When the ancient world’s cache of history is prised open and its contents spill out – myriad faiths and nascent religions, canny priests and cunning warriors, kings, queens and the gods they chose to elevate, art and architecture, linguists, astronomers, mathematicians, polymaths and ambitious seafaring merchants all trading goods and knowledge for gold, courtly access and nirvana – when history’s minutiae is juxtaposed against its complex big pictures, and when all of it is sorted, sifted, cross-referenced and bibliographed carefully, you get a book as glorious as its name implies.
The Golden Road is William Dalrymple’s superbly engaging account of an Indosphere that endured for nearly 2,000 years, a history of India’s incredibly transformative influence spanning entire continents to its east and west, achieved not by conquest but by a merchant-and-monk combination that was supremely successful in capturing the hearts, minds and very rich purses of the rulers of far-flung peoples.
Ancient India gave the world concepts that endured and formed the basis of what we think is distinctively modern: the decimal system and the zero, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, medicine, metallurgy, astronomy, even the dreaded algorithm. Dalrymple traces the origin of these ideas and other equally important Indic advances in arts, architecture, linguistics and philosophy and then tracks precisely how they spread to the West and East, to be studied and disseminated with enthusiasm, eventually moulding the course of human history.
Early in his book, Dalrymple quotes a postscript to another book, one written by the Chinese monk Xuanzang, the most comprehensive account of seventh-century central Asia and India ever produced: “Although it was difficult to exhaustively verify all matters, I never resorted to speculation.” Dalrymple has remained true to that very creed himself for the jigsaw pieces that he puts into place, as he takes us down the Golden Road, are backed up with an astonishing 200 pages of source notes and bibliography to clarify and verify his position. Surely, a most joyous rabbit hole to go down once the book is read.
Dalrymple concludes by pointing out that India has been at its most influential when it was open, plural and receptive to ideas of cohabitation and tolerance. No doubt the question on every reader’s lip will be – could India do it again?
Cauvery Madhavan’s latest novel, The Inheritance, is published by Hope Road next week
