‘The Golden Road’ by William Dalrymple: An information-rich narration of knowledge in ancient India

In the year 773, a group of Brahmin astrologers from Ujjain arrived at the court of the Abbasid Empire (the third Caliphate of Islam) in the glittering Iraqi city of Baghdad. The visitors were carrying a rare manuscript called “The Great Sindhind”, a treatise on sciences, mathematics, astrology and astronomy composed in India. “It contains everything,” one Arab commentator wrote, “the Hindus had known about the spheres and stars.”

The manuscript was intended for the perusal of Khalid ibn Barmak, the illustrious chief vizier of the Abbasid court, who was remarkably fluent in Sanskrit. Barmakids, Khalid’s extended family, were originally from Afghanistan. They were the hereditary rectors at Naw Bahar, a large Buddhist monastery in Balkh that was also a great centre of learning. Barmakids were previously Buddhists and, giving in to the raiding parties of the Arab Umayyads, had converted to Islam.

On account of their passion for arts and sciences, Barmakids rose to become central figures in the caliphate. By the time the Umayyad state fell and Abbasids took over, the Barmakid scion commanded such an influential position that he would be assigned the responsibility for designing the architectural plan for Baghdad city, the new seat of an Islamic caliphate.

But what was the source of the higher potential that Barmakids seemed to be capable of? It was the Indian learning in mathematics, astrology, medicine and philosophy.

It is accounts like these that permeate William Dalrymple’s new book The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World, whose project is to show how ideas originating in India have historically influenced a wider swathe of the world around it, rewiring cultures and civilisations therein into a loosely tied “Indosphere”. With a lucid narration that jumps from the humid marshes of the Mekong Delta to the Byzantine-era basilicas of Sicily, The Golden Road evokes captivating images of a world enriched by the slow drip of seminal knowledge originating from India.

Indian connection to the Islamic caliphate

Indeed, stories abound in this volume. The story of Barmakids performing alchemy between Indian, Hellenistic and Persian knowledge systems in the Islamic heartland is fascinating for a number of revelations. Khalid’s intellect was a reflection of that of his father, a senior Barmakid who acquired education in Kashmir, another big centre of learning in South Asia of its time.

The passion for “Indian mathematics, sky-gazing and arts of celestial prediction” that Barmakids replicated in Baghdad is traced to the Indo-Gangetic plains. More than a century earlier, writes Dalrymple, it was here that these traditions had flourished under the Guptas, the Indian dynasty that was the first to blend calendrics, divination, arithmetic and astrology. The dynasty tapped into this learning to harness the power of Vedic deities so that they are personified in a chakravartin king, one who moves the wheels of law.

The way Dalrymple writes it, at the hospital that Barmakids had built in Baghdad, Indian physicians served in supervisory roles. Arab sources refer to one “Manka the Indian” who worked with Khalid’s son Yahya as a personal physician. The texts being studied regularly at the hospital were treatises such as the ‘Compendium on the Heart of the Eight Branches’ that Vagbhata had composed in 7th century Kashmir. It was this knowledge of arts and sciences that then made its way to Umayyad, Spain. After the Spanish Reconquista, in which the Christian kingdoms seized control over Islamic Spain, Europeans accessed this vital scholarship which led to the period of Renaissance blossoming in Europe.

Buddhism as mercantile trade

Defying the Brahmanical injunctions against sea-faring, the Mauryan Emperor Ashoka (died 232 BC) sent his envoys on evangelical missions fanning out across the world. Dalrymple talks about the way these emissaries would help plant Buddhist ideas that offered a “moral path to the cessation of both desire and suffering” in distant lands.

Those territories included a wide patchwork of Greek satrapies left behind by Alexander’s invasions in Central Asia. There is some evidence that Ashoka had experienced remarkable success in these missionary campaigns. In Turkey, an inscription associated with the Greek ruler Antiochus of Commagene has the impression of the Ashokan rock edicts on it.

As Buddhism started to crystallise into more physically perceptible forms, it produced a new iconography, giving us – among many riches – the first images of Vedic gods. Until this period, Hindu Gods were venerated in their anionic forms.

In the Deccan, the Buddhist monasteries built into the caves along the shorelines matured into networks of maritime commerce, connecting the Indian trade guilds with the foreign markets. This way, a wave of Indian culture would wash ashore in places such as Egypt, where archaeologists – digging at the temple of an Egyptian deity in 2022 – found a large Buddha bust.

The findings are testimony to the crowning success of the close commercial ties that ancient India shared with the Roman Empire (ended 480 AD) of which Egypt once was a part. A unique papyrus document unearthed in Egypt suggests that trade with India accounted for one-third of the entire revenue of the Roman exchequer.

At Egyptian ports, Indian merchants cultivated liaisons with Roman traders which opened their access to European markets. In Europe, traders racking up fortunes from the pepper trade with India would go on to commission a mosaic of an Indian-looking Goddess on the walls of a Roman villa in Piazza Armerina in Sicily that dates back to the 4th century.

Inroads into the Transoxiana

In the period of Kushanas (ended 375 AD), who took over the territories formerly ruled by Greek Macedonians, Indic culture would reach the farthest recesses of Central Asia, contends Dalrymple.

The Kushan kings blended Greek art with Indian motifs. Kujula Kadphises, the first Kushan Emperor, struck coins with some of the earliest images of Lord Shiva along with his trident – an element that’s likely to have been borrowed from imagery associated with Greek deities Hercules or Poseidon.

Further territorial expansions by his grandson Vima acted as a catalyst for Indic culture’s diffusion into the southern stretches of the Eurasian Steppe and Chinese Central Asia. One third-century historical source refers to the presence of the Tamil Monastery in Old Termez in Uzbekistan. At the ruins of Mes Aynak in Afghanistan, there is a chapel dedicated to the Hindu goddess Durga.

It is probably these reservoirs of Indian culture that became important stopovers for Chinese monks crossing the Hindu Kush on their way to India. One such monk was Xuanzang whose quest for the authentic Buddhist scriptures led him to Nalanda University in Bihar.

The impact on the Chinese

The story of Xuanzang as narrated by Dalrymple is certainly the highlight of the book. It will definitely go down as one of the most authoritative and vivid portrayals of the peripatetic Chinese scholar.

Every relic that Xuanzang would bring from India to Tang-ruled China would become a shrine of its own. He wrote his exhaustive annals about his experience in India, popularising Indic knowledge among the Chinese and setting the stage for the cross-fertilisation of ideas between the two cultures.

This inter-mixing of thoughts would reach fruition during the reign of Empress Wu Zetian, the only woman ruler of China. She offered full-throated patronage to Buddhism in the country, recasting its iconography into the present sinicised forms. The images of Buddha began to be crafted into the features of her deceased husband king.

Wu Zetian would also summon Indian monks to her court and direct them to produce ancient texts that would appear to legitimise her rule. So deeply influenced was she with the Buddhist philosophy that Wu Zetian proclaimed it to be the official religion in China during her reign, and enacted the Ashokan edicts through which she exercised power. As Dalrymple writes, the Indic Renaissance bloomed in the heart of China

The Golden Road traverses a wide historical canvas. The narration is packed with so much information that Dalrymple’s evocative writing, his own voice – which is what made his previous books like The City of Djinns extremely popular – are sometimes completely missing. What’s left is a story told in an uncharacteristically matter-of-fact way, quite unlike what one might expect from Dalrymple.

The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World, William Dalrymple, Bloomsbury.