As a people we Indians are rather inept at presenting our real achievements to the rest of the world. So many among us have for long been making phantasmal claims of our ancients having invented the atom bomb or developed the internet. All this is rather annoyingly ridiculous considering that ancient India had many genuinely spectacular achievements to flaunt in every field of human endeavour.
One of the earliest to call our attention to India as a civilisational powerhouse was the famous historian AL Basham through his book, The Wonder that Was India, published 70 years ago. More recently, another well-known historian, Michael Wood, dwelt extensively on the significant part ancient India played in shaping the world through his fascinating 2007 television series and eponymous book, The Story of India. However, it took William Dalrymple’s The Golden Age — How Ancient India Transformed the World, published earlier this year, to give us a near-complete idea of how central India was to everything that happened in the ancient world right up to the early stages of the rise and rise of Islam.
Heart of commerce
One of the big points Dalrymple makes in his book is that India not China was at the heart of ancient commerce. It was the sea-lanes radiating from India rather than the overland silk road from China that drove international trade, many on Indian ships. Reading Dalrymple and his descriptions of the seafaring traditions especially of the audacious Tamils from ancient times and the Cholas particularly later should convince anyone that India was indeed a maritime power in antiquity touching Egyptian ports to the west and Indonesia and the rest of Southeast Asia to its east.
Among the best parts of Dalrymple’s book is his account of the astonishingly close links India and Southeast Asia forged over centuries through intense religious political and commercial exchanges initiated by India. A hugely visible outcome of this association was the construction of the world’s largest Hindu (and later Buddhist) temple complex, Angkor Wat in Cambodia and Borobudur, the world’s largest Buddhist shrine, in Indonesia.
An interesting insight coming out of Dalrymple’s book is the extent to which China looked up to India. This led to many Indian astronomers, mathematicians and Buddhist missionaries serving Chinese emperors and institutions. Among the most influential, Dalrymple tells us, were ‘‘probably Bodhiruci a monk from South India and a scholar with a talent for incantations”, honoured and respected by Empress Wu (602- 705 CE) of the Zhou dynasty and, “Gautama Siddhartha, the Supervisor of Astronomy”; between 665 and 698 CE.
Dominant influence
Dalrymple’s book has enough verifiable evidence to establish that right up to the advent of Islam India was the dominant influence in Southeast Asia with Hinduism — and later Buddhism — becoming the principal religion of large parts of the region, especially in Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Indonesia, with Sanskrit recognised as the language of the royals.
Without the contributions of Indian mathematicians like Chajaka, possible author of the Bakhshali Manuscript (224-383 CE?) and astronomer- mathematicians like Aryabhata (476-550 CE) it is quite possible that the astonishing advances in science and technology we see today would have taken much longer to achieve. Many of these advances, especially in the fields of mathematics — the invention of the zero being just one famous example — were, as Dalrymple’s book brings out, so foundational to human progress.
Through the ages scholars and savants, emperors, kings, and caliphs across the world from China, to Western and Central Asia, and even Moorish and later Christianised Spain generously admired India as the principal knowledge hub. Even after the advent of Islam and its spread India’s rich mathematical and astronomical traditions continued to dazzle the world. Here Dalrymple’s book builds on Frederick Starr’s fascinating work, Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane, which has several references to India’s much-admired mathematicians.
Painstaking research
For the vast period it covers Dalrymple’s book is a short one — easy to read, well-argued, and illuminating. Around half of it is devoted to notes and sources most readers will rarely plough through. However, it is this which gives The Golden Age the evidence-based gravitas — those hallmarks of painstaking research and good scholarship.
The Golden Road is a timely and wonderful book. Dalrymple has done a great job connecting little-known facts to known ones to bring out how ancient India was as great and as dynamic a civilisation as China was at a time when the West was hardly in the reckoning.
At the end of reading the book we need to ask ourselves a Needham question, “Why did India like China steadily fall behind the West through medieval and modern times?” It is a question we need to answer, and answer honestly, if we wish to regain a past glory we know was real enough from Dalrymple.
The reviewer taught public policy and contemporary history at IISc Bengaluru
Title: The Golden Road — How Ancient India Transformed the World
Author: William Dalrymple
Pages: 484
Publisher: Bloomsbury