also spread. Finally, Indian math would be the basis of modern math in general, specifically through its spread to Persia and Iraq and then on through the Italian city-states to the world.

The reason the story is not already told this way is the ethnocentric projects of other nations, specifically Germany and China. They had (and in China's case, have) an interest in minimizing Indian contributions in the interest of their own. The examples is the Silk Road, which really was not a thing. The Silk Road is somewhat like calling the diner at the corner 'the farming place,' ignoring the instrumentality of the project for the particular ends that serve your own ego.

In general, the book has two problems. The first is the sort of project in general. Golden Ages or Pax Whomever-as are wobbly concepts in general, and are more of a referendum on what sorts of values you have rather than what is going on. The book is not about an Indosphere except in its relationship with other cultures using their intellectual product. You can look at that as about cultural domination, but it seems to me more like proof of the intractable connection of nations and the way in which that every culture only exists in relationship to other ones. Globalism is a social and economic constant. It only becomes a relevant concept after it is lost through more protectionist or mercantilist projects.

The odd bit is that the closest the book comes to a specifically Indian cultural hegemony is, curiously, in some of its least externally influential parts. The bits on art and drama are unique.

The second problem is what history is chosen here. Even under the assumption that we can isolate out a unique Indosphere, the selection here feels arbitrary. They are good stories. The author writes excellent narrative history. But it seems like the tail is wagging the dog in taking these bits of Roman, Chinese, Khmer, Iraqi, et cetera history and converting it to a history about India. I am uncertain that I know what evidence that I would expect to prove the point, but there is nothing about this as a list of topics that is uniquely persuasive.

So fun topic, interesting detail, but insubstantial.

Thanks to the author, William Dalrymple, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Bloomsbury, for making the ARC available to me.

I have always had a special interest for any kind of history or nonfiction read that goes in-depth on how interconnected the ancient world was. On top of that, I’ve also carried something of a hyper specific fascination in all the ways that early Buddhism met with the Greco-Roman world and even blended at several different points of contact. As a result, I found myself quickly drawn into “The Golden Road.” I not only enjoyed the sections devoted to subjects such as the Kushan Empire and the art of Gandhara, topics that I already had a little bit of prior familiarity with, but I also liked learning in-detail about the array of other ways that India’s influence was felt from China, to across southeast Asia and into Europe.

However, I do feel the need to criticize this book in one area. I find that Dalrymple is a bit uneven in his coverage of the topic, with some areas getting what feels like an over-generous amount of attention. One prominent example that comes to mind is roughly midway through the book, when everything seems to be very narrowly focused upon the Chinese monk Faxian, and surrounding historical figures. And while his era was of course a major period of rapid spread and strong support for Buddhism in China, I felt like things had temporarily become micro-focused at the expense of the greater overarching narrative.

Still, I do appreciate the work overall. I do agree with Dalrymple’s general sentiment that India’s contributions to the ancient world tends to be heavily overlooked, and enjoyed having the ability to get a strong taste of just how far and how deeply many of the ideas, beliefs, and culture that originated on the subcontinent spread in one easily accessible read. Definitely one of major eye-opening history reads of 2024 for me, and I am quite positive that many others will feel strongly likewise.