“I wrote this book as a personal grouch,” said historian and author William Dalrymple to a rapt audience as he introduced his new book, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World, at The Explorers Club in New York City (May 9). The book is an extraordinary collection of stories that recount India’s often-forgotten yet significant contributions to the ancient world.
The Explorers Club was an apt setting for tales of explorers and their visionary adventures – in wood-paneled rooms displaying artifacts from pioneering polar, ocean, and space expeditions, icons like Tenzing Norgay, Edmund P. Hillary and Neil Armstrong have shared personal stories of exploration that changed the world.
In The Golden Road, Dalrymple takes his readers on an equally stunning journey of discovery, chronicling the spread, by traders and monks, of Indian intellectual, economic, scientific, and spiritual ideas that transformed the ancient world. He unearths facts behind the origin of mathematics, the spread of Buddhism, and the largest Hindu empire (not in India as one might expect), in a tome that’s a daunting 600+ pages long. A careful historian, he devotes about one-third of the volume to meticulous notes that authenticate his narrative. In The Golden Road, Dalrymple searches for and finds incontrovertible answers to the foundational tenets of modern math, eastern religions, and a thriving ancient global economy built on maritime routes rather than the Silk Road, sweeping aside the opacity cast by revisionist history, colonialism, and fading collective memory.
In a conversation with Meera Kymal of India Currents, Dalrymple discusses the genesis of The Golden Road, his connection to India, and the unique places and characters that populate his stories. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Watch excerpts from the interview here:
MK: The Golden Road discusses India’s influence in the ancient world and the extraordinary transformation it left in its wake in a region you call the Indosphere. What is the Indosphere?
WD: Well, the Indosphere is a term which is not my own coinage. It has existed for a while out there, but I think it’s a very useful term for talking about the way that Indian ideas left India and completely transformed Southeast Asia in a dramatic way that still lingers today.
When you go to Indonesia, you often go on the state airline Garuda. In Thailand, you arrive at Suvarnabhumi Airport (the lands of gold), the old Sanskritic name of Southeast Asia. You might then choose to go to Ayutthaya, the city just outside Bangkok, the oldest version of Bangkok, named, of course, after Ayodhya. You might take a trip to Laos to see Kurukshetra, and then go for a boat trip on the Mekong, which people don’t realize is just Ma Ganga – Me Kong in a Khmer pronunciation.
So far more than many realize, there is a massive imprint of Indian civilization, Hinduism, and Buddhism on Southeast Asia, in ways that often surprise people.
Angkor Wat, of course, is the largest Hindu temple in the world – once the center of the largest Hindu empire in the world, which was the Khmer Empire. People often think of the Guptas, but in sheer geographical reach, the Khmer (Empire) was larger. At Angkor Wat, you often see Indian tourists surprised and baffled to find images of the Krishna, and gopis on the walls, but it shouldn’t be a surprise, because it’s one of the great achievements of Indian civilization, that it spread these ideas out, and even more remarkably, that it did so entirely peacefully, contrary to some of the early Indian nationalist ideas of 1930s that these were Hindu colonies. We know that now not to be true. It wasn’t a military conquest. It was something more remarkable. It was an empire of the spirit, an empire of ideas, and Indian ideas, both Buddhist and then later Hindu, profoundly transformed all areas in every direction, around India, leaving an imprint that’s there today.
MK: You call the book The Golden Road, but it’s not really a road, is it? For the most part, it talks about maritime trade. So, why did you choose ‘Golden Road’ to describe these sea routes?
WD: There’s a number of different reasons. First of all, it’s a very simple counter to the Silk Road because I don’t believe the Silk Road existed at all until the 13th century, when the Mongols created a motorway through the middle of Asia, linking the Mediterranean and the South China Sea.
Before that, there is a massive and forgotten Roman trade between Roman Egypt and ancient India by the maritime route from the Red Sea ports of Berenike and Myos Hormos, through past Aden to Barbarikon which is where Karachi is now on the mouth of the Indus, then, Barygaza which is the great port of Gujarat, leading up to Ujjain, and then the Gangetic Plain. And then, most important of all, Muziris, down in Kerala, now thought to be the village of Pattanam, inland from Kochi. These ports were major centers of Roman trade.
The Indians didn’t really want much from the Roman world. They quite liked a little bit of Tuscan wine, and bizarrely, they also liked an interesting Roman fish sauce called garum. We have many amphorae full of this fermented fish sauce. But basically, what the Indians were after was Roman gold.
In classical times, India didn’t know that it had gold mines (in Kohlapur). So, India was importing all its gold largely from the Roman world. It was then, in search of replacement, after the Roman gold stops on the fall of the Roman Empire, you get this extraordinary pivot eastwards with the Tamil trading guilds. They look for gold in Suvarnabhumi and Swarnadwipa, probably Sarawak, but certainly that whole region of Indonesia and Khmer Empire, the Mekong Delta.
It’s there in the Jataka stories, and it’s there in the Ramayana. Sugriva tells Hanuman kick the floor, and gold dust will rise up. All this stuff is there.
It’s an extraordinary story how, first westwards towards the Roman Empire then eastwards towards Suvarnabhumi, this amazing Indian diaspora takes place from trade and ideas, and it’s powered by the monsoon winds. In ancient times, Indian sailors loved to harness the monsoon winds, which blow, you know, six months out of India, and then they reverse. So, whether you’re leaving Kerala going towards the Red Sea, or whether you’re leaving Machilipatnam or Nagapattinam on the coast of Tamil Nadu and going down the Malacca Straits to the Mekong Delta and beyond to China, the Indian winds help you by blowing you out and then blowing you in again – which is why we have massive Indian trading communities from Gujarat in Mombasa and Kenya and Tanzania and Aden. And why on the other side we have Chettiar communities and also some Bengali communities out in Singapore and in Burma.
MK: So much of this history seems forgotten or maybe undiscovered. You’ve said before that it’s opaque. At school, we studied Marco Polo and the Gupta Empire, Ashoka and his pillars, and the Chinese scholar Hiuen Tsang (Xuanzang). But this diffusion of ideas that has existed – it certainly wasn’t there in those history books.
WD: I make a little correction, it’s not that it’s undiscovered. Scholars know about this. Okay, there’s a lot of scholarly work in academia about it, but it somehow hasn’t percolated into popular consciousness in the way that, say, the Silk Road has done.
MK: OK, scholars know about it, but there doesn’t seem to be sort of a robust recording of trips that these people made.
WD: No, it is all there! The inscriptions are there! And the only extraordinary thing is that an Indian hasn’t written this book in the last 40 years. Why does it take a Scotsman to (do that). The last person, frankly, who wrote a book similar to this was an Englishman, A.L. Basham (The Wonder That Was India). And it’s very odd because Indians obviously are particularly proud of their culture. I can’t answer that question, why this book hasn’t been written.
MK: You’ve divided the book into several distinct chapters. Why did you make that decision to choose these particular elements of the story?
WD: Well, when you’re telling any story, obviously you’ve got to find a way to divide it into manageable chunks, or else everyone suffers from indigestion. And it seems to me that the obvious division said that there were three principle (groupings) – I mean there are many, many ways that India influences all the lands around it, encompassing ideas from mathematics, astronomy, astrology and science, through ideas of dance and aesthetics and sculpture and temples, through philosophy and religion into medicine, and the way that you run hospitals. There’s a whole enormous spread of Indian ideas for these, but it seemed to me that there were three ways of grouping it.
One was to talk about, first of all, the Buddhist expansion, which takes place from Ashoka onwards. Secondly, the period from the fifth century onwards, when Hinduism and Hindu kingship becomes a massive force in Southeast Asia. People are well aware of Indian antiquity, of Hinduism and the Vedas, but it isn’t really until the fifth century AD that you get these ideas making massive inroads in Southeast Asian – and suddenly you find Buddhist sculptures turning up all over Southeast Asia.
And then, the final section of my book is the ideas of what ancient Indians would call Jyotisa, which is the combined science of maths, astronomy, and astrology, and the way that that went first to the Arab world, to Baghdad. We have a date -776. Aryabhatta and Brahmagupta books are brought by an embassy from the Raja of Sindh to Baghdad, where it’s received by the Abbasid Caliph; and then, a couple of generations later, a remarkable translation and reworking of Aryabhatta and Brahmagupta takes place under this guy, Al Khwarizm. His book, the Book of Hindu Calculation According To Completion Of Balancing, has the nickname, shorter, more accessible, Al Jabr, which is our algebra. And then his name, Al Khwarizmi, is the basis of our word algorithm.
