Review by K.S.Loganathan
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024
Dalrymple’s magnum opus, his latest book “The Golden Road” , tackles the theme of how the Indian Ocean maritime trade, from 250 BCE to 1200 CE, between the patchwork of kingdoms in the subcontinent and its neighbors to the west and east ,constituted an “Indosphere”,a cultural zone that spread across its political frontiers where ideas and arts followed trade and transformed everything for the better. He admits that the term has not been recognized as a connected region stretching from the Hindu Kush to the Pacific .Throughout the book he refers to the knowledge and religious systems as ‘Indian’ or ‘Indic’, representing the soft power of a cluster of kingdoms in the South Asian region that would become a nation state only several centuries later.
India’s location at the Centre of the Asian land mass with the Indian Ocean to its south and its great network of navigable sea lanes and river ports , together with the Asian tropical monsoon trade winds, made maritime trade between the Middle East, India and Southeast Asia faster and more economical compared to land routes .India was a crucial economic fulcrum and civilizational engine at the heart of the ancient and early medieval worlds. The influence of religion ,the arts, science and technology, astronomy and astrology, yoga ,Ayurveda, Sanskrit language and literature came to dominate Asia where over half the world’s population lives today. Trade with the Western Roman Empire flourished after Egypt was added under Caesar and the Mediterranean became a Roman lake.
Until the fifth century CE, the booming Indo-Mediterranean trade brought great prosperity to the merchants and financed the growth of Indian Buddhist monastic movement in the west coast and this helped spread Buddhism overseas. Ancient India had a strong shipbuilding tradition ,with sturdy ocean- going sailing ships capable of carrying 1000 passengers or 3000 amphorae ,which could undertake round trips to the Red Sea or the South China Sea. The Buddhist monasteries managed profitable mines and undertook financing and commercial activities ,which enabled them to establish enclaves in Afghanistan from which the Indian knowledge systems spread out across the Hindu Kush.
Under the Kushans, trade and cultural exchanges flourished; a massive cultural, religious and iconographical flow happened into Central Asia and China. Mahayana Buddhist texts from India were carried over into China by the Indian monk Kumarajiva in 384 , by Bodhidharma, said to be a Pallava prince in 504, and by the Chinese scholar Xuanzang who studied in Nalanda during the reign of Emperor Harshavardhan who returned to China in 645, and by Gautama Siddharta in 664 ,all of whom helped to create an Indic Renaissance at the heart of China. Buddhism replaced Confucianism as the court religion of China during the reign of the remarkable Wu Zetian, the first and only female Emperor of China.
In the fifth century CE, when Imperial Rome’s trade with India collapsed as a result of a Persian blockade and the loss of Red Sea to the Arabs, Indian traders turned their attention to Southeast Asia, exchanging glass beads, textiles and metal goods, for spices ,gold, camphor and other produce of the region. Some trade continued with the Sasanian Persians and Ethiopian Axum Empire, both of which were then at their peak. The new empires of Southeast Asia grown rich on trade were clones of the Hindu kingdoms, but they amassed the resources to develop Indic ideas more extravagantly than any of the smaller Indian kingdoms could. Srivijaya , a thalassocracy based in Palembang ,became an important trading point and cultural intermediary between the Pallavas and the Middle Kingdom. Borobudur in Indonesia ,and Angkor Wat in Cambodia were the prime examples of superb Buddhist and Hindu architecture based on Indic designs.There was a significant influx of Brahmins who brought in Sanskrit and the sastras, as well as a varied mercantile diaspora into the region. From the early eighth century, there was the increasingly stiff competition faced by the Indian traders from Arabo-Persian traders for the Southeast Asian market: as it turned out, by the fourteenth century, Islam would be last great cultural export to Indonesia.
Toward the west, the Abbasid Caliphate in 762 absorbed Brahmagupta’s book on astronomy with the help of scholars and astrologers and laid the foundations of Islamic mathematics and astronomy. It was followed by Ayurveda, chess and the Indian system of numerals from 1 to 0. These reached Europe, after translation into Latin three hundred years later, after the Crusades. Of course, as Indic knowledge was absorbed , the recipients in turn made adaptations and applied it to their advantage.
The Indosphere finally broke down in the 11-13 th centuries, due to conquest and settlement of the Turkish invaders, and the influx of Persian refugees from Central Asia after the Mongol expansion, which linked the area between the Mediterranean and the China Sea under a single Khan via a land route. Sanskrit ,the lingua franca , was replaced by Persian ,and the Hindu rulers with Muslim sultans.
My Views
The book is 600 pages with numerous color images, maps, references ,bibliography and notes covering over 200 pages. The level of detail is astonishing .It fills the gaps in our history curriculum. The author develops the concept of the Indosphere and gives credit where it is due. His focus on the Indian Ocean Sea routes is timely ,as the Indo-Pacific region is set to become the battleground for great power rivalry in the decades to come and the logistics of commodity transport moves front and Centre .However, it is difficult to imagine ancient India with its discrete kingdoms as a naval power ; there is not a single sailor like Columbus or Captain Cook , nor a single ship named in the book. The ancient naval ships mainly protected coastal trade and ferried troops to the mainland conflict zones for the major dynasties. Only the Pallavas and the Cholas sent overseas expeditions to conquer islands; no naval battles fought by the northern Indian dynasties has yet come to light. As late as the 17th century, the European powers could easily establish trading centres in ports through naval power and the Mughals had to concede trading rights to their own detriment, when powered boats came into vogue .It is a story for another day. Dalrymple names no merchant guilds or the captains of export-import business either , but he does cite a few references. He also makes no mention of the only known Sanskrit text on shipbuilding- the ‘Yuktikalpataru’ compiled by King Bhoja of Malwa in the 11th century. However it is a delight for an Indian reader to go through the achievements of ancient India and understand how the sheer power of these ideas shaped the world; the book well describes how it happened.
