Director’ Remarks: Vimarsh talk on ‘The Golden Road: How Ancient India transformed the world’ by Dr William Dalrymple

Friends,

It is a great pleasure to welcome you to today’s discussion of Dr William Dalrymple’s latest book ‘The Golden Road: How Ancient India transformed the world’ published by Bloomsbury.

Mr Dalrymple is a renowned British historian whose previous books include White Mughals, The Last Mughal, and The Anarchy, which shed light on important periods of Indian history during the Mughal and British colonial rules. An award-winning author, journalist and academic, Mr Dalrymple has five honorary doctorates. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society and is a visiting fellow at Princeton and Oxford University.

Globally well known, Mr Dalrymple has made important contribution towards promoting the understanding of modern Indian history. He writes for several global newspapers including the Guardian, The New Yorker and The New York Review of the Books. He is the co-founder of the Jaipur literature festival and the co-host of popular podcast empire.

In his latest book, Mr Dalrymple focuses on India’s contribution to the transformation of the world. He writes, “out of India came not just pioneering merchants, astrologists, scientists and mathematicians, doctors and sculptors but also the holy men, monks and missionaries” who took the various strands of Indic religious thought culture and devotion abroad.

Given Mr Dalrymple’s global reach and popularity, the book will certainly help raise awareness around the world on how ideas emanating from India contributed to the transformation of the world. Unfortunately, the colonial historians and left-liberal historians of post-independent India deliberately undermined India’s role in shaping the ancient world.

Mr Dalrymple focuses on the Golden Road, which carried Indian influences across political boundaries, from India to the Roman Empire of India to the Eastern countries. As Mr Dalrymple writes,

“The Golden Road aims to highlight India’s often forgotten position as a crucial economic fulcrum, and civilisational engine, at the heart of the ancient and early medieval worlds and as one of the main motors of global trade and cultural transmission in early world history, fully on a par with and equal to China”.

It is high time that serious research is done into India’s engagement with the rest of the world over the last several millennia. The Chinese concept of the Silk Road has overshadowed the historical fact that India was well connected with East, West and North through maritime and land routes through which pilgrims and traders travelled uninterrupted for centuries, taking Indian philosophical, and cultural ideas to the foreign lands. The foreigners also use these routes to come to India in search of knowledge and riches. Some came as looters and invaders but were eventually absorbed into the vast Indian socio-cultural ocean. Some of them settled down and adopted Indian ways. The fact remains that India contributed by way of ideas to the growth of other civilisations. The imprint of Hinduism and Buddhism on South-East Asia is visible even today. The contribution of the Indian numeral system, mathematical, geometric, trigonometric, and astronomical ideas on world science and mathematics has not been fully acknowledged. The Golden Road tries to set the record straight.

As I was reading the book, I recalled Dr Motichandra’s seminal book Sarthavaha, written in 1953, that gives a detailed account of ancient India’s trading routes including those in North and South India. He focuses on Sarth and Sarthvaha. These were the people who helped traders, pilgrims and travellers to organise their journeys across India and to other parts of the world. What is interesting is that the book described in detail the Uttar Path (the northern route), the Dakshina Path (the southern route), the travellers of the Vedic period before it goes on to describe links with the Roman Empire and the travellers of the Gupta’s period. It extensively refers to Hindu, Jain and Buddhist literature.

Dr Motichandra was the Director of the Prince of Wales Museum, Mumbai. The book was published by Bihar Rashtriya Bhasha Parishad, Patna. Since it was written in Hindi, most English-speaking academics of post-independent India ignored it.

Last year, the VIF released 11 volumes titled ‘History of Ancient India’ edited by Prof Dilip K Chakrabarti. The VIF had also published the abridged and revised edition of the book India’s Contribution to World Thought and Culture originally published by Vivekananda Kendra. These works also dealt with India’s historical, cultural and trade ties with the ancient world.

The book Golden Road deals with the story of the spread of Indian cultural and religious influences to Tibet, Central Asia, China, Japan, Burma, Indo-China, Afghanistan, Ceylon, Nepal etc. The influence of Indian epic Ramayana and Mahabharata can be seen in South East Asia even today.

Mr Dalrymple has been described as a “master storyteller”. We are delighted that Mr William Dalrymple's book Golden Road takes the story forward.

Sh Raghvendra Singh, who helped organise this talk, has read the Golden Road. An author and historian, he is the former Secretary of the Ministry of Culture. He headed the National Archives of India (NAI). He had organised the exhibition Routes and Roots at the time of the G20 Summit meeting. Having read the book, Mr Raghvendra Singh will today discuss it after the author’s remarks.

I now request Mr William Dalrymple to take the floor.