And you know, this is the heart of modern science and computing, and yet it comes from this meeting of the Indic world and the Arab world. And the Arab world remembers this, while in the West, we call the Indic numbers Arabic numbers, because we get them from the Arabs. In the Arab world, they’re still known as Hindi numbers. Yeah! I think it’s only in the 19th century that Europe forgot, because when it first makes it to Europe, and this takes place when Fibonacci – who’s from Pisa – Leonardo of Pisa is his real name; Fibonacci is a nickname. And Fibonacci brings the system back to Italy, he calls it the Modus Indorum (the Indian Method). And so I think it’s probably only in the 19th century that we forget this, and it suddenly becomes Arabic. The Arabs play a role. As we said, the actual form which these numbers have today are developed in Morocco and Islamic Spain, but their development of it (is) significantly different in form from the numbers originally used in Gwalior or whatever the first script was.
MK: You write that Buddhism was India’s greatest export to the world
WD: In terms of geography and spread, yes.
MK: Why do you think it has faded away in India?
WD: There’re two things that happen. I mean, you have for five or 600 years, both in India and in Southeast Asia, Hinduism and Buddhism coexisting, and you find some kings like the Pala kings in Bengal who patronize both. Harsha, who hugely enlarges Nalanda University, is a Hindu king who sponsors Buddhism students too.
But sometime in about the 10th or 11th century – it begins in the sixth century, but it accelerates over the next 600 years – Buddhism becomes more and more niche, and Hinduism becomes the dominant faith. While the opposite happens in Southeast Asia. Buddhism becomes the dominant faith, and Hinduism fades away. So, while today the only place that you get indigenous Buddhism in India is Ladakh, as opposed to the Ambedkar Buddhists. The only place now where you get Hinduism in Southeast Asia is Bali. It’s a difficult question to answer why that happened, but that’s what happens.
MK: Another interesting aspect of the book was that Buddhism was not always as austere as we perceive it to be now. You write it was spread by merchants, not by missionaries, or a little bit of both? And then the early Buddhists actually believed in yakshis, or have that symbolism incorporated in their structures, and the monasteries were the first banks. You know that seems contrary to the teachings of the Buddha? How did that happen?
WD: It’s not contrary to the teachings of the Buddha, but I think we’ve come to romanticize Buddhism. Certainly, you know, here in America, we’re speaking of Buddhism as it appears in Hollywood – shamans floating, levitating in Marvel movies, and with some superpowers.
Buddhism is a highly worldly religion in its practical (sense) and it appealed to merchants. It never appealed so much to Kings, which is why, one of the reasons why it dies out in India, because the Rajputs, who want to hunt, who want to show their valor in battle, don’t like vegetarianism, and they don’t like nonviolence (chuckles). But the merchant classes embrace it very much. And there’s something in the idea of karma and the idea of almost sort of paying off your sins, which appeals to merchant classes.
The early Buddhist monasteries are always associated with urban spaces, places like Pataliputra, places like Varanasi, and the great North Indian cities that now sort of we forget about, like Bodh Gaya and Rajgir and so on. And it is spread by monks who travel along with merchants. The monasteries become caravanserais. We have inscriptions whereby merchants talk about repaying with interest the money lent to them by monks. Often, the monasteries are founded on mineral deposits, like in copper in Afghanistan or iron ore in Southeast Asia.
MK: You visited one of those places in Afghanistan?
WD: I visited all these places. I’ve had a great time visiting everywhere in this book, including looking at the remains of Islamic Spain right through to Angkor Wat, Bali, and so on. One of the most wonderful aspects of this book was immediately after lockdown getting into Angkor Wat. I was quite literally on the first plane to leave Indonesia for Cambodia when the COVID restrictions (were in place). The reward for that was getting to see Angkor Wat with no tourists. I was virtually alone with just a bunch of Buddhist monks in Angkor Wat, which I’ll never do again in my lifetime, and then Borobudur, the greatest Buddhist monument, with no tourists! I managed to get the Ministry of Culture to let me in and went around with the director alone. Never again.
