“Like ancient Greece, India is one of the seedbeds of civilisation” | William Dalrymple on putting India back at the centre of global history

That 18-year-old would be very disappointed in the middle-aged version ‘selling out’ to modern history and writing about India, which in my teens was way beyond my horizon. In fact, this is a period about which I’ve written before in From the Holy Mountain, which is set in the same monastic milieu [as Ajanta and Sanchi], though from a Mediterranean vantage.

But for the past 20 years I’ve been writing about the East India Company and the Mughals, so this is my first non-Mughal book after two decades of research in that area. It feels very nice to be writing and thinking about a different topic, although there’s also that slight anxiety when you’re dealing with something that you don’t know so well.

• Read more | “This was a corporation that could topple kings”: William Dalrymple on the East India Company

What do you hope readers will gain from reading this book?

I wanted to have a very broad, wide-angle focus spanning over 1,000 years. Each of my previous four or five books was a micro-history of a couple of years in a single Indian city. This is a very different book, stretching from 250 BC to AD 1200, over a whole continent.

It looks at the way that Indian ideas spread: first, with Buddhism going up through Tibet and central Asia to China, and then Hinduism going to south-east Asia. Notably, the largest Hindu temple in the world is not in India but in Cambodia – Angkor Wat, a Vishnu temple built in the 12th century.

When I was halfway through my work on this book, the Berenike Buddha was discovered on Egypt’s Red Sea coast. This extraordinary statue, sculpted around the second century AD, was discovered at an ancient port where Indian traders were landing, highlighting the reach of Indian influence. Today, everyone’s waking up to the fact that India was, for most of history, the richest country in the world.

Turning to mathematical numerals and the concept of zero, these came out of India, first to the Arab world, then passed on from there to Europe via the Italian mathematician Fibonacci in the early 13th century. We know these figures today as Arab numerals because we got them from the Arabs, but the Arabs got them from the Indians.

• Read more | Digital revolution: the evolution of Hindu-Arabic numerals

My book makes the point that India is like ancient Greece, in that it’s one of the seedbeds of civilisation – but it has been totally eradicated from our consciousness and our education systems.

This is surely a lingering legacy of colonialism and, more specifically, Victorian Indology, which undermined, misrepresented and devalued Indian history, culture, science and knowledge from the period when Thomas Babington Macaulay confidently proclaimed that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia”.

If India were acknowledged to already have been a powerful, cosmopolitan and profoundly sophisticated civilisation, then what justification would there be for Victorian Britain’s civilising mission? How would you set out to bring civilisation to a part of the world that you recognised has been supremely civilised for thousands of years and which indeed was spreading its influence all over Asia long before the coming of Christianity?

What is the ‘Golden Road’ of your book’s title?

It’s an idea that is deliberately pitched in contrast with the concept of the Silk Road. My book argues that almost all intercontinental activity and trade during this period occurred by sea, with much less over land. This was primarily because of the hostile land borders separating the Roman world from Persia.

One of the fortunate aspects of geography for India was the monsoon winds. These are predictable and regular, reversing directions every six months: they blow cold from the Tibetan Plateau in winter and warm from the south-west in summer. Once the monsoon winds were understood, sailors could travel efficiently from regions such as Kerala, Gujarat and the coast of Sindh to the Red Sea coast of Egypt or the Persian Gulf.

Similarly, it was easy to sail across the Bay of Bengal to Thailand, Laos, the Mekong Delta, Cambodia and beyond to China. The ‘Golden Road’ refers to a trade route, mentioned by Strabo and Pliny the Elder around the time of the early Roman empire, that exported luxuries from southern India.

Victorian Indology undermined, misrepresented and devalued Indian history, culture, science and knowledge... If India were acknowledged to already have been a powerful, cosmopolitan and profoundly sophisticated civilisation, then what justification would there be for Victorian Britain’s civilising mission?

Pliny disapproved of the expensive luxuries flowing into Rome at great cost, remarking that India was “the sink of the world’s precious metals”. This lucrative trade route brought significant amounts of Roman gold to India in the early centuries AD.

Conversely, my colleague at All Souls College in Oxford, Andrew Wilson, who specialises in the history of the Roman economy, has estimated that possibly as much as one-third of the entire Roman military budget was powered by the customs take on the Red Sea ports.

However, events such as the Justinianic Plague [from around AD 541] and raids by nomads such as the Blemmyes on southern Egypt led to the decline of this trade by the seventh century. This had consequences including curbing the arrival of garnets – which were popular in places like the Merovingian kingdoms and Anglo-Saxon England, where they were found at Sutton Hoo – from Rajasthan and Sri Lanka, signalling the end of this trade.

