William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How India transformed the world

 

Ashoka Pillar at Vaishali, Bihar, India (c250 BCE) [Wikipedia]

After the excellence of Dalrymple’s The Anarchy (2019), it proved a real challenge to get through The Golden Road (2024). It might have sold more copies than the earlier book, but it is a much less entertaining read; it’s not so easy to follow the vast canvas. In this book, Dalrymple has taken on subjects well outside his core territory. His thesis is that India exported religion, culture, and science, during the period from the Buddha (C5 BCE) to around 1250, not that he tells you explicitly these parameters. Dalrymple is a great narrative historian, but not all histories make for good narratives, and this book is an example. Within a few days of finishing it, I could remember only a few key individuals, such as the monk Xuangzang. History of science is not his forte, and I feel there as an element of uncertainty about his arguments that is revealed by the vast number of footnotes (there are around 98 pages of footnotes for 289 pages of text). Referencing your sources is a good principle, but here the subject is too vast, both by location and by subject, for Dalrymple to keep in manageable proportions, and the endless footnotes suggest he hasn’t quite mastered the (largely secondary) sources. He draws on a few primary sources, but many of the references are to other secondary works (inevitable, given that he is covering India, the Middle East, China, and Southeast Asia over a period of 1,000 years).

The book describes well the transmission of Buddhism via traders and wealthy donors (who paid for the large number of sculptures and buildings across SE Asia) – not the way I imagined early Buddhism at all.

perhaps counter-intuitively for a faith that embraced poverty and renunciation as an ideal, it was spread around the globe most effectively by wealthy merchants engaged in trade.[p42]

To give an example of the strength and weakness of the book, here is a quote that had me scratching my head:

But just as it was the conquest of northern India by the Kushans that opened the way for the Buddhist conquest of China, so it was the Umayyad Arab conquest of Central Asia, and its absorption into the wider Islamic world, that opened the way for Indian learning to seduce the western mind with its brilliance and sophistication. [p246]

Even if you are familiar with the Kushans and the Umayyad conquest, which I am not, you will find this proposition contrary to your expectations. Dalrymple is stating that in both cases, India was conquered, and yet its ideas were exported. That may have been the case (take the Roman conquest of Greece), but it requires some explanation.

The big questions I have from the text are around these cultural spreads. Why was Buddhism so popular outside India, when it did not spread even across the whole of India? Why did Jainism never gain significant followers outside India? And then, why did Buddhism start to be replaced after around 1200 in China and SE Asia? As a historian, Dalrymple is of course dependent on his sources, but these questions I think deserve answering.  

A few notes on the e-book (Kindle) edition

• Uses CE/BCE in the text, but AD/BC on the paperback cover
• I am reading the e-book and there don’t appear to be any illustrations. As often happens with e-book editions, there are credits for photographs, but not a photo to be seen. Nor does this edition have any maps.
• The index has a very strange layout, not helpful at all. Here are the first few entries:

• Readers use page numbers to get some idea of the type of reference, but if all the references are to “here”, the reader has no clues whatever – are these references found close together, in one chapter, or widely separated?
• The book has ten chapters, and as often found in pop history books, the chapter titles tell you little or nothing about what the chapter is about; the main coverage of the monk Xuangzang, who travelled from China to India in search of Buddhist learning, is covered in the chapter “The Sea of Jewels”.

All in all, Dalrymple is a fine historian, and all credit to him for using art and architecture as a way in to periods of history about which I for one know very little. It could have been better organised, but I am grateful for the insights and analysis provided.