India - The Real Middle Kingdom

"The Golden Road

By William Dalrymple

Bloomsbury, 432 pages, $32.99

Hindu nationalists are in undisputed control of political power in India for the first time since the 12th century, and they're making the most of this opportunity for triumphalist messaging. A common refrain among them -- from Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the humblest hack-propagandist -- is that India is a vishwa guru, or teacher of the world, the font of all global wisdom. World leaders visiting the country for the G-20 summit two years ago drove past giant billboards making just such a boast. (Xi Jinping's reaction was not recorded.)

William Dalrymple does not deploy that Sanskrit phrase in "The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World." But his audacious book's aim is to "highlight India's often forgotten position as a crucial economic fulcrum, and civilizational engine, at the heart of the ancient and medieval worlds." In other words, India as vishwa guru, "fully on a par with and equal to China."

Mr. Dalrymple, a blue-blooded Scotsman who's lived in a farmhouse outside Delhi for 36 years, is the author of a dozen books, the best-known of which are "White Mughals" (2002) -- with which he established his reputation as a first-rate storyteller -- and "The Anarchy" (2019), on the irresistible rise of the British East India Co. He's also a co-founder of the Jaipur Literary Festival, among the best-attended lit-fests in the world. In other words, no one should question his credentials to pass judgment on India.

Mr. Dalrymple sets out to correct what he believes is a narrative wrong -- the playing down of India and Indians in Western accounts of history. "The centrality of the Indian subcontinent as one of the two ancient economic and cultural hubs of Asia" has been, he writes, "obscured by the seductively Sinocentric concept of the 'Silk Road.'" He uses the phrase "Golden Road" in conceptual competition with that fabled overland route to describe the maritime passageways that went both westward and eastward out of India.

From 250 B.C. to A.D. 1200, these ship routes stretched from the Red Sea to China, along which "pioneering merchants, astronomers and astrologers, scientists and mathematicians, doctors and sculptors" as well as "the holy men, monks and missionaries of several distinct strands of Indic religious thought" set forth from India. There were religious representatives not only of Hinduism (in its many complex forms) but also Buddhism (whether Theravada, Mahayana or Tantric) and even Islam. This last was brought to India by Muslim jihadi-kings from the Middle East and Central Asia. It was then exported to Java, Mr. Dalrymple tells us (with more than a touch of oversimplification), by "Gujarati Muslim Sufi mystics." There were, of course, many other vectors of Islam in these far reaches of Southeast Asia, not least the Arabs themselves.

As Mr. Dalrymple informs us, his desire to write this book arose out of a series of spirited discussions with Peter Frankopan, an Oxford history don who wrote "The Silk Roads: A New History of the World" (2015). Its account, Mr. Dalrymple suggests, overemphasized the centrality of Persia, Central Asia and China in the ancient and medieval world. The "vast Indosphere" -- stretching from Indian trading outposts in Egypt, Ethiopia and the Roman Empire to a massive swath of Southeast Asia that came to be suffused with Indian culture and commerce -- needed its own passionate proponent.

Mr. Dalrymple, oddly, says that this area "up to now has never been given a name." Yet buried in his book's acknowledgments is a word of thanks to Simon Sebag Montefiore, the author and historian, "for allowing me to borrow his wonderfully useful and ingenious coinage 'the Indosphere.'" In fact, the word was first used in 1990 by James Matisoff, an American linguist at Berkeley, to describe those areas into which the influence of Indian languages radiated outward. But let's not get bogged down in details of paternity: Whoever came up with the word gave us a very useful tool. (Mr. Matisoff, incidentally, also coined the word "Sinosphere.")

For a thousand years, Mr. Dalrymple tells us, India was a cradle of wisdom, "a confident exporter of its own diverse civilization," while the rest of Asia was "the willing and even eager recipient of a startlingly comprehensive mass transfer of Indian soft power" in fields as diverse as art, mathematics, medicine, mythology and language. The author contrasts this outpouring of positive energy from India with the country's condition in late medieval and modern history, when India -- overrun by invaders from the West -- was "on the receiving end" of foreign cultural influence, its Sanskritic language and culture giving way, first, to Persianate dominance, and later to the ways of the Anglosphere.

Mr. Dalrymple traces the history of Indic mercantile contact with the Roman world, writing how Romans sought Indian exports -- pepper, spices, ivory, cotton, gems, teak and sandalwood -- in exchange for gold. So dominant was India's hand in this exchange that the "puritanical" Pliny the Elder issued an almost Trumpian cry of indignation, saying of trade with India that "there is no year which does not drain our empire of at least fifty-five million sesterces." The museums of India, Mr. Dalrymple writes, "probably contain more Roman coins than those of any other country outside the boundaries of the Roman empire."

The fall of the Western Roman Empire led to a decline in Indian trade, pushing the kings and merchants of the subcontinent -- in the main, Tamils from India's southeast -- to venture eastward to the geographical region they called Suvarnabhumi -- the Lands of Gold in modern-day Burma, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and, above all, Cambodia, as well as Java and elsewhere in present-day Indonesia. This was "an eastern El Dorado," Mr. Dalrymple writes, "where fortunes were there for the picking."

Buddhism and Hinduism, taken to these places by monks and merchants alike, transformed not only Southeast Asia -- home to the wondrous Hindu temple complex of Angkor Wat and the Buddhist temple at Borobudur -- but also China. Mr. Dalrymple has a gift for bringing to life people from the past. His story of an ever-expanding Indosphere is never an abstract narrative. We learn about the men who matter, the sages and evangelists who carried India abroad, such as Kumarajiva (A.D. 344-413), who translated the Lotus Sutra (a Buddhist text) from Sanskrit into Chinese. And there are also those, like the Chinese scholar Xuanzang (A.D. 602-664), who made a 17-year, 6,000-mile overland pilgrimage to India, returning to China with a caravan-load of scholastic texts that he'd copied by hand at the university at Nalanda in central India, whose library was "the Indian equivalent of the great Library of Alexandria."

Other salient characters include the cruel and irrepressible Wu Zetian (A.D. 624-705), the only female emperor of China, who made Buddhism the state religion and surrounded herself with Indian advisors. India's influence in China peaked during her reign. After her death came a Confucian backlash, sweeping away much that was Indic.

The last part of "The Golden Road" focuses on the return of Indian influence in the West -- via the Arabs. Scholars from the new Muslim caliphates in Baghdad and Al-Andalus (Moorish Spain) sought out and mastered Indian mathematical, astronomical and scientific texts. The most profound impact was the adoption, first by the Arabs and later by the Europeans, of the Indian concept of zero, which transformed mathematics, accounting and much else. The numbers we use today, Mr. Dalrymple reminds us, are Indian in origin and "arguably the nearest thing the human race has to a universal language."

In this respect, at last, India's claim to be a vishwa guru is not overblown. Mr. Dalrymple must get credit for flying the flag of the land that has been lucky enough to become his obsession.

---

Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at NYU Law School's Classical Liberal Institute." [1]

1.   REVIEW --- Books: The Real Middle Kingdom. Varadarajan, Tunku.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 03 May 2025: C7.