In books such as The Anarchy, Dalrymple is slowly but surely — aided by his hit podcast — influencing younger generations to look at history, particularly the notion of empire, through different points of view (Photo: SooPhye)
Everywhere I see India but I do not recognise her
— Rabindranath Tagore in Java, 1927
From 250 BCE to about 1200 CE, a confident and superbly capable Ancient India took its ideas, trade, culture, religions, the Sanskrit language and, more importantly, its mathematics to the rest of the world, travelling along what has been termed the Golden Road, a swathe that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific Ocean. Transforming nations and crossing political boundaries, not by the sword but by the soft power of innovative ideas, Indian merchants, missionaries, mathematicians, sculptors and astronomers substantially impacted the known world.
Arabic numerals and the concept of zero went from India to Europe via the Bagdadi court. In the kingdoms east of India, Sanskrit became the language of the palaces. Angkor Wat, the biggest Hindu temple complex in the world, was constructed in Cambodia. Further south in Java, rose the splendid Borobudur, the biggest Buddhist temple in the world. Buddhism entrenched itself in China, aided by the machinations of Empress Wu Zetian.
To the west of India, the Roman exchequer received one third of its revenue from customs duties on Indian ships at its seaports in the Red Sea. Exotic India exports flooded the Roman markets. Pliny the Elder famously complained of the drain of Roman gold into Indian coffers, describing India as “the sink of the world’s most precious metal”. In 408 CE, when Alaric the Visigoth held Rome to ransom, he asked for 5,000 pounds of gold and 3,000 pounds of Indian pepper.
There has never been any doubt as to the influence of ancient Indic: for instance, trade with the West, which had an everlasting impact on most of Asia particularly in the Southeast, or the glories of its once-unrivalled Nalanda University. The movement of language, religions, culture, writing and architecture continue its civilising dance up to today, not forgetting the footprint left on kingdoms outside of India by the Pallava and Chola dynasties as well as the pilgrimages by scholarly monks from China to Nalanda and other key Buddhist sites on the subcontinent. These have all been exhaustively researched and dealt with by various historians and subject specialists. But now, it gets the William Dalrymple treatment.
For those unfamiliar with the Scotsman’s name, Dalrymple, 59, is a modern-day, larger-than-life Herodotus, that is, a Herodotus who grew up along the shores of the Firth of Forth. Born William Benedict Hamilton-Dalrymple, he is the son of Sir Hew Hamilton-Dalrymple, 10th Baronet of North Berwick and Lady Anne-Louise Keppel, a daughter of the 9th Earl of Albemarle.
After reading history at Trinity College, Cambridge, Dalrymple went on to author several award-winning titles, from In Xanadu (which won various accolades) when he was just 22 to City of Djinns, White Mughals and The Age of Kali, before moving to India in 1989. A co-founder of the hugely successful Jaipur Literature Festival, he continues to call India home, living just outside of Delhi with his wife, the artist Olivia Fraser, and three children. Home is a working farm, a little rural island of India near Delhi, where they grow vegetables and keep bees, goats and pigeons.
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His erudite, scholarly writing and engaging way as a consummate storyteller (one can forget the stodgy, soporific approach to history) have won him a legion of fans. In books such as The Anarchy, which savagely criticises the East India Company, Dalrymple is also slowly but surely — aided by his hit podcast — influencing younger generations to look at history, particularly the notion of empire, through different points of view.
Currently on a book tour to promote The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World, a Kuala Lumpur pit stop was arranged at the last minute, the result of sheer luck and largesse. Brahmal Vasudevan, head of private equity firm Creador and his wife Shanthi Kandiah were once Dalrymple’s neighbours in Delhi (their kids even attended dance classes together) and, upon hearing he was in the region, decided to host Dalrymple in KL, putting together a talk and book signing all within the two short days he was here, much to the delight of the city’s book-loving coterie.
But back to the subject of ancient Indian influence on the known world then, what Dalrymple has done is remove them from their silos. Uncovering trails left by a statue, a shipping receipt, a letter or a Buddhist monk’s journal, he connected the dots in luminous prose to create a spectacular tapestry of ancient India’s gifts to the world. Published barely two months ago, it became an instant Sunday Times bestseller and is, understandably, among the top selling books in India too.
