THE idea of a Silk Road has a glamour associated with it which, William Dalrymple argues, is quite unjustified. The term did not appear until 1877 in German and until 1938 in English. More crucially, there was no through route from China to Constantinople until Genghis Khan swept away national boundaries with his ruinous empire over that extensive territory at the end of the 12th century.
The main route for trade before that period and for much of it afterwards was via a southern route, with India as the central player. Ships could carry five times the goods of convoys of pack animals, and the monsoon winds enabled goods to travel much quicker. They went from India to Arabian counties in the West, and from India to Indonesia and China in the East. This is Dalrymple’s golden road, on which trade was highly flourishing and lucrative and from which Europe benefited.
Dalrymple is less concerned with trade, however, than with the spread of religions, culture, and intellectual ideas: the Indosphere. The first half of the book focuses on Buddhism and Hinduism. The great Buddhist monastic centre at Nalanda, founded in the fifth century, drew monks from as far afield as China, and Buddhism spread eastwards, leaving, for example, one of the great religious buildings of the world, at Borobudur, in Java.
Strangely, this was then overtaken by Hinduism, which again left one of the great religious buildings of the world at Angkor Wat, in Cambodia. I would have liked Dalrymple’s thoughts about why the latter turned out to be more popular than the former. In the end, of course, both Buddhist and Hindu kingdoms were overtaken by the spread of Islam.
AlamyAn aerial view, which appears in the book, of what Dalrymple calls a “mighty quincunx of towers”: the Hindu temple at Angkor Wat, Cambodia
The second half of the book focuses on how the intellectual achievements of India were taken up, first, by the Abbasid empire, and then spread via Toledo in Spain to Western Europe. Above all, of course, we owe the Indo-Arabic numerical system and the concept of zero to Indian mathematicians, but also much in the way of geometry, algebra, astronomy, and architecture.
Dalrymple sees a line between the architecture and teaching methods of the monastery at Nalanda and the Oxford colleges that were founded in the 12th century. The method of statement, counterstatement, and conclusion, for example, associated with Thomas Aquinas, he sees first in that monastery of some 10,000 monks.
As always, Dalrymple writes with great knowledge and verve, and with telling details. For example, India was spared a devastating invasion by the Mongols because Genghis Khan saw a rhinoceros and took it as an omen that he should go west to Russia, not through India.
The Rt Revd Lord Harries of Pentregarth is a former Bishop of Oxford, and an Hon. Professor of Theology at King’s College, London. His latest book is Wounded I Sing: From Advent to Christmas with George Herbert (SPCK, 2024).
The Golden Road: How ancient India transformed the world
William Dalrymple
Bloomsbury £30
(978-1-4088-6441-8)
Church Times Bookshop £27