India has inspired William Dalrymple for well-on thirty years, resulting in a number of eminently readable books, including White Mughals—an analysis of east-west inter-cultural conflicts), Return of a King (a portrait of military disaster); and The Anarchy, an exposé of colonial exploitation. In his latest book, The Golden Road, Dalrymple for the first time tackles a big, civilizational theme: what world history owes to the subcontinent.
The book is timely. We have been reading since the 1980s about how the modern world took shape under the influence of that other Asian giant, China. Type “silk road” into Amazon.com and you will be offered more than 4,000 titles. Scholars have credited China with movable type, gun powder, paper money, the postal system and more. When asked about India’s historical legacy many people will answer “yoga”. Given that India is now the world’s most populous country and currently its 5th largest economy, Dalrymple argues that we must look more deeply into our debt to India.
India has long been a cosmopolitan place, with ports and markets teeming with foreign traders. In ancient times, Indians themselves traveled far and wide, establishing colonies in Egypt, Ethiopia, Vietnam and China. Dalrymple points out that the rise of Buddhism, with a more universalist vocation than that of rival Brahmanism, encouraged its followers to travel both as missionaries and as merchants. The result of these exchanges resulted in huge wealth creation for both India and its trading partners. Dalrymple musters the most recent archaeological evidence in a compelling fashion to highlight the opulence of India’s trade with the Roman Empire. The customs duties paid by the Red Sea trade covered one third of the imperial budget. Three ships laden with luxuries from India would gross enough silver to maintain a Roman legion for a year.
The importance of India’s sea-borne trade underscores another point—that maritime traffic far eclipsed in volume and value the caravan trade, and therefore the Silk Road, for all its legendary aura, played a minor role in India’s economic expansion. The sea trade with China led to the rise, along the navigation routes, of the Indianized polities which subsequently created the glories of Borobudur in Java and Angkor Wat in Cambodia.
Riding on these merchant ties came India’s cultural exports: the west is indebted to India for much astronomy and mathematics, including (vehiculated by the Arabs), base-ten numbers, the zero and algebra. Eastward, India brought religion, art and Sanskrit literature, including the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.
Much of India’s economic and cultural expansion took place between 500 CE and 1000 CE, and then gradually receded. Dalrymple touches on possible causes for this. Extroverted Buddhism (as opposed to introverted Hinduism) disappeared in India, partly due to the success of more popular, devotional “bakhti” cults. The great centers of learning in the north of India, like the Nalanda university, suffered from a lack of patronage and the increasingly destructive raids of Turkic and Afghan warlords, while they did not have a powerful Buddhist kingdom to defend them.
Dalrymple attributes the Turkish success to “new technology” of stirrups and mounted archery, but this advantage had accrued to the steppe people since the time of the ancient Sakas and the Kushans. Contemporary historians of the Turkish invasions saw nothing particularly new about these northern barbarians, as Dalrymple rightly observed. It was not their military technology making them more successful, but the more organized religion of these Islamized Turks that made them less easy to assimilate into Indian culture, compared to their animist predecessors.
As a result, between 1300 and 1700 India found itself firmly anchored in what historians awkwardly name the Persianate sphere. Within India culture continued to flourish but the influences from India outward were colored by the Persian language and Islam, not Sanskrit, Buddhism or Hinduism. Dalrymple points out that India’s last big cultural export to Asia was Islam, as merchants from Malabar and Coromandel brough this faith to Malaya and Java.
Dalrymple treats this transition from the native India traditions to the cosmopolitan Persianate-Islamic tradition with kid gloves, since it is a hotly-debated topic in today’s India, where his books are always extremely popular. He offers that the Turks and Afghans contributed greatly to the decline of Sanskrit culture in the north through their iconoclastic destruction of temples and monasteries. Left unexplored is why the same decline did not occur during the earlier destruction of Pallava temples by their rivals the Cholas. Readers may find a more nuanced discussion of this topic in Richard Eaton’s India in the Persianate Age.
For pure prose style, it’s hard to find a more pleasurable narrator than Dalrymple. His education in art history and his debuts as a travel writer always show through in his luminous prose:
Here among handsome princes and bare-chested nobles,princesses with tiaras of raat-ki-rani, Queen of the Night jasmine, languish lovelorn on swings and couches, while heavy-breasted and narrow-waisted dancing girls, dressed in diaphanous robes, jewels and girdles, perform beside lotus ponds, swaying to unheard music, ringing their ghungroo anklets. These court women wear little but spinels and chrysoberyl cat’s eyes; they hold nothing but empurpled ebony flywhisks of burnished gold; gleaming rubies the colour of peacocks’ blood flash against their dark skin.
Reading The Golden Road, it is instructive to recall an earlier generation of writers about India’s cultural legacy, including Tagore, Coomaraswamy, Vivekananda and Nehru. Their works inspired austere Bostonians like TS Elliot to study Sanskrit at university. Awareness of Indian culture declined, as Dalrymple reminds us, after Partition, a period of great cultural destruction, and then during Nehruvian socialism, when factories, not poetry, focused Indian minds.
Could India again become a light to the world, and not just a call center? Perhaps Indian readers of The Golden Road will be inspired to take up this mission.