As history blurs with mythology, William Dalrymple’s The Golden Road brilliantly illuminates India’s most misunderstood era.
In The Golden Road, William Dalrymple breathes life into a glorious era of the Indic world
As history blurs with mythology, William Dalrymple’s The Golden Road brilliantly illuminates India’s most misunderstood era.
First, he was robbed of his possessions in Jammu. Then, while navigating the Ganges on a boat, his luck sank further—he fell into the hands of pirates. But these were no ordinary outlaws; they were fervent devotees of Goddess Durga. And when they laid eyes on the “grand” and “handsome” monk, they were utterly pleased. “The season of sacrifice [Durga Puja] is upon us … Isn’t it auspicious for us to kill him as a sacrifice?” the pirates said among themselves.
As they prepared the sacrificial altar, the monk calmly requested permission to offer his final prayers. Moments later, as legend has it, a fierce black wind howled from all directions, uprooting trees and whipping sand high into the air. Waves surged in the river, and boats were overturned. Panic-stricken, the pirates turned to the travellers and desperately demanded, “Where does this monk come from and what is his name?”
He was Xuanzang, the intrepid Chinese Buddhist monk who, in the autumn of 629 CE, left the capital city of Chang’an to embark on a daring 3,000-mile journey to India. His mission? To reach Nalanda—the legendary Buddhist university and monastery—where the era’s brightest minds gathered to unravel the mysteries of wisdom. Seventeen years and 6,000 miles later, Xuanzang returned to China, bringing back more than just memories of his extraordinary pilgrimage to India’s renowned centres of learning.
In The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World, William Dalrymple breathes life into a glorious era of the Indic world, one that was chronicled by the likes of Xuanzang and many others. Known for his bestselling narrative nonfiction on Indian history, Dalrymple captivates readers once again with his storytelling mastery. What sets The Golden Road apart from his previous works is its vast thematic scope—recounting the grandest story he has ever attempted.
In writing the book, Dalrymple visited many of the places he describes, drew extensively from a wide range of sources, and consulted with numerous leading scholars. His labour of love culminates in a rich blend of text and visuals. Spanning nearly 300 pages, the book is complemented by dozens of rare picture plates and over 150 pages of meticulously detailed notes and bibliography, providing readers with a comprehensive, immersive experience. In the pages of The Golden Road, readers discover a forgotten India—an era when its knowledge, scholarship, arts, and commerce flourished. The book opens a window into an ancient civilisation that once stood as one of the greatest intellectual, spiritual, and economic powerhouses of its time, shaping and inspiring the world around it.
Between 250 BCE and 1200 CE, Dalrymple argues: “India was a confident exporter of its own diverse civilisation,” cultivating an expansive Indosphere where its cultural influence reigned supreme. The term ‘Indosphere’ immediately captures readers’ attention. While Dalrymple credits British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore for the term’s “ingenious coinage,” and acknowledges borrowing it from him, the term was actually first coined by American linguist James Alan Matisoff. Nevertheless, with Dalrymple’s usage, it is poised to gain wider recognition and significance.
In the opening chapter of The Golden Road, Dalrymple whisks away readers to the mid-fifth century BCE—when Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, walked the earth. He traces the remarkable journey of the Buddha’s teachings, which began with the doctrine of a little-known ascetic but quickly spread across India and beyond after King Ashoka embraced them. Devoting himself to spreading the dharma to distant lands, Ashoka’s efforts paved the way for merchants engaged in global trade to carry Buddhism to the far corners of the world after his death.
The next nine chapters, skilfully crafted, intertwine multiple stories that come together like pieces of a complex jigsaw puzzle. Three chapters, in particular, stood out to me: “India: The Sink of the World’s Most Precious Metals,” “The Sea of Jewels: Exploring the Great Library of Nalanda,” and “The Fifth Concubine.” Each provides a captivating glimpse into a distinct facet of India’s rich history, highlighting its remarkable economic and cultural influence on the global stage.
By the first century BCE, Dalrymple argues, Europe and India were already closely connected through thriving trade routes across the Red Sea. Indian merchants met Europe’s insatiable demand with an array of goods—diamonds, rubies, silk and cotton textiles, sandalwood, spices like cloves and pepper, rare drugs, elephant tusks, tortoiseshell, and even exotic wild animals. Take, for instance, the opulent Lollia Paulina, consort of Emperor Caligula. Draped in Indian emeralds and pearls worth a staggering 40 million sesterces, she wore her fortune woven into her hair, hanging from her neck, and even sparkling on her shoes—a dazzling display of Roman extravagance fuelled by India’s treasures.
The profits were nothing short of jaw-dropping: goods bought in India fetched up to a hundred times their original price in the Roman Empire. By the first century CE, Indian imports into Egypt had surged to an astonishing value of over a billion sesterces each year. Pliny the Elder, alarmed by this colossal outflow of wealth, described India as “the sink of the world’s most precious metals” and lamented that no year passes without draining “our empire of at least fifty-five million sesterces.” To put that in perspective, a Roman soldier’s annual salary was a mere 800 sesterces—a stark reminder of the immense scale of this ancient trade imbalance in favour of India.
By the fourth century BCE, Dalrymple suggests, Indian merchants had also built a maritime network that spanned from India’s eastern shores across the Bay of Bengal to the thriving city states and ports of Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Java, and the South China Sea. Dalrymple also vividly recounts how Indian innovations in mathematics—ranging from number symbols and algebra to the decimal system, trigonometry, and astronomical discoveries—paved the way for scientific progress worldwide, influencing everything from commerce to cosmology.
The sprawling “golden road,” linking India to the Red Sea and the Far East, became the lifeblood of trade and cultural exchange, shaping the economic and cultural landscapes of entire regions for centuries to come.
With the Muslim invasion of India, followed by British colonisation, the Indosphere rapidly diminished. Despite their lasting and transformative impact on the world, India’s unique contributions have often remained in the shadows. Dalrymple suggests that this is a result of “the legacy of colonialism,” specifically stemming from Victorian Indology. From Macaulay’s period onward, this approach systematically “undermined, misrepresented, and devalued Indian history, culture, science, and knowledge,” shaping how the world would view India’s contributions for centuries to come.
The Golden Road is entertaining and thought-provoking. With its vast thematic scope and historical breadth, it is inevitable that some of Dalrymple’s arguments will ignite intense debate—yet this very aspect makes his work all the more invaluable.
The closing paragraphs of the book reminded me of a scholar’s witty remark: Never mind the future—even history is at risk in India. In this light, The Golden Road stands as a remarkable scholarly achievement, illuminating one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented periods of Indian history, while making it accessible to a wide audience.
Ajay Saini teaches at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi