After writing a string of award-­winning books on India, the historian and literary phenomenon William Dalrymple has forsaken the glamour of the Mughals and the murky dealings of the English East India Company to look beyond the Indian subcontinent and make the case for the existence of a wider, pre-Islamic ‘Indosphere’. His aim in The Golden Road is, he says, ‘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.’ 

This will go down well in an assertive and increasingly Sinophobic India, where Dalrymple is largely based. It will in particular be music to the ears of the nation’s ubiquitous technocrats. It also chimes with the marginalisation of Indian Muslims and the ‘saffron-washing’ of the country’s Islamic heritage by Hindu zealots of Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Dalrymple writes:

This entire spectrum of early Indian influence has always been there, hiding in plain sight in the Buddhism of Sri Lanka, Tibet, China, Korea and Japan, in the place names of Burma and Thailand, in the murals and sculptures of the Ramayana and Mahabharata in Laos and Cambodia, in the Hindu gods, rituals and temples of Bali. Yet somehow the Golden Road linking all these diverse forms and geographies into … a vast Indosphere stretching all the way from the Red Sea to the Pacific, has never been recognised as the link … and up to now has never been given a name.

The name Dalrymple puts forward, ‘Golden Road’, may not help. As he defines it, the ‘Golden Road’ was no more an actual highway than the elusive Silk Road. Rather, it was a network of monsoonal sea routes. Some enabled trade and cultural contacts between the Indian subcontinent and the gold-rich polities of Southeast Asia, others between India and the gold-surplus territories of the Mediterranean, most notably the Roman province in Egypt. Imagine the subcontinent as a many-limbed Hindu deity with outstretched arms and that’s the ‘Golden Road’. 

As a term for this vast sector of the globe, ‘Indosphere’ has pedigree. It appears to be a term acceptable to non-Indians for what used to be called ‘Greater India’ or ‘Further India’. Ideologues of the BJP still promote the Greater India theme, although they are wary of the term ‘Indosphere’. Originally coined to signify areas influenced by languages derived from Sanskrit, ‘Indo­sphere’ might now evoke the kinds of political and cultural associations of ‘Anglosphere’ and ‘Sinosphere’.

Whatever the name, the concept is well established. In the 1920s, it attracted considerable support from a network of nationalist historians from Bengal headed by Rabindranath Tagore. A Greater India Society was founded as part of the nationalist movement, a journal of its proceedings was published until 1959 and group tours were organised to parts of Southeast Asia to substantiate the linkages explored here by Dalrymple. Last year the Dutch historian Yorim Spoelder published a forensic study of the concept in Visions of Greater India, a work which would surely have appeared in The Golden Road’s bibliography had it been available when Dalrymple was writing the book.

A more masterful and accessible survey of a ‘world-changing’ traffic in commodities, creeds, scientific insights and artistic conventions than The Golden Road would be hard to find. The only surprise is that it has taken Dalrymple so long to address the subject. No one is better qualified to do so. 

The Sumerians were among the earliest recipients of the subcontinent’s exports. The Mesopotamian city-states obtained lapis lazuli and probably cotton from the cities of the Indus valley civilisation in the fourth to second millennia BC. ‘Etched carnelian beads from Gujarat … turn up in the Royal Tombs of Ur,’ Dalrymple writes. ‘Teak from Malabar, red Indian marble and ivory’ also reached the city. Such weighty goods could only have come by sea, and Dalrymple cites ample evidence of ‘a very early Indian merchant diaspora’ accompanying them: a cuneiform tablet mentions a whole village of Indians in what is now Iraq, an Ur king claimed to be able to speak their language and Indian DNA ‘turns up in a surprising number of the bones excavated from this period in Mesopotamia’. 

By the first millennium BC, the trade in Indian commodities had spread further afield. Indian diamonds ‘are believed to have cut the stones of the pyramids’ and grains of Indian pepper have been found in the mummified nostrils of the no doubt sneeze-prone Pharaoh Rameses II. Eastward across the Bay of Bengal, the process of exchange saw the introduction to the subcontinent of ‘crops later regarded as quintessentially Indian such as ginger, cinnamon, sandalwood, bananas and rice’. Southeast Asian sites have yielded gemstones, charms and ornaments of Indian provenance. ‘Around this time,’ reports Dalrymple, ‘there is evidence of Indian glassmakers setting up workshops on the Isthmus of Kra.’

The breadth of Dalrymple’s research is a revelation and a delight. In addressing the Indian trade with Egypt via the Red Sea, he extracts clues from such texts as the first-century-AD Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, though he relies more on the archaeological evidence – ivory carvings, Buddha statuettes – yielded by recent excavations of the Red Sea’s Ptolemaic ports. In the Chennai Government Museum he dusts off sculptural panels salvaged from a fourth-century stupa at Amaravati (today in Andhra Pradesh) to reveal scenes depicting the reception in India of a delegation from the Ethiopian kingdom of Axum (other panels from the same site are housed in the British Museum). ‘I don’t believe these images of envoys from Axum have previously been identified or published,’ Dalrymple ventures. 

For the Romans, India’s big attraction was the supply of pepper. The Greek geographer Strabo estimated that, from one Red Sea port, 120 vessels a year made the round trip to the pepper emporiums of Kerala. Pliny the Elder feared that payments for the condiment were bankrupting Rome. According to Dalrymple, more golden denarii have been found in peninsular India than anywhere else except Italy. 

But at the heart of his book lie less tangible spin-offs of this traffic, most notably the diffusion throughout Asia of ideas and belief systems developed in early India. In everything from medicine and mathematics to linguistics, metallurgy, astronomy and iconography, the civilisational legacy of the ‘Indosphere’ can indeed compare with the Sinosphere’s. It was Indian monks who introduced Buddhism to China via Central Asia (here Dalrymple’s ‘Golden Road’ flirts with James Elroy Flecker’s ‘Golden Road to Samarkand’). From China, Buddhism spread to Korea and Japan. Buddhism’s most sensational legacy, however, resulted from the later widening of Indian influence to Southeast Asia by sea. Borobudur in Java, a monumental nine-storey mandala, is, says Dalrymple, ‘the greatest Buddhist structure ever built’. Its scale is rivalled only by that of Cambodia’s Angkor Wat, ‘the largest religious structure of any sort constructed anywhere in the world’ (the area within its moat is ‘four times the size of the entire Vatican City’). Neither is typically Indian, both being more extensive and complex than anything created in India itself. 

Inevitably there are omissions: Myanmar is largely overlooked while Bali, possessing the only significant surviving Hindu culture in Southeast Asia, merits just a single mention. What Tagore called ‘the Greater India outside India’ knew no boundaries. Neither does this enthralling study.