Book review: The Golden Road by William Dalrymple

THE GOLDEN ROAD by William Dalrymple, Bloomsbury Publishers.

If I call this a real feelgood book and you ask why, I shall offer you the subtitle: How ancient India transformed the world, it says. And before you raise that skeptical eyebrow, let me remind you that this author could write the manual for the innards of a vacuum cleaner and still have us read every word avidly.

Here Dalrymple  posits that India`s connections to both East and West had laid the Golden Road many years before China`s Silk Road became a major trading route. Then he backs this claim with an impressive quantity of archaeological and historical research presented as clear evidence.

By the time you are done reading of Buddhism`s spread across Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Java, Korea, Japan, all the way into China; how Hindusim cut a swathe through southeast Asia, culminating in the greatest Indic temple in the world Angkor Wat ; how Indian mathematical and astronomical theories mad e their way westwards to eventually reach Europe; how India exported  so much be it gold, ivory, beads, silk, spices, wild animals, and wielded so much influence in the art, music, dance, literature of the day, you are not only convinced that we were indeed a trading superpower back in the day, you also feel a fresh swell of pride at how adeptly India used its soft powers to influence royalty, aristocracy and the common man across the world.

Don`t read it as a chest-thumping exercise. Read it to reflect on what we were.

One telling paragraph starts thusly: History shows that India has always been at its most creative and influential when it is at its most connected, plural, hybrid, open and receptive to new ideas from its neighbours, when it represents the cohabitation, not a clash, of civilisations.

There you go.

 

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