MK: That’s amazing. I want to ask you a question about the nature of religion. You’ve been writing for some years now about the confluence of religion, you know – From The Holy Mountain – the confluence of Islam, Christianity, The Golden Road, and spirituality in Nine Lives. There’s all this search for salvation, this desire for enlightenment, and detachment from the material. How has that shaped your perspective on a belief system? Are you a person of faith?
WD: I grew up in a very religious household, and although I’m personally not a practicing Christian anymore. I think if you grow up in that world, it molds your perception of the world, and once you understand how central religion is to the outlook of many people, you can never view the world with quite the same spectacles again. So, I’m fascinated by religion, and I spent a lot of my time in religious institutions, reading religious texts, studying religious art.
MK: Because that’s where most of the documentation took place, right? In the monasteries.
WD: Exactly. So India, religion, and religious history profoundly alter my worldview, but I don’t adhere to one particular faith, not in the way that my parents did, or my upbringing led me to.
MK: Let’s talk about the women in your books.
WD: There are some remarkable girls in those books!
MK: Exactly! Well, history is primarily male-centric, so for me, it’s always interesting to learn about authentic female characters. One of the most heartbreaking and moving stories was of Khair-un-Nissa in The White Mughals. One of the most haunting – the Jain nun in Nine Lives. But then you hit us with the daughter of dragons, in an episode that I think is straight out of Game of Thrones, you know, the fifth concubine, the Heavenly Empress – Wu Zetian – and how she used Buddhism to consolidate power. She was, as you say, the only female Emperor in China, ever. Tell us about her.
WD: She’s a person that’s extremely well known in China. There’s recently a 250-part, very sexed-up Chinese soap opera about her. She’s regarded in modern China slightly as the Lady Macbeth of Chinese history. She’s regarded as this Killer Queen who assassinates hundreds of her ministers. So, it’s hard to tell what’s true, because she converts China to Buddhism, and then after her death, Confucianism returns, and she is hated by the Confucian establishment, who write this vile version of her into history.
Now, as a storyteller, I’m attracted to the historians. As a historian, I’m never sure how much they’re true, because obviously this was a person that destroyed the Confucian world and was the greatest historic challenge to the domination of Confucianism in all of Chinese history. They’re not going to give her a good press. And so, we’ve got to be very skeptical about the (stories).
There were other powerful empresses who were consorts or modern Dowager empresses, but Wu Zetian was ‘Emperor.’ She has her own sort of think tank behind her, her body of activists who get her onto the throne. They’re called the Scholars of the Northern Gate, and they’re often Indian-trained. They’re often from Nalanda. And you can interpret this as the scholar Tamsin Sanders did, as effectively an Indian coup d’état in the heart of the Chinese state.
MK: Do they acknowledge that today in China?
WD: Well, the popular understanding of Wu Zetian is this monster who gets rid of the old elite. But certainly, what you do get in modern China is feminist scholars who are sympathetic to her. So there is definitely an awareness that she’s been demonized for a particular reason, and the feminists would interpret it as her being the only woman.
In the Buddhist texts, of course, she’s remembered as this highly pious queen who promotes Buddhism, who encourages scholars. There are even pen portraits of her by people that knew her, whereby she’s sitting in the translation bureau with these highly educated elderly monks who are doing difficult translations from Sanskrit Mahayana texts into Pali texts into Chinese, and she’s offering to be the reader and the copyist, and humbly offering her senses. So, we have different versions.
MK: Let’s talk about the Muziris Papyrus. How did its discovery change the history of the world as we know it?
WD: The Muziris Papyrus was discovered in Egypt 20 years ago (now in Vienna), which gives us hard data on the trade between Rome and Kerala. There’s lots of archeological evidence of objects passing, but hard economic data with figures is very rare in history. You often see in history books that India had 30% of global GDP during the Gupta period. Now, those figures are often highly questionable, because we just don’t have modern economic data for past periods. But every so often, a stray document survives, and Egypt is famous for the way that the dryness of the desert has often led to the preservation of all sorts of things, like palm leaf sandals, which somehow, because of the dryness of the Egyptian desert climate, survived perfectly.
