In 1877 a Prussian geographer, Baron von Richthofen, coined the “Silk Road”, a fantasy railway route from Berlin to Beijing. Today that fantasy has found expression in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a trade network that traverses Asia and seeks to connect with Europe. By invoking this historical geography of a Silk Road of exchange and connection, the Chinese premier Xi Jinping seeks to soften China’s expansionism. Except that, as William Dalrymple’s luminous new book shows, there was no Silk Road in the classical, ancient or even the early modern era. It was not a silken yarn that stitched together the ancient world, Dalrymple argues, but a “Golden Road”, named for the riches of ideas and knowledge associated with the enlightenment and wealth of India.
The Golden Road, with India at its centre, stretched from the Red Sea, with links to Rome and Venice, to China via Afghanistan, and all the way to the western rim of the Pacific Ocean via peninsular India. This thoroughfare did not merely connect continents and oceans: it built the ancient world. The Golden Road created – and, importantly, outlasted – empires and even religions for more than a millennium, only to come to a violent end with the surprising but powerful rise of Pax Islamica.
The book opens with the discovery, in the early decades of the British empire, of the great Ajanta and Ellora caves in western India by a hunting party that included Dalrymple’s forebears. His riveting account transports the reader into those caves, which house some of the world’s oldest and most spectacular statues and paintings, including some of the earliest iconography of the Buddha, who, as Dalrymple writes, was almost unknown to the world then. Born in the sixth or fifth century BC, the Buddha attained nirvana in Bodh Gaya (in India’s Bihar state today) and inspired the greatest emperor of ancient India, Ashoka, whose Mauryan empire connected northern and peninsular India upwards into Afghanistan and beyond. With the trained eye of an art historian and accomplished travel writer, Dalrymple has an overwhelmingly visual style, taking paintings, statues, temples, archaeological digs and manuscripts as his landmarks in this sprawling history of the long millennium. He leads the reader along a revolutionary road that until now has remained obscured in works of history wrought by contemporary nationalism, geopolitical conflicts and, above all, European conceit.
The book’s reconstruction of the Buddhist world as temporal power, spiritual persuasion and system of knowledge is a standout contribution. Eschewing narratives about the rise and fall of dynasties and empires, and even rejecting the importance of the dizzying traffic of commercial gain and exchange, Dalrymple instead focuses on the enduring and alluring power of ideas in shaping the ancient world. As The Golden Road recovers, translates and conveys the staggering genius of what the French Indologist Sylvain Lévi termed Greater India, the book projects India’s majesty outwards as India replaces Europe as the original and even grander home of classical learning and power.
Kings and courts are replaced as the protagonists of history by monks, wanderers and seekers of knowledge, seminaries and stupas. Mixture is everywhere, with some surprising, powerful stories of miscegenation. Dalrymple is careful to balance the large scale and sweep of time with life portraits of exemplary figures. The story of the fourth-century Kumārajīva, the Indian translator of Buddhism into Chinese, is illustrative of the forces of “conversion and influence” that led to the spread of ideas. Kumārajīva was born to a Kashmiri monk and a mother from the royal family of Kusha (in contemporary Xinjiang) – his life captures the dramatic power of ideas in making and unmaking empires, and also illustrates a forgotten story of mixture. The Chinese conquest of the Buddhist kingdom of Kucha, where he resided, did not diminish Buddhism’s power but increased it. Though Kumārajīva was initially imprisoned, the future Qin emperors feted him and installed him as the official scholar of Chinese Buddhism. Through a prodigious canon of translations from Sanskrit into Chinese and original treatises, Kumārajīva essentially made Buddhism distinctly Chinese.
The story of the celebrated sixth-century Chinese traveller and monk Xuanzang, who visited India on the eve of the rise of Islam, is similarly instructive. Dalrymple traces his journey to India, including his visit to the Buddhist seminary of Nalanda, and then back to China. While Xuanzang’s teachings have become fodder for new-age spirituality and self-help, he also became an icon of Indian and Chinese exchange. In a rare gesture of friendship, the Indian and Chinese governments collaborated to erect a spectacular monument to the monk in Nalanda in 2007. Today, Nalanda is the site of feverish reconstruction – archaeological digs, new monuments and even a university – by the Indian government as the central node in the so-called Buddhist Trail across India’s northern and eastern states.