Grounded in exhaustively documented research, The Golden Road is a scintillating read. One might think it hefty at 479 pages, except that 190 of them are given over to footnotes and bibliography, providing enough critical evidence for credibility.
In the hilarious 1990s BBC series Goodness Gracious Me, Sanjeev Bhaskar, as a grouchy dad, would go around declaring everything was Indian. From words that were of actual Indian origin, like jungle or shampoo, his claims stretched to the inflated and ridiculous. The Royal family? Indian (except for Prince Charles who was African, because of the size of his ears). Mona Lisa? Indian. Superman? Indian. Jesus? Indian. As Meera Syal, one of the show’s creators, said in a BBC documentary to mark its 20th anniversary, “Beyond the farce, there was a touch of pathos, of the Indian trying to reclaim India’s importance before British colonialisation and domination.”
The Golden Road reveals that, beyond the hyperbole, grouchy dad was not so wrong after all.
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Options: How would you describe this period of the flow of ideas, trade, numerical concepts and philosophy, with India at its epicentre?
William Dalrymple: Civilisational India at its brilliant best. Ancient India was a global powerhouse with trading networks that created enormous wealth for all the trading partners. It was also a powerhouse of intellectual and spiritual thought.
There is instinctive pushback in this part of the world when people claim Ancient India colonised Southeast Asia. That was what the 1930s historians thought. They were wrong. Southeast Asia chose to embrace certain aspects of Indian culture. So, there was an element of choice, and selection. There was cultural spread and melding, not a military imposition. There were no Indian colonies in Southeast Asia as such. Ancient India did not impose military colonisation on the region.
The Indian merchants, priests and Buddhist missionaries brought their religions, epics, culture, mathematical knowledge, architecture, Sanskrit and the Brahmi script to the kingdoms of Southeast Asia; they did not bring an army. Even as Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Malaysia and the Indonesian islands embraced the new concepts and beliefs, they remained independent of ‘Indian’ rule as it were. Take the Cholas — they raided these regions, yes, but they didn’t rule them.
Indian influence in Southeast Asia was spread by merchants and priests, not through weapons of conquest. For a long time, because of the 1930s overstatement, Indianisation became a dirty word in this part of the world. These nations were not colonised; they chose selectively. Tagore got it right. When he visited Java in 1927, he said: Everywhere I see India but
I do not recognise her.
The kingdoms were Indianised but not Indian?
Precisely. This was the attraction of the soft power of India. All over the region, from Bali to Vietnam, they interpreted the Indian canons, taking in what they wanted: Sanskrit as the language of the palace court and diplomacy, the Brahmi script for writing and the ideas of kingship. Kings adopted the names of Hindu gods like Jayavarman, Suryavarman and Mahendravarman.
Yet nothing was an exact copy. Take Angkor Wat. The Khmer sculptors, architects and artisans took what they wanted from the soft-power lessons of India. So, Angkor Wat is the largest Hindu temple in the world; it can be seen from space. But when you look at the bas-relief galleries, you realise the statues and devatas on the walls don’t seem Indian at all. Their features and physiques are Khmer and they are dressed like Khmer. Imagine the entire Ramayana and the battle of Kurukshetra, the churning of the ocean on the walls of Angkor Wat and every single character appears not Indian but Khmer.
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Southeast Asia embraced many aspects of Indianisation, including Hinduism and Buddhism, but it never embraced the caste system.
No, it didn’t. Southeast Asia took what it wanted — from the whole thali, so to speak — the idea of kingship, the Brahmin script, the stories of the Ramayana and Mahabharata. It refused to give up pork or beef, completely rejected the caste system and insisted on continuing with women priests conducting temple ceremonies.
One of the rebuttals of the word ‘Ancient India’ is that there was no such thing as ‘India’ in ancient times. Yet there has always been a sense, an awareness, of this place, larger than the many kingdoms that inhabited it.
The ‘sense’ of India has always been present as a single, sacred, geographical unit. The Mahabharata talks of it as ‘the land north of the seas and south of the Himalayas … where the descendants of King Bharata lived’. Strabo mentions how Alexander the Great met sadhus who spoke of their homeland as stretching ‘from the mouth of the Indus in the west to the mouth of the Ganges in the east to the tip of southern India, and from there again, to the mouth of the Indus’. Xuanzang, in 700 CE, noted at Jalalabad that he was entering a holy land, the ‘Five Indias’. His 500 CE counterpart Faxian spoke of a country triangular in shape, broad in the north and narrow in the south.
What are we looking at when we talk about the resonance of Ancient India in this part of Asia today?
Contemporary resonance? The fusion of Ancient India’s influence is hiding in plain sight. Bali comes to mind. It’s still Hindu. That 500 BCE prince’s discourses on pain and suffering still live on in Southeast Asia. Names of people, place names, court practices, language. Numbers, mathematics and the whole bag of tricks. Imagine you get on the national carrier of Indonesia, Garuda Airlines, land at Suvarnabhumi, the airport in Bangkok, and travel to Ayutthaya, the ancient capital of Thailand.
Some time ago, I was in Yogyakarta, wandering around, when I heard the gamelan being played. Being nosy, I followed the music and found a group of musicians playing the gamelan in an old palace. They were practising for a wayang kulit show on the Ramayana. You have it all there, don’t you? A group of devout Muslims performing an ancient art form on a theme that can’t get any less Hindu.
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Your previous books City of Djinns, White Mughals, The Last Mughal, Return of a King and The Anarchy have all centred on North India. This is your first book featuring South India. What made for the shift?
After 20 years in 18th-century India, it was time for a change. My family said I’d written the same book four times. Obviously, I didn’t think so, but they did. While writing The Anarchy, I took six months off to do a series of articles on the newly restored murals in Caves 9 and 10 of the Ajanta Caves. They were centuries older than the others and I knew then that I wanted to go back to my first love, which was the ancient world, but what form the book would take was still a vague idea. Then, Covid-19 happened. The lockdown came as a boon. Enforced isolation on our farm meant that I read all the books in my library. I learnt so much about stuff I never knew and at the end of lockdown, the architecture of the book took shape.
As soon as the restrictions on air travel were lifted, I was on a plane to Cambodia. I was 5,000 miles east of India in Angkor Wat when I received an email picture of the Berenike Buddha, unearthed 5,000 miles west of India in an Isis temple in Berenike, a port city in the Red Sea. At that moment, the theme of the book crystallised in my mind — the diffusion of ancient India’s trade, religions and mathematical discoveries across the Indosphere. Then followed nine months of travelling to connect the dots. And the dots included the trail of the Arabic numerals. Many Indians grew up hearing about Aryabhata, the mathematical genius who gave us zero.
While Indians know about the depth and profundity of ancient India’s civilisation, and while Indians know about Aryabhata or Brahma Gupta who gave us the properties of zero, no one else does. This is profoundly different from the case of ancient Greece. Thanks to Western Eurocentrism and colonial history, we grew up knowing more about Pythagoras or Archimedes and his bath.
You debunked the theory that the Silk Road was ancient. The Silk Road with all the romance it conjures up, has been the accepted view for many of us in this part of the world. There are bound to be rather crabby reactions.
China has been very good about telling its stories — that it was the centre of ancient trade with Xi’an as the terminus. The fact is there is no evidence at all of the existence of a Silk Road or any highway linking western Europe with East Asia with a free movement of trade and ideas. Even Marco Polo did not mention it and he travelled at a time when the Mongols made it easiest to travel to China. The term ‘Silk Road’ was coined by Baron von Richthofen in 1877. He was doing a survey to plan a railway route linking Berlin to Beijing. He called this route die Seidenstrasse, the Silk Road. The reality of trade between China and Rome is that not a single Roman coin has been found in China. However, there has been a notable concentration of Roman gold all around the coasts of India.
What would you be doing if you were not a writer?
I’ve been very, very lucky. There are a whole lot of things I cannot do — can’t turn up on time, will never hold down an office job. I have very limited talents: I can write and I can speak. I am a lucky boy who turned his hobby into a job.
Purchase a copy of 'The Golden Road' for RM196.33 at Kinokuniya here.
This article first appeared on Nov 25, 2024 in The Edge Malaysia.