There’s this town called Oxyrhynchus on the edge of the Nile. For some reason, the rubbish dumps on the edge of the town are in an area so dry and undisturbed that mountains of wastepaper have survived. And it’s a total treasure trove, I mean, I can’t remember how many hundreds of thousands of fragments of papyrus have been found, but they range from unknown gospels, the Gospel of Thomas, there are early sayings of Jesus which predate those in the Gospels, and which survive in Islamic tradition. For example, that phrase, Jesus Isa Son of Mary, said, ‘Life is a bridge. Walk over it, do not build your house upon it,’ or something like that. That’s a saying by Jesus which turns up at Oxyrhynchus (but) never makes it into Christian tradition, which is preserved by Islamic tradition bizarrely. We have lesbian love poetry of Sappho, which has survived. And then in the middle of all this completely random paperwork, this is one random shipping invoice of a container from Muziris in Kerala.
This shipping invoice is about the pepper, ivory, cotton, silk, and perfumery materials such as Nardin and Veravac, which one entrepreneur shipped from Kerala to Alexandria. And it’s a spreadsheet in modern terms. It just says the goods, the price, and the amount the Roman state was paying in tariffs. It was 37 tariffs. Big surprise is that all this stuff is super expensive, known and relevant – pepper, silk, cotton – was being sold for such vast sums in the Roman region. These were highly prized.
The total container, which had about 200 tons of ivory – there’s a lot of dead elephants, I’m afraid to say – and the equivalent amounts of pepper. If it sold for the amount evaluated on the invoice, it would have made the importer one of the richest men in Egypt. We know that 250 ships a year would leave from Roman Egypt.
MK: I always look in your stories for what I call aha moments. In your visits to historical sites and in your search for answers in sources, have there been any surprising moments, something unexpected?
WD: I’d say most of this book. I didn’t know 10 years ago. I had no idea of the importance of Indian trade. I had no idea the astonishing way in which not just Angkor Wat and Garuda Airlines, but the entire Southeast Asian culture is derived from Sanskritic culture. I had very little concept of the way that Indian numbers start with Ashoka and end up in modern Europe.
This was my lockdown project. I sat in my library, read and read and read. Most of my books are archival books – I go to archives and dig out completely new material no one’s seen before and build them out of that. This book is not that. This is a book built from secondary sources, the work of other scholars. Its only claim to originality is joining the dots.
I mean, the Sanskritists know the Sanskrit stuff. The Buddhist scholars know the Buddhist stuff. The mathematics historians know the history of mathematics. But they don’t talk to each other, and we haven’t seen this all put into one movement. It’s just one extraordinary story. And you know, it hugely increases your respect for ancient India.
We’ve all received enthusiastic WhatsApp forwards from patriotic friends who talk about how India invented nuclear weapons in the Mahabharata, or plastic surgery. To a certain extent, I think that has made a lot of intelligent people suspicious of claims of great Indian influence and antiquity. It seeps into patriotic fog, if you like, the story of India. What I’ve tried to do with this book is to keep it very firmly grounded in fact, and a third of the book is footnotes. I wanted to be completely clear that anything I said in this book has absolutely strong primary source validation.
For me, as an outsider, I just feel this is extraordinary history that I don’t know, and I’m dazzled by.
MK: Which kind of leads nicely into my last question. I’m always curious about perceptions of India because it’s not an easy country to know and love. How did your travel writing take you to India, and what keeps you there?
WD: It’s an easy country to love, but not an easy country to know. So, what brought me was an accident. I actually wanted originally to go and dig Assyrian remains in Iraq. Was my original plan after leaving school, and that went pear-shaped when Saddam Hussein closed the British School of Archeology, saying it was a nest of British spies.
So, I literally jumped on a plane with my best friend who was going to be teaching in Dehradun.
It took about a month for me to completely fall in love. I remember thinking, by March 1984, this is where I want to spend the rest of my life. This is the most extraordinary place.
MK: How old were you?
WD:18. And I’m now 60. It’s the longest year off in history, the longest gap year. Occasionally, I go on some holidays on some Greek island. I think it wouldn’t be nice to spend a couple of years on Rhodes or Crete or Santorini, but India keeps pulling me back.
MK: William Dalrymple, thank you for your time.
THE GOLDEN ROAD: How Ancient India Transformed the World
By William Dalrymple
(Bloomsbury/April 29, 2025).
Hardcover: 9781639734146
eBook: 9781639734153