You introduce the notion of an ‘Indosphere’. How did ancient India influence the lands and cultures beyond its territory?

In India, the decline of its trade with Rome led to a crisis in gold supply. Although India had gold reserves, they hadn’t been fully discovered in the early centuries AD. As a result, Indian traders set off to Suvarnabhumi [a general term for south-east Asia], the ‘Lands of Gold’. This shift led to civilisational transformation in the region.

Before that time, south-east Asia had no writing system. Suddenly, everyone there started using the Brahmi script, particularly the Tamil forms. Hinduism and Buddhism took root and produced even more dramatic monuments in that region than in India. The Khmer empire, with its million-strong urban population centred around Angkor Wat, produced the world’s largest Hindu temple. The most sophisticated Buddhist monument was built at in Java.

Hindu forms of kingship and literature spread through out the region, and reminders of this influence endure to this day. The name of Thailand’s old capital, Ayutthaya, came from Rama’s kingdom in the Hindu epic Ramayana, for example. And Indonesia’s national airline is named Garuda, after Vishnu’s mount.

The mythical battle of Kurukshetra, fought just north of Delhi, is depicted at Angkor Wat, along with images of Krishna cavorting with consorts and devotees in Mathura [that god’s traditional birthplace]. These ideas, originating from specific areas of India, were sculpted on a vast scale thousands of miles away. This was a fascinating moment in history, when south-east Asia became an extension of the Indian holy land.

Even more dramatically, Indian ideas conquered China. In the 660s AD, Wu Zetian took power, becoming the only ‘female emperor’ in Chinese history. This was viewed as a dark period by the patriarchal Confucians. To bolster her power, Empress Wu imported Indian monks who proclaimed her to be the Bodhisattva Maitreya – the long-foretold future Buddha – giving her a divine right to rule, and Buddhism, an Indian faith, became the state religion of China for a time.

That did not last, but it brought a massive wave of Indian ideas: literature, cosmology, mathematics and more. Though Chinese civilisation eventually rolled back some of these influences, Buddhism remained a significant presence. To this day, China has more Buddhists than any other country.

Who are some of the other figures that you highlight?

There’s a motley crew of murderous empresses, Buddhist wizards and tantric magicians.

One of the first figures in the book is Saint Thomas – an unexpected presence. According to legend, he travelled the spice route between Berenike and Muziris [on India’s Malabar Coast], arriving in India as part of the Jewish merchant diaspora. He converted Brahmins (the priestly caste), built seven churches and was reputedly martyred in Mylapore [now part of Chennai] in AD 72. Though the legend is recorded in the Acts of Thomas, written around the turn of the third century, early conversion to Christianity in Kerala is documented from the second century, with Indian Christians seeking bishops, patriarchs and relics from Alexandria.

One of my favourite figures is Vajrabodhi, a tantric wizard from the Pallava dynasty of Tamil south India – akin to a Buddhist Merlin. In the early eighth century, during a period when Buddhism was competing with Hinduism, Vajrabodhi – with his magical powers and Vajra staff, like a kind of magic wand – was sent on a diplomatic mission to Tang China. Detailed hagiographies describe his journey to Sri Lanka, a centre of tantric Buddhism, and his possible role in the construction of Borobudur, a monumental Buddhist site designed as a spiritual ‘power generator’ reflecting the void and nothingness central to tantric Buddhism.

One of my favourite figures is Vajrabodhi, a tantric wizard from the Pallava dynasty of Tamil south India – akin to a Buddhist Merlin. In the early eighth century, Vajrabodhi – with his magical powers and Vajra staff, like a kind of magic wand – was sent on a diplomatic mission to Tang China

Another notable individual is the wandering Buddhist monk Xuanzang. He realised that the texts in his monasteries were corrupted and missing advanced tantric and Mahayana Buddhist scriptures, which were unavailable in China. Despite a travel ban imposed by Tang authorities, Xuanzang secretly went to India. There he spent 10 years at Nalanda, a renowned monastery equivalent to the Library of Alexandria with an exceptional educational institution, where he copied many manuscripts.

Though some were lost on his return journey in a mishap while crossing the Indus river, he brought back enough to fill the Great Wild Goose Pagoda in Xi’an, which still stands today. Xuanzang’s generation faced prejudice against Indian learning, which was dismissed as ‘barbarian’ by the Confucian and Taoist elite.

