aAfter the Roman conquest of Egypt in 30 BCE, at the height of the Roman Empire's power, Indian luxury goods suddenly became available to Europeans in unprecedented quantities. No one could resist it. So much gold and silver flowed into India to pay for these goods that Pliny the Elder complained that the subcontinent became “the greatest outlet of the most precious metals in the world.”
At a time when a Roman soldier's annual pay was about 900 sesterces, the Roman military commander and author Pliny estimated that Indian merchants were draining at least 55 million sesterces from the empire each year. In fact, he would have been horrified to learn that Egyptian imports from India during this period were probably more than a billion sesterces per year. It is said that Indian museums hold more Roman coins than any other country outside the old Empire.
All this, Pliny derided, was merely “so that Roman ladies might flaunt in public their see-through garments.” His complaint that the empire's trade balance had been ruined by “the decadent desire of women for fashion” only underscores that two thousand years earlier, the wonderful lightweight muslins and other cottons manufactured in India had become the most coveted textiles in the world. His dislike of Indian spices (“It is quite amazing that the use of pepper should have become so prevalent,” he wrote, “its only desirable quality is a certain pungent taste…”) and its famous jewels and handicrafts made him a heretic among his countrymen. Europeans were obsessed with Indian pepper, and by the first century BCE, even the soldiers guarding Hadrian's Wall in Britain, the far-flung border of the empire, craved it to spice up their daily meals. In Rome, Caligula's consort, Loria Paulina, proudly walked around with 40 million sesterces worth of Indian emeralds and pearls in her hair, neck, and shoes.
In his brilliant new book, William Dalrymple argues that we should forget about the Silk Road. The first, centuries earlier, was the Indian Golden Road, which stretched from the Roman Empire in the west to Korea and Japan in the east. For more than a millennium, from 250 BC to 1200 AD, Indian goods, aesthetics and ideas dominated the vast “India-sphere.” Travelling long distances on the winds of the monsoon, Indian merchants reaped huge profits from unparalleled textiles, spices, oils, gems, ivory, hardwoods, glass and furniture.
The Golden Road depicts this economic development well, but Dalrymple's larger theme is Indian intellectual hegemony: as he shows, India was Eurasia's great religious and philosophical superpower during this period, with influence that continues to this day.
The book begins by highlighting the spread of Buddhism from a fringe sect in India. It eventually became central to the cultures of China, Japan, and Korea, and flourished in other parts of the region. It then traces the remarkable adoption of Hindu and Sanskrit culture by Southeast Asian rulers, influenced by the prestige of Indian thought and lifestyle. The largest Buddhist and Hindu temples ever built are not in India, but at Borobudur in Java and Angkor Wat in Cambodia, respectively. These are the largest religious structures in the world. Finally, The Golden Path tells the gripping story of how basic astronomy and mathematics tools such as modern numeral symbols, the decimal system, algebra, trigonometry, and algorithms were developed in India and spread around the world, eventually reaching the backward cultures of Christian Europe, along with the Indian game of chess.
Dalrymple is a born storyteller, with an incredible talent for describing complex events with vivid clarity. Like any successful comprehensive work, his writing is based on extensive reading and a keen eye for detail. But it is also a deeply personal work. Before he wrote a series of highly acclaimed books about the British imperial adventure in South Asia, he was already renowned as a chronicler of its esoteric religious traditions. The Golden Path, Filled with his own evocative descriptions of remote caves and forest temples, sculptures and murals, this book is not just a historical study but also a love letter to a lost world of intertwining, where religious beliefs and intellectual movements interacted and evolved, at a time when Indian ideas changed the world.
