The Golden Road
How Ancient India Transformed the World
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
A Waterstones and TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR
A SPECTATOR and History Today BOOK OF THE YEAR
A revolutionary new history of the diffusion of Indian ideas, from the award-winning, bestselling author and co-host of the chart-topping Empire podcast
'Richly woven, highly readable ... Written with passion and verve' Spectator
'Dazzling ... Not just a historical study but also a love letter' Guardian
'An outstanding new account ... The most compelling retelling we have had for generations' Financial Times
India is the forgotten heart of the ancient world.
For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilisation, creating around it a vast empire of ideas. Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics and mythology blazed a trail across the world, along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific.
William Dalrymple draws from a lifetime of scholarship to highlight India's oft-forgotten position as the heart of ancient Eurasia. For the first time, he gives a name to this spread of Indian ideas that transformed the world. From the largest Hindu temple in the world at Angkor Wat to the Buddhism of China, from the trade that helped fund the Roman Empire to the creation of the numerals we use today (including zero), India transformed the culture and technology of its ancient world – and our world today as we know it.
Praise for William Dalrymple and The Anarchy
'A superb historian with a visceral understanding of India' The Times
'Magnificently readable, deeply researched and richly atmospheric' Francis Wheen, Mail on Sunday
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestselling historian Dalrymple (The Anarchy) brings a lifetime of scholarship to bear on this magisterial and energetic account, which "aims to highlight India's often forgotten position as a crucial economic fulcrum, and civilizational engine, at the heart of the ancient and early medieval worlds." Dalrymple coins a term, the Indosphere, for this zone of influence—an "empire of ideas" stretching from western China to Persia and on to the Mediterranean coasts, where "Indic ideas, art, science, languages, and religions" were ever-present. (As one seventh-century Chinese monk put it, "People of distant places, with diverse customs... generally designate the land they most admire as India.") Dalrymple foregrounds the unique ecological factors at play, noting that India lies at the center of the Asian monsoon system, where "the regularity and predictability of these winds" aided Indian vessels venturing both east and west. He offers colorful and fascinating glimpses of the period's Indo-centric interconnectedness, from Frankish kings showing off their "Sri-Lankan garnets" to an east Indian monastery that served as a kind of international school for Buddhist monks from abroad. Dalrymple writes movingly about these ancient meetings of the minds, bringing a contagious enthusiasm and a profound humanism to his descriptions of these moments of "pluralistic and syncretic interaction." This first-rate work is a must-read for any history lover.
Customer Reviews
Another tour de force
The author is a Scottish historian, who is a third cousin of Queen Camilla, and a great nephew of Virginia Woolf. He has won or been nominated for numerous awards for his history and travel writing, and his TV documentaries. His specialty is Asian, particularly Indian, history. He lives India and is co-convenor of the Jaipur Literary Festival, the world’s largest writer’s festival. He co-hosts the ‘Empire’ podcast, one of the leading history podcasts on Apple and Spotify. His last book ‘The Anarchy’ (2019) about the British East India Company was among the best written, most informative non-fiction books I have ever read.
The traditional view of India in the Anglosphere, and elsewhere I suspect, is of a country subjugated by foreign empires, first the Mughals, then the British, but as Dalrymple shows here, Its role in shaping Asian civilisation and that of the world more generally was huge. Fore example, two of the world’s great religions, Hinduism and Buddhism, originated there before spreading to encompass South East Asia, China and Japan. The world’s largest Hindu temple, indeed, the world’s largest religious temple of any type, is Angkor Wat in Cambodia, while Borobudur in Java is the world’s largest Buddhist temple. Notwithstanding the repressive Marxist-Leninist government, more Buddhists currently live in China than anywhere else in the world. Thai, Khmer, and Indonesian languages all derive from Sanskrit. Much contemporary science, astronomy and mathematics (the notion of zero, for instance) originated in ancient India. The numerals we use today are called Arabic because Europeans adopted them from Abbasid in Baghdad, but they originally came from India. The list goes on.
Dalrymple is unafraid of ruffling feathers in the debate about which Asian country was more important, China or India. The much vaunted “Silk Road” embraced by Xi Jinping as part of his Belt and Road Initiative, was a term first coined in the late 19th century
by a German geographer Baron von Richthofen (not the fighter pilot) but unknown in Asia at the time it was supposed to have been in operation. Graphic representations of it nowadays tend to show India as a sidebar. Dalrymple suggests the opposite was the case, which puts him at odds with another eminent, and eloquent, British historian Peter Frankopan, author of ‘The Silk Roads’ (2022). While I am not qualified to judge which version is correct, it makes for fascinating reading.
Anyone who tries to tell you history is not alive, or is limited to Greece, Rome and parts of North Africa, must read Dalrymple. Frankopan too.