So much of The Golden Road, not necessarily in fact, but in sentiment, is about the feeling that many Indians grew up with: the idea that ancient India was a kind of “golden bird” and the civilizational center of the ancient world. Did this belief spark your interest in the hypothesis that eventually led to the book?
I think the opposite is true. So much of the popular understanding of this sort of subject is often confused with talk of nuclear weapons in the Mahabharata at Kurukshetra, or rishis generating the internet by power of their meditation, or plastic surgery in the Vedas, and so on. And I was aware that there really hadn’t been anything since maybe AL Basham in 1954 (Wonder That Was India), which really tried to pull together the whole thing in a single volume. There is, I think, a terrific sense of frustration both in India and in the Indian diaspora that India has a great civilization which is incredibly ancient, which has been wounded. But it’s quite dislocated from history books. And therefore, you end up with figures like the Indian uncle from Goodness Gracious Me saying, you know, “Leonardo da Vinci? Indian. Jesus Christ? Indian.” … This is partly why a quarter of this book is footnotes and primary sources. I’ve tried to anchor it so solidly in fact is because this is a much mythologized, sometimes politically mythologized, subject, and I think it’s an important job to try and have a holistic look at the whole subject.
I also feel that there has been a huge amount of separating out this story into different silos, which are studied completely separately. The well-known story of the Indianization and Sanskritization of Southeast Asia is an example of something which is widely known, but it’s often mythologized by the nationalists and turned into a story of military conquest, which, with the exception of the Chola raids in 1016CE and 1025CE, it wasn’t. It’s an entire civilization diffusing outwards without military conquest. It’s an empire of the spirit, not an empire of the sword. In 6th-7th century Java and Cambodia, you have not just the Sanskrit language becoming the language of court and diplomacy, but you have the Shilpa Shastras telling people how to build, the Natya Shastra telling people how to dance, the writings of Aryabhatta and Brahmagupta, an understanding of zero.
The great epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, are passing and yet passing in a weird way. So, it’s a world where you get female Brahmins officiating in royal temples, and everyone eating pork. You get emperors depicting themselves as Vishnu or putting their face on a statue of Vishnu — which, as far as I know, you don’t get anywhere in India — and their wives as Durga. It’s what Tagore nicely said when he went to Angkor, “Everywhere I could see India, yet I could not recognize it.” That’s the nature of this passage — it doesn’t pass so as to create a simulacrum. At every stage, people are choosing what they want. Often, the early Hindu kings in Southeast Asia are choosing the idea of Hindu kingship because it bigs them up, it gives them more power. They’re using the Brahmins for administrative ability and numeracy and literacy just as much as the Brahmins are using them for wealth and status.
Elsewhere, the (Chinese) Empress Wu Zetian is using the Buddhists as a way of getting rid of the Confucians and the Taoists… During the period of this book, I don’t think there was a Silk Road in any meaningful sense, certainly as an East-West motorway, it didn’t exist. The whole story of Buddhist penetration along the trade routes into China, past Dunhuang to Xian, has become part of the story of the Silk Roads, often put in that gallery in a big international museum like the Met or the British Museum. The current British museum show on the Silk Roads, which I’ve written about, it’s magnificent, but it leaves out India, totally ignores India, and yet, a lot of it is about Buddhist monks passing backwards and forwards.
Then, the whole story of Indian mathematics, Brahmagupta and Aryabhatta, which every Indian knows and no one in the West has ever heard of. (I gave this lecture at Oxford and Cambridge over the last month. You asked for a show of hands, and three people, all Indians, put their hands up.) And that is told as part of the history of science or history of mathematics.
So, these things are separated out. And it seems to me that in some senses, it is one story. India is like a rock thrown into a still pool, and these ripples diffuse out in all directions to the Red Sea, to beyond, and then the other side to Angkor wat and to Bali and Java and even the Philippines.
Many parts of the book are based on recent discoveries such as the early sections about the extent of India’s trade with the Roman Empire. In 2022, archaeologists found the head and torso of a Buddha statue at the excavations at Berenike, on the shores of the Red Sea in Egypt — the first to be found to the west of Afghanistan. There were also, you write, “what the excavators described as ‘just tons’ of Indian finds, including gems and pearls, woven mats and baskets, teak from Kerala and even the bones and skulls of elephants and monkeys — specifically rhesus and bonnet macques from India…” Has the evidence of India’s importance in the ancient world been stacking up over the decades or is much of this new?
There are some specific areas where there’s been suddenly an acceleration. For example, the Berenike you mentioned — those excavations have been going on for about 20 years, but in the last four or five years, they’ve had an extraordinary run. They found Hindu gods, they found the famous Buddha statue, they found a lot of ostraca with camel names and so on, on it, even a pet monkey, someone’s pet monkey turned up last year.
And there’s also been, at the same time, PJ Cherian’s work in Muziris (excavations in the Kerala village Pattanam, “the probable site of Berenike’s Indian counterpart”). So, you have the mirror port to the other side. And so now, as well as having Syrian Christians and Jews in Kerala, we have Buddhists and Hindus on the other end of the Red Sea.
There’s been a lot of work on the Barmakids… (The Barmakids were a powerful family under the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad for four generations. Khalid ibn Barmak was the chief vizier of the caliph. His son Yahya ibn Barmak was the tutor of the future caliph Harun al-Rashid. And his son, the last Barmakid vizier, Ja‘afar was Harun’s best friend. Before converting to Islam and moving to Baghdad, the Barmakids had been hereditary rectors of what was once the “greatest Buddhist centre of learning in what is now Afghanistan.” The era of their influence in Baghdad “coincided with what some scholars have called ‘the Indian phase of early Islam’.”)
A lot of early scholars thought they were Zoroastrian magi, not Buddhists. Much of this chapter is derived from the brilliant detective work of Kevin van Bladel who found the missing link between the intellectual world of India and the Arabs.
Was this book sparked off by disagreements with Peter Frankopan?
I think it is possible to have historical disagreements with a close friend and not fall out about it. I loved his Silk Roads book (The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, 2015), but it does have a small India-shaped hole in it.
Did you think that when you first read it?
I didn’t notice it at all when I first read it because I loved it and I gave it a rave review, which is out there in The Guardian…
One of the first things that happened (in 2014), when I was about a year into The Anarchy (2019) — I hadn’t started writing yet — I did this little trip down to Ajanta. And there in Cave 10 were these frescoes I didn’t know. I knew Ajanta well. I’d written about it endlessly and had visited first aged 18 in 1984. I couldn’t understand why there were these images that I’d never seen before because it’s one of the most photographed sites… It turned out that this cave had been conserved very badly by the Italians – under the Nizam – who not only cleaned it but then put shellac, which is a sticky kind of varnish, that quickly attracted batshit. The cave was just black. And so, from the very earliest period of photography of Ajanta, there are no images of what are actually, it turns out, the oldest Buddhist paintings in the world.
So I knew at the time I was writing The Anarchy that I wanted to write some sort of Early Buddhist book as I originally conceived it… Then I went off after COVID-19 to Southeast Asia, and I think it was while I was in Angkor Wat, looking at all that, that I received the WhatsApp picture of the Berenike Buddha, which turned up out of the ground, three years ago. And that’s when the whole thing came together. The idea there was something as far west of the Red Sea, but also where I was in parts of the east in Angkor.
…The biggest challenge of this book was that a lot of the archaeology is very thrilling if you’re an archaeologist, but it’s extremely dry on its own. The great challenge was to try and find enough biographical and narrative elements to bring the story alive. My first really exciting discovery was Wu Zeitian.
She’s such a wild character. How she executes the king’s first wife and his chief concubine! And when the dying chief concubine curses her — (“I pray that in my future lives I shall return as a cat, and Wu will be a mouse, and that from life to life I shall tear her throat out”) — Wu Zetian banishes all the cats in all of her palaces… Had you heard of her before?
I think I’d maybe heard of her and was aware of her, but I certainly didn’t know the gory and sexy details of that story…The other great mystery is how far we’re reading her through Confucian and male eyes. But clearly, she was a tough cookie. We know from detailed Chinese records that she went through, what, 38 chief ministers in the course of her reign and many of them committed suicide.
There’s one particular scholar who’s written brilliantly on her — Tansen Sen. His works were the ones that set me onto that trail… At no point does India have more influence in China ever again, ever before or ever again… The way that she uses Buddhism…
The heart of the book is Buddhism, and…
I wouldn’t agree with that. I think it’s one third of the book.
But it shows up a lot elsewhere. India’s influence on the Arab world for instance — how Khalid ibn Barmak helped plan Baghdad as a circular city probably inspired by the mandala. And the spread through time and space of the idea of Buddhist monastery universities designed around a courtyard plan (“of a vaulted cloister giving on to the rooms for the students and their teachers,” which is what early madrasas may have been modelled on — from 11th century Persia, then across North Africa, to Spain and Paris, and eventually the courts of Oxford and Cambridge in the mid 13th century)…
I think there is a right-wing conspiracy theory going through Twitter that I have been subtly undermining Hinduism by glorifying Buddhism… But this is not a book about India. This is a book about the diffusion of Indian ideas. And clearly Buddhism is the Indian idea which has affected most people outside India….The whole story of Hinduism and Sanskrit in Southeast Asia is an equally remarkable story, even though it affected arguably a smaller number of people.
READ MORE: Review: The Golden Road by William Dalrymple
How much of the pushback were you anticipating?
I have to say, I was very nervous about this book in every way, actually, not just in the cultural aspect of it. My brothers read it and thought it was niche and slightly dull. My kids thought it was less colourful and less accessible… And lots of people said, you know, this will do well in India. But don’t expect anyone to be interested in Britain. And astonishingly, it went higher in the best selling list than any book of mine since In Xanadu (1989).
Saudamini Jain is an independent journalist. She lives in New Delhi.
