For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilisation, creating around it a vast empire of ideas. Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics and mythology blazed a trail across the world, along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific.
This is the premise of award-winning historian-author William Dalrymple’s latest insightful tome ‘The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World’, which is released this month. Dalrymple, who divides his time between India and the UK, is currently on tour across British cities to highlight the key messages from his historical account that hopes to highlight India’s rightful status at the forgotten heart of the ancient world.
The author draws from a lifetime of scholarship to highlight India's oft-forgotten position as the heart of ancient Eurasia. For the first time, he gives a name to this spread of Indian ideas that transformed the world as ‘The Golden Road’. From the largest Hindu temple in the world at Angkor Wat in Cambodia to the Buddhism of China, from the trade that helped fund the Roman Empire to the creation of the numerals we use today – including the quintessential zero, India transformed the culture and technology of its ancient world and, as a result, our world today as we know it.
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“That is not in any English school text but without it we cannot understand how we get are numbers today,” said Dalrymple, with reference to the early evolution of the Hindu-Arabic numerals at an event in London this week.
“It’s an extraordinary absence in our education system and may be a lingering fragment of the attitudes that a ‘single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’ of [Lord] Macaulay,” he said, with reference to the colonial influence on education in India.
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