The idea of the “Silk Road” is embedded in our historical imagination. The trail of Eurasian oasis cities and overland trade routes that linked China to the bazaars and markets of the Arab world and Europe has become a synonym for the deep connections bridging East and West. In more recent years, Beijing has invoked the history of the Silk Road as ideological ballast for China’s 21st-century geopolitics, casting its network of major global infrastructure investments and projects, dubbed the Belt and Road Initiative, as the inheritor of an ancient legacy.
But what about the links far deeper and older than the Silk Road? One of the big contentions of popular historian William Dalrymple’s latest book “The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World,” which came out in the United States a few weeks ago, is that the Indian subcontinent’s connections to the West, especially via the Roman Empire, were far richer than those of China. Once the might of Rome reached Egypt and the maritime routes of the Red Sea, it brought the customers of the Mediterranean to India’s doorstep. It also saw Indian philosophy and mathematics travel west and east.
The book, a bestseller in both India and Dalrymple’s native Britain, draws on a diverse array of sources – from new archaeological findings to classic literary texts – to sketch a sprawling history of India at the center of the world. Once their economic links to the West thinned with the collapse of the Roman Empire, South Indian merchant guilds turned east, embarking on trade and contacts that spread Indian religion and ideas across a wide expanse of Asia and underlay the grandeur of centuries-old temple complexes like Angkor Wat in Cambodia or Borubudur in Indonesia.
I spoke with Dalrymple as his book tour pulled through Washington. Our conversation is edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: Unlike the Romans or the Chinese, India in the era covered in the book didn’t have a single strong, central political authority expanding its power and clout around the world. And yet the reach of the “Indosphere” you write about seems so vast.
A: It’s this zone of Indian influence which encompasses not just trading contacts, but the diffusion of Indian ideas – most obviously religion, Hinduism, over Southeast Asia, but Buddhism over a far wider area going not only through the [Central Asian] ’Stans and Afghanistan and Pakistan and Western China, but through Mongolia after Siberia, through China to Korea and Japan, down through Southeast Asia, as far as the Philippines.
And because there are so few Buddhists in India today, India hasn’t really trumpeted this. It hasn’t been something that it’s been proud of, but it’s one of the great soft power miracles of world history, because unlike Islam and unlike quite a lot of Christianity, no one took Buddhism at the point of a sword. No one imposed Buddhism at any point. It was the sophistication of its ideas and particularly its attractiveness to the merchant classes, bizarrely. The Buddhist monasteries act as banks, as factories and as caravanserais.
Q: So we’re talking about an arc of territory that’s far larger than the Roman Empire at its peak.
A: There’s a whole zone, which spreads from Kandahar in Afghanistan through to Bali [in what’s now Indonesia] and Japan, where [the ancient Indian script] Pali and Sanskrit were read and spoken. And there is a period that runs from about 600 A.D. to about 1200 A.D. – when you get what [renowned Sanskrit scholar] Sheldon Pollock calls the “Sanskrit Cosmopolis,” when what English is today, what French was in the 19th century, Sanskrit is in that part of the world for more than 600 years. It’s the language of all courts and all diplomacy and all learning.
It’s larger than the Roman world, and far more rich and far more sophisticated. And the period when this happens is when the Roman world disappeared into the Dark Ages. So the only rival is the growing power of the Mayans [in Mesoamerica] and the Abbasids [in the Middle East] at this point.
Q: And the Silk Road, as we understand it today, doesn’t even exist, right?
A: It’s an idea which I argue in this book never has the slightest historical reality until the time of the Mongols [when their conquests in the Middle Ages paved the way for more consistent trade from China to the West]. But in antiquity, the big trading partner of the Roman Empire was India, and that’s very clear in the classical sources. [The famous Roman chronicler and diplomat] Pliny says that India is the drain of all the precious metals in the world.
Q: An almost Trumpian complaint.
A: In actual fact, the Romans do level 30 percent tariffs on Indian imports, which provide possibly as much as a quarter of the entire Roman imperial budget. So the Appian Way, the fortresses on the Sahara frontier, the Rhine frontier – 30 percent of all that is paid for on Indian imports. And the imports that were coming from India were not necessities. They were entirely luxury. It’s pepper, cotton, silk, which was bought in India, not in China. And if the Romans and the Chinese ever met, it would have been on the quays of [what’s now the Indian states of] Kerala or Gujarat, because that’s where the Romans bought their silk.
Q: Why is this history not better known?
A: There is a whole world of Indian soft power where the dots have not been joined. And it’s odd, because there’s so much great scholarship coming out of Indian universities, but often it’s siloed. And there’s a whole world of Indian learning and knowledge which people in the West simply don’t know about.
It’s during the 19th century, when [British imperial official Thomas Babington] Macaulay declares: “A single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” So I think partly it’s that the colonial powers had a vested interest in downplaying the importance of Indian learning. But I think it’s also that the nationalist scholars in 1930s India overplayed their hand and wrote about Hindu colonies in Southeast Asia. Now, we know that those Hindu colonies never actually existed, that they weren’t political colonies in the sense of French or Dutch or British. But they were places where important ideas were astonishingly taken up, even though there was much greater physical proximity to China.
The overstatement by nationalistic Indian historians of 1930s as Hindu colonies meant that these Southeast Asian postcolonial scholars reacted against that and “Indianization” became a dirty word. Instead, they were always stressing the indigenous elements in all these cultures, which were always there. And the metaphor I use is these are Indian seeds which develop new forms in different soils.
The person who gets this quite simple idea is [20th-century Indian Nobel laureate Rabindranath] Tagore. Tagore goes to Angkor [in Cambodia] in 1920, and he says, everywhere, I can see India, yet I could not recognize it.
