The Golden Road

By William Dalrymple

William Dalrymple's The Golden Road is, at its heart, a love letter to Indian civilization. It is written with the enthusiasm of a lifelong admirer, but also with the rigor of a trained historian. The guiding impulse behind the book is a question that many Indians have asked themselves, at least half in jest: our temples, our music, our food, our literature are so rich—why haven't others adopted them wholesale? The British comedy sketch Goodness Gracious Me had a running gag about "Who discovered X? India." Dalrymple's book, though vastly more serious, carries the same spirit. It is a sustained attempt to show that India did, in fact, export its ideas, aesthetics, and sciences across half the world, even if we have forgotten the story.

The narrative begins with the Roman Empire. By the first century CE, India was Rome's great trading partner. The Senate, in tones of despair, declared that India was "the sink of all the empire's gold." This was no exaggeration. The densest hoards of Roman coins ever found outside Italy are in Tamil Nadu and Kerala—not in China, not in Persia, but in southern India. Pepper, silk, gems, and fine cottons flowed westward; coins and bullion flowed east. India's southern coastline was the hinge of this commerce, the first great opening of the Golden Road.

But trade was only one axis of transmission. Religion was the other, and here Dalrymple places the spotlight firmly on Buddhism. Before the Buddha, Indian religion was mostly Vedic—a world of hymns, fire rituals, and oral transmission. Temples as we know them did not exist. Then came Ashoka, the Maurya emperor who left an indelible mark. In the third century BCE, Ashoka built the first great stone stupas, erected rock edicts across the subcontinent, and sent emissaries as far afield as Sri Lanka and Central Asia. He effectively made Buddhism the state religion, partly for political reasons: its universal ethics of compassion were a unifying balm for a vast and diverse empire.

Buddhist monasteries soon doubled up as caravansaries along trade routes. They were safe houses for merchants, inns for pilgrims, and centers of literacy and record-keeping. They also redefined the relationship between religion and the sea. Vedic orthodoxy had frowned on ocean travel as a polluting act; Buddhism, more pragmatic, declared that to cross the sea was no sin. This seemingly small doctrinal shift unlocked maritime commerce across the Bay of Bengal and beyond.

Dalrymple lingers on a cultural turning point: for centuries, the Buddha was represented only in symbolic form—the empty throne, the wheel of dharma, the bodhi tree. It was considered improper to depict him in human likeness. But somewhere around the first centuries CE, sculptors in Gandhara and Mathura dared to give the Enlightened One a face. The serene, meditative image of the Buddha, now ubiquitous across Asia, was born.

From here, the book moves outward—to China, where the Indian story intersects with the astonishing tale of Wu Zetian, the only woman to rule China in her own right. Wu Zetian used Buddhism as a political instrument, invoking its universalist themes to justify the reign of a woman in a Confucian society. She bankrolled the construction of massive temples and statues, binding her rule to this imported Indian faith. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, who journeyed to India in the 7th century, became both a chronicler of India's scholarly world and an adviser to Wu Zetian herself.

If China represents one arm of this diffusion, Southeast Asia represents another. After the fall of Rome, Indian merchants turned eastwards. Their influence can still be seen in the names of cities—Ayutthaya (Ayodhya), Amarapura, and many others. The Khmer Empire at Angkor was built on Indian models, yet on a scale that dwarfed India itself. Angkor, with a million inhabitants, was a metropolis when London was a mere market town of 20,000. The Khmer kings adopted Sanskrit names—Suryavarman, Jayavarman—and built the largest Hindu and Buddhist temples ever constructed. The Ramayana and Mahabharata were embraced and localised, with temple friezes in Cambodia and Indonesia preserving not just the familiar stories of Rama and Krishna, but obscure episodes like the battle of Sunda and Upasunda. The Chola dynasty, when succession faltered, was even propped up by the Khmers—proof that these connections were not only cultural but political.

The second half of Dalrymple's narrative turns from architecture and trade to the life of the mind. Here, the focus is on India's intellectual contributions: the invention of zero, the decimal system, astronomy, and the argumentative traditions of its universities. Nalanda stands as the symbol of this world, with its nine-storied library, thousands of manuscripts, and students drawn from every corner of Asia.

The transmission of ideas westward is traced through the Arab world. Hindu numerals, carried by Arab scholars, became the basis of modern mathematics. The peaceful Christian reconquest of Toledo in Spain (1085 CE) allowed the translation of Arabic texts into Latin, which in turn reintroduced not only Greek and Roman learning but also Indian knowledge—astronomy, medicine, mathematics—into Europe. This was the hidden foundation of the Renaissance, though rarely acknowledged as such.

Dalrymple ends just before that Renaissance dawns, at the moment when Europe was about to take the knowledge it had borrowed, synthesized, and inherited—and then surge ahead. But his point is clear: the Golden Road was India's road as much as anyone's. The great ideas of India did not stay confined within its borders. Through trade, faith, and scholarship, they travelled—to Rome, to China, to Southeast Asia, to Arabia, and finally to Europe.

In tone, the book is a mixture of narrative sweep and admiration. At times, it reads like a more erudite version of the Goodness Gracious Me gag—"Who discovered zero? India." Yet behind the playfulness is a serious argument. Civilizations are not self-contained. They bleed into one another, absorb, reshape, and transmit. India's genius lay less in conquest than in osmosis—in the way its ideas seeped outward through pilgrims, traders, and texts.

Dalrymple's Golden Road reminds us that the world we inhabit is stitched together by such exchanges. If India once dazzled Rome with its spices and silks, its more enduring gift was numbers, narratives, and philosophies—treasures that continue to shape the global mind.