India’s impact on trade and thought: Dalrymple’s stunning retelling

Within the pages of his book, The Golden Road, William Dalrymple shuffles the largely traversed tale of the Silk Road. Here, it is India, its contributions to trade and culture, which are foregrounded. Dalrymple’s historical imagination enterprisingly puts forward a thesis that between 250BC and AD1200, India was part of a wide sphere he refers to as the ‘Indosphere’, which touches territories as far as the Roman Empire and most of East Asia.

Monsoon-sailing Indian merchants, however, did not empty their robes after trading one good on each planet. They went home, new ships, new caravans advancing well-inland, rags redolent with the earth’s odours. Burdened with such goods as spices, textiles, and jewellery, in time commerce became a defining feature of the continent.

But Dalrymple’s tale and its affairs extend beyond the trading relations in question. He presents India in its golden years and captures its ethos in a way that ensures that such a lesson begins with the audience who reads his poems. Some of these lessons are the promotion of Buddhism, an offshoot religion from India to China, Japan, Korea and their way of life, and the destruction of the Indosphere as ancient conquerors reach into South Asia.

Shaping European thought

In the same and similar terms, Hinduism and Sanskrit culture kept the attention of the Southeast Asian royalty who incorporated them and those civilisations exist in the form of modern Myanmar and other states in the region.

And Dalrymple elucidates that its greatest citadel of Buddhism and Hinduism isn’t in India, rather it is located in Java and Angkor Wat in Cambodia respectively.

Taking this point of view, Dalrymple reveals new facets of the Indian role in world history, expanding well beyond trade in his work.

The book also takes us through India’s remarkable contributions to science and math. Innovations like the decimal system, algebra, and even the game of chess all have their roots in India and travelled across the world, eventually shaping European thought and development.

India’s far-reaching influence

In one particularly engaging chapter, Dalrymple traces India’s trade routes with the Roman Empire, emphasising that maritime connections, driven by the monsoon winds, were the first real links between Europe and India. Roman elites craved Indian spices, textiles, and jewellery, creating a thriving trade that flowed across seas and centuries.

Dalrymple also introduces us to the fascinating Kushan Empire, which ruled parts of Central Asia after the Greeks. The Kushans blended Greek and Indian styles, with one of their emperors, Kujula Kadphises, minting coins that featured Lord Shiva alongside symbols inspired by Greek gods like Hercules and Poseidon.

Through Dalrymple’s storytelling, The Golden Road offers a rich, human account of India’s far-reaching influence, showing how it shaped trade, religion, culture, and science in ways that still resonate today.

Ahmad Nazir is a UAE based freelance writer, with a degree in education from the Université de Montpellier in Southern France