Buddhism in China peaked under Empress Wu, who was a spiritual follower of Xuanzang. She entered the imperial harem as the fifth concubine at the age of about 15, around the time Xuanzang returned from India, and the two became allies. Recognising her influence, Xuanzang regarded Wu as a key figure in advancing the Buddhist cause. Thus there was a growing awareness in China of India’s sophistication, driven largely by Buddhists who comprised one of several competing factions at court.

How was ancient India’s cultural influence spread?

Indian nationalism often promotes the idea of a ‘Greater India’, a concept popular with the current regime. This narrative suggests that the spread of Indian epics and gods throughout south-east Asia was the result of the actions of imperial warriors – an idea that gained traction in the 1930s with the Greater India Society.

However, this notion seems unfounded. The spread of Indian culture was more likely driven by merchants and the appeal of Indian ideas, in much the same way as Hellenistic ideas spread to ancient Rome. Indian concepts in mathematics; architectural manuals such as the Shilpa Shastras; and jyotisa – a Sanskrit word encompassing both astronomy and astrology – spread widely.

This happened not through conquest but via trade and the movements of Brahmins, who, despite legal restrictions, travelled across the Bay of Bengal. They brought with them ideas of Indian kingship and governance, influencing regions such as the Mekong Delta, Thailand and the Malay Peninsula.

You’ve mentioned colonialism already, but are there any other reasons why ancient India’s impact on the history of human civilisation has been overlooked?

I do think that the number one reason is colonialism. Britain went to India, conquered it and dismissed it as a barbaric civilisation. And the attitude I mentioned earlier – reflected in Macaulay’s disregard for India’s cultural sophistication – lingered.

But in addition, history itself has been split up. The spread of Buddhism, Sanskrit and Arab numerals are treated as separate stories by different academics and museums. China, on the other hand, has done a better job of advancing its version of history, especially the romantic idea of the Silk Road.

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In my view, the Silk Road as an east–west phenomenon didn’t really exist until the Mongols punched an enormous hole through Eurasia, connecting the Mediterranean to the sea off China. This then enabled the likes of Marco Polo to travel with a single passport. Before that, trade was more of a relay, with goods gradually moving from one merchant to the next, sometimes taking 100 years to reach places such as Rome or Antioch from China.

The idea of a single, ancient road connecting east and west simply wasn’t based in fact. India, as shown by a new map of the distribution of Roman coin hoards just published by Professor Wilson, was the primary long-distance trading partner of the Roman empire. Rome had only an extremely vague under standing of the location of China.

This changed in the 13th century when the Mongols created a hostile border with India, effectively snapping the Golden Road. Then, as Persian intellectuals fled the Mongols and settled in Delhi from around the 13th century onwards, the cultural landscape of India shifted from a Sanskrit-speaking world to a Persianate one.

India is on track to become a 21st-century superpower. Is this region predisposed to be a geopolitical and cultural powerhouse?

Yes. It’s a great civilisation, with several unique traits. China was largely a single political unit throughout most of its history, though there were periods like the Warring States [c475–221 BC] when it fragmented. India, by contrast, experienced brief moments of unity under the Guptas, Mauryas and Mughals, but mostly remained a cultural unit divided into many small political fragments.

When Xuanzang arrived in India, he described it as a region of 70 states bounded by the ocean and the Himalayas. India doesn’t share China’s history of centralisation but has always had a strong sense of itself as a civilisation, a geographical unit and a spiritual centre, as evident in its earliest literature.

India, like Greece, has always been one of the places where humanity’s fundamental questions have been addressed: what are we doing here? Why are we here? How should we live? How do we count? How do we pray? What’s the point of life? Over half of the world’s population today lives in countries that were influenced by Indian religion and philosophy, including China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia and Siberia.

Despite this, the European perspective on civilisation overwhelmingly focuses on ancient Greece, overlooking India’s contributions. As far as we do know about India, we tend to know about the Mughals or the British in India. We don’t learn in our schools about the civilisations of ancient India.

This book aims to correct that omission, placing India back at the centre of global history. India has almost always been one of the world’s richest areas, alternating with China as the wealthiest. By the end of this century, India is expected to be one of the three largest economies, alongside the US and China. And it’s time we learned this stuff. We need to know this stuff. It’s a whole chapter of high civilisation that colonialism removed from the curriculum – and it’s time to put it back.

William Dalrymple is a historian, broadcaster, writer and cultural critic. He is currently a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He is the author of The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World (Bloomsbury, 2024)

This article was first published in the November 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine