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.