'The Golden Road' Review: How India Enriched The World

The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World. William Dalrymple. Bloomsbury Publishing. 484 pages.

In the proto-historic period, when the Indus civilisation was flourishing, the Sumerians recorded in detail what they were buying from India. But there are no records of what they were selling to India. The Indus civilisation had set up factory villages in multiple locations where each village specialised in manufacturing a specific set of items, which in turn were shipped to Sumeria from the Gujarat coast.

Over the historic period, Greeks and Romans kept detailed records of their trade with India. Thanks to the writings of Periplus and Pliny, inscriptions found from Red Sea ports such as Berenike and midway points such as Socotra Island, and papyri records from Egypt, we have detailed records of Indian exports to the West. Unlike the Indus period, where we do not have interpretable writings, we now have Sanskrit and Tamil literature talking of Yavanas, a catch-all term for Greeks and Romans.

Unlike the Indus period, India was now also importing some items, but still the balance of payment was overwhelmingly in favour of India. The presence of massive quantities of Roman coins in India outside of the Roman-controlled territories attests to this.

In the field of art, India owed a lot to the Yavanas. Indian artistic styles were shaped by Greek ideas from Bactria, known to Indians as Gandhara, where Alexander’s retreating Greek army had set up a kingdom. The Indo-Greek fusion art from Gandhara and the native art from Mathura together gave shape to Indian art. Mauryan Emperor Ashoka was the ruler, and Buddhism emerged as a major religion.

Ashoka has left detailed inscriptions of his edicts across India and all the way up to Gandhara. He also sent Dharma ministers across his entire kingdom to ensure that his people followed the edicts properly. He sent monks to Sri Lanka and other nearby countries to propagate Buddhism.

The Kushana Emperor Kanishka helped to spread Buddhism further across Kashmir and Central Asia and took it close to Chinese borders. The competing Hinduism was tied down by its own shastras, with an injunction not to cross the seas. Buddhism did not have any such problems. It became the guiding spirit for the merchant class. Buddhist monasteries provided resting places along trade routes, and in many cases, Buddhist monks provided working capital loans as well.

William Dalrymple presents in his brilliant book The Golden Road this fascinating story of India’s trade with the world and the spread of Buddhism to far corners. Buddhism did not move West beyond Gandhara, but from Gandhara as a staging post, it moved into China. For it to take strong roots in China, the religion had to be sinified. This happened through the fascinating lives of three key people — one half Indian and two Chinese, Kumarajiva, Xuanzang, and the Empress Wu Zetian.

Dalrymple presents their lives in a compelling manner. The fourth-century CE scholar Kumarajiva, son of a Gandharan Brahmin and a Kucha princess, established a platform for translating Sanskrit Buddhist texts to Chinese on an industrial scale. The seventh-century CE Buddhist monk Xuanzang, living in troubled times in China, undertook an arduous journey to India to collect Buddhist manuscripts and to learn from the masters.

After many years of travel, Xuanzang reached Nalanda University, a centre of Buddhist learning. There, India’s greatest Mahayana Buddhist scholar, Silabhadra, became Xuanzang’s teacher. Indian Emperor Harshavardhana funded Xuanzang. After spending many years at Nalanda, Xuanzang embarked on a trip back to China, for his ultimate goal was to propagate the Right Path to his people.

Xuanzang had to defy the orders of his emperor Taizong to come to India, but the emperor had no choice but to celebrate Xuanzang’s return, for that was his accomplishment in India. Taizong established him in a monastery with full financial support. But his sudden death impacted both Xuanzang and the emperor’s concubine, Wu Zetian, who was banished to a Buddhist nunnery as per tradition.

Fortunately for Buddhism in China, Wu Zetian manipulated her way to become a concubine of Taizong’s son and the new emperor Gaozang, then slowly wormed her way to become the empress. Upon his death, instead of elevating her son, she herself became the first and only woman to rule China. While the traditional Confucians opposed this move as they considered women inferior to men and unfit to rule the country, Buddhist monks from India and China endorsed Wu Zetian’s right to rule and also ‘discovered’ enough material in Sanskrit to show that the Buddha himself was reincarnated as Wu Zetian.

No wonder the empress elevated Buddhism above all religions and poured money into building Chaityas, Viharas, and giant Buddha statues across the country and funded the translation work of Xuanzang and his successors.

While all this was going on in China, Indian trade to the West had suffered a severe setback due to the collapse of the Roman empire in the fifth century CE. All the gold pouring into India had come to a stop, and the Indian merchants had to find other lucrative markets. Thus they turned eastwards, towards Swarnadeepa. Dalrymple masterfully introduces the Pallava dynasty of Kanchipuram and Mamallapuram, their artistic achievements, and how their merchants set out to establish trade routes to South East Asia and through the Malacca Strait to China.

What we do know based on available records is that the regions of Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Indonesia became Indianised in this period, but it is very difficult to reconstruct the history step by step. The earliest writing we get are some fragments in the Indian Brahmi script. Subsequently, the inscriptions are all written in the Pallava Grantha script that was invented in Kanchipuram during the Pallava rule, in perfectly grammatical, literary quality Sanskrit. Today, the modern scripts of Thai, Khmer, Laos, and so on are all derived from the Pallava Grantha.

Along with the language and the script, South East Asians wholeheartedly took to Hinduism and Buddhism. Though they are geographically closer to China, it is not the Chinese Buddhism but the Indian Buddhism that spread to South East Asia. We also see Brahmins somehow overcoming shastraic injunctions and arriving in large numbers, bringing along with them Indian ideas on philosophy, cosmology, town planning, water engineering, astronomy, calendar making, astrology, medicine, art, architecture, math, and sciences.

For their part, the people of South East Asia became fully Indianised. The Ramayana and Mahabharata became their epics. Vishnu and Shiva, their gods. Buddhism and Hinduism, their salvation. Variation of South Indian temple architecture influenced their temples. Sanskrit became their literary language. Grantha, their writing script. So much so, the world’s largest Buddhist and Hindu temples are not in India but in Indonesia’s Borobudur and Cambodia’s Angkor Wat, respectively.

It is exhilarating to read through Dalrymple’s personal travels and extensive research and storytelling about this process of Indianisation that happened across South East Asia. In his words, one can see Mamallapuram, Angkor Wat, and Borobudur sculptures coming alive. His success is in the storytelling.

Finally, Dalrymple takes up the contribution of India in mathematics and sciences. This is also the weakest portion of his book. In his defence, we have to admit that it is also a difficult story to present to the audience. Very few cultures have developed advanced mathematics till the modern age. Greeks and Indians are the only two whose ancient work still ranks on par with modern developments. Records indicate that Indians were aware of the Greek advances in mathematics. Varahamihira talks about Romaka Siddhanta in his work Pancha Siddhantika and quotes from the same. It is not clear whether Greeks were learning Indian mathematics.

When the Roman Empire collapsed, India remained the only place where mathematical ideas continued to develop. Dalrymple focusses on the decimal system and the usage of the zero symbol in the place value system. Interestingly, the oldest inscription with a zero marker is found in Cambodia in a Sanskrit inscription written in Pallava Grantha. Indian astronomical calculations, including predicting eclipses, were the most accurate in the world for its times, and Indian scholars provided this technology to China and South East Asia.

On the West, rising Islam put an end to the spread of the Indian religious and philosophical systems, but they were more than happy to take the Indian mathematical and astronomical ideas to Baghdad from where they spread across the entire Islamic world. Unfortunately, the Arabs never mastered Sanskrit sufficiently to fully translate the treatises of Aryabhata and Brahmagupta, or the later greats like Bhaskara II. Despite the dwindling royal support, Indians did outstanding work in algebra, trigonometry, infinite series, and a whole lot of pre-calculus.

While the Arabs did preserve Greek math and translate portions of Indian math they understood, their greatest contribution was in propagating the Indian number system above that of the Greeks and Romans. The Italians learnt this Indian number system from the Arabs, and from them it spread across the entire Europe.

Dalrymple does not give much space to the collapse of the Indian civilisation under the onslaught of Islamic rule, as it is not politically correct to dwell on this topic. Nalanda was destroyed. Buddhism was stamped out of India. 

If Islam restricted Indian religion and philosophy, European mercantilists and joint-stock companies destroyed the Indian trade.

Dalrymple explains that the concept of the Silk Road — a trade route through which goods could move freely from China all the way to Europe — has no basis in history whatsoever. Any trade between China and the West happened only through India and was dwarfed in size by the Indian trade. Dalrymple coins the word ‘The Golden Road’ to indicate that the trade routes established by India primarily over the sea to the West and the East brought in large quantities of gold into India but also made these countries richer through religion, culture, philosophy, art, architecture, mathematics, and sciences whose remnants can be seen even to this day.

China still has the largest number of Buddhists in the world. An Islamic Indonesia still venerates its Indic cultural roots; its national airline is called Garuda. The world is using the Indian number system, and high school mathematics is still largely what Aryabhata developed.

This book is certainly the best PR India has received in recent times and a balm to the wounds of centuries of colonisation and suppression of India and should be a call to the twenty-first-century Indians on what is awaiting them in trade, manufacturing, religion, culture, art, and architecture — to enrich themselves and the world around them.