Across the vast expanse of history, few civilizations have left as profound and enduring a legacy as ancient India. From the Red Sea to the Pacific, its ideas, art, and innovations shaped the contours of human progress, forging connections that transcended borders and epochs. In his latest masterpiece, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World, William Dalrymple brings this extraordinary story to life. With a historian’s rigor and a storyