Sea change: How maritime connections enabled ancient India’s global impact

Dalrymple shows how traders and monks sailed beyond borders, turning India into the ancient world’s cultural powerhouse.

Depictions of scenes from the life of the Buddha in the temple of Borobudur, Indonesia. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/ iStock 

William Dalrymple’s The Golden Road features a great amount of sea. It could be no other way. The text covers territories from beyond West Asia to China, and India sat, quite literally, at the centre of this world. In substantial measure it was the sea—and maritime trade—that built the passageways for ideas, culture, goods, and men to navigate this Indosphere. And note this term. While linguists might be familiar with “Indosphere”, Dalrymple gives it a wider significance; I think the word will catch on and be used with greater regularity hereon. There is a small risk it might be romanticised even, but The Golden Road itself steers clear of this.

Of all his books, this one represents Dalrymple’s largest canvas, with far broader brushstrokes. His earlier books like White Mughals (2002) and The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857 (2006) are more granular. The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company (2019) did tell a greater story, and it might appear as if Dalrymple were slowly moving towards “big picture” narratives anyway. What is surprising about The Golden Road is the period: while all of his histories so far are set in the modern age, the newest one takes us to the ancient world. Its ambitions are greater, and Dalrymple is in fresh territory. But he pulls it off expertly. The book is edifying, well-structured, learned, and thoroughly interesting.

The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

By William Dalrymple

Bloomsbury Publishing

Pages: 608

Price: Rs.999

There are several elements that stood out for me in the book. In India, we have not yet focussed on maritime history as essential to the understanding of our past. There has been a fixation with land and events within the country’s present-day boundaries. And yet, one cannot fully comprehend peninsular India’s personality, for example, without recognising the role of the sea. The Golden Road gently offers such a reorientation so that we approach Indian history with a far more zoomed-out lens. Or as Dalrymple writes, “in the ancient and medieval world, the sea did not divide so much as unite”. And the book offers adequate proof of this.

Another contribution is the book’s highlighting of merchants as architects of the Indosphere. While there is general awareness of the medieval Cholas sending armies overseas, and while it does supply a certain chest-thumping pride, The Golden Road notes the far more subtle, far more constant, and in many ways more sustained role of mercantile networks. It was through traders that Indian ideas and religious thought travelled east, for instance, laying the foundations for greater things. This is why potentially the oldest representation of the Tamil female bhakti icon Karaikkal Ammaiyar is found in Cambodia rather than India.

Export of Buddhism

Rich dividends from exporting religious ideas led even Brahmins—who formally saw seafaring as taboo—board ships and travel abroad. I chuckled when I read how some claimed they had reached foreign shores “magically… by yoga”. But whether by special powers or aboard trading ships, there were eventually heaps of Brahmins attending to princes in Malaysia and nearby regions. Buddhism was the other big export, and one of the most arresting chapters in the book tells the story of Wu Zetian, the 7th century Chinese empress, who weaponised the Buddha’s religion to seize power and marginalise her political opponents.

While all of Dalrymple’s histories so far are set in the modern age, The Golden Road takes us to the ancient world. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

Buddhism, in fact, is another underappreciated component of Indian history. It wilted away eventually in the land of its birth, which explains our tragic ignorance of the subject, but for centuries it attracted all kinds of people to the country.

In some ways, in fact, those Brahmins sailing to Cambodia, Vietnam, and Malaysia were playing catch-up with Buddhist rivals, whose networks must have truly seemed formidable. The Golden Road makes an important contribution in reminding us of our Buddhist past, and of just how much the pull India held for the ancient world came from Buddhism.

Minor errors

Some scholars are likely to quibble with Dalrymple on certain specifics of the book. One can see, for example, Meera Nanda frowning at the claim that the zero was a “revolutionary Indian concept that would transform mathematics”. Revolutionary it was, but claims of a purely Indian pedigree for it she might question.

An arresting chapter tells the story of Wu Zetian, the seventh-century Chinese empress, who weaponised the Buddha’s religion to seize power. | Photo Credit: Wiki Commons

Dalrymple also describes a 1192 battle between the Turks and the Chauhans at Tarain, citing the “contemporary historian Firishta”, though Firishta was writing several centuries later. But a couple of minor errors are forgivable in a book of such vast scope and accomplishment.

The main text in The Golden Road is just under 300 pages, while the bibliography adds another 100. The writing is elegant, the storytelling strong, and the reader’s attention rarely falters. On the one hand, it is a book one can read in a few sittings—a good thing for wooing non-experts into the subject. But for those with a more serious interest in history, there is much in the book to bring you back and make you think. The notes in several cases acknowledge standard views as well as counterviews, and Dalrymple uses established and recent scholarship in reaching his conclusions.

The Golden Road ends with the rise of India’s Persianate phase, serving in some ways as a prequel to India in the Persianate Age: 1000–1765 (2020). While the present and its concerns do not intrude into the book, there is yet a message of sorts that Dalrymple leaves us with in his final pages. “History,” he writes, “shows that India has always been at its most creative and influential when it is at its most connected, plural, hybrid, open, and receptive to new ideas… when it represents the cohabitation, not a clash of civilisations.” Marshalling great swathes of historical knowledge, The Golden Road makes this case most compellingly.

Manu S. Pillai is a historian and writer.