The Golden Road is – uncharacteristically, given Dalrymple’s oeuvre – not fixated on the violent rise and end of empires. While the book is a testament to the power of Buddhism, the explanation of its demise in India is but a footnote. This choice is critical, as the account is focused on those ideas and beliefs that, through their agility, can survive transformation. Ideas that are too weak or too introverted to endure the tumult of political change have largely been ignored. Political conflict and social change are suborned to the creative, spiritual and intellectual quest. The book, to its credit, has no easy political message or commitment. If anything, it is a homage to the human mind and an ode to India.
Yet, to repurpose Tagore, though India is everywhere in this breathtaking book, it is not entirely recognisable. Here, India serves as an anchor rather than as a battlefield or a prize for the most ambitious empires in human history.
Its reach beyond its shores, not only to the heartlands of China but to the littoral worlds of Sumatra and Java, casts India as not merely open and therefore vulnerable, but extroverted and powerfully confident. The Pallava kingdom in peninsular India gets a welcome makeover as a naval power that sent Tantra adepts and scholars to both China and Sumatra. The book also dispenses with any claim that south-eastern Asia’s kingdoms, such as in Cambodia or Indonesia, were once Hindu colonies. Instead, Dalrymple reconstructs them as extravagant new and grand polities, best illustrated by Angkor Wat in Cambodia, a monumental temple complex built by spiritual and political persuasions that had become insular and even conflictual in India. At the very moment of the expansion of Islam in India, Buddhist-Hindu kingdoms flourished in new polities in South-East Asia.
The westward path of Dalrymple’s Golden Road is not merely revisionist but uncanny. In tracing the story of the digit zero, from its origins in Hindu classical mathematics and its integration into Western knowledge enabled by Islamic scholasticism, Dalrymple makes India the fulcrum of modern life. Indic classical knowledge went global, ironically, through the expansion of Islam. The traffic of ideas from India and across Egypt, Iraq and Iran created by the Golden Road would unmoor even the most zealously cloistered knowledge of the Brahmins and Buddhist monks.
Dalrymple appeals for a just recontextualising of violence, not so much in the history of Islam’s conflict with Christian Europe but primarily with its role in the rise of Islam in India. In contrast with Europe or even Islam, Dalrymple is keen to show the importance of non-violence in the expansion of India overseas.
In a stunning sequence, Dalrymple details the structural reach of the Golden Road: the first madrasas (Islamic educational institutions) were modelled on Buddhist vihara monasteries, and employed Hindu teaching practises that inspired the modelling of quads and the college, and ultimately the modern university in Europe. In the emergent age of Islam, the Golden Road carried the new religion all the way to the eastern shores of the Indian Ocean and into Indonesia, not through war and conflict but through the commerce of ideas.
The Golden Road was thus the “Indosphere” that, in connecting land and sea by Indian ideas, made the ancient world. The Indosphere is lost – but it is also being founded anew. Today, the new global order pivots towards India, as American-led strategic alliances such as the Quad (between Australia, India, Japan and the US) gain ascendancy and India’s infrastructural expansion – through the building of ports and bridges, such as in Iran or Sri Lanka – deepens. The ambition of the ideas that gave ancient India its grandeur sits in stark contrast with the narrow range of global political visions today.
In brilliantly excavating the Golden Road in the current age of the Silk Road, Dalrymple’s book is both contemporary and altogether foreign. It does not so much explain the present as indicate the long and even insurmountable distance between then and now.
Shruti Kapila is a professor of history and politics at Cambridge University
The Golden Road
William Dalrymple
Bloomsbury, 482pp, £30
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[See also: The fury of history]
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This article appears in the 02 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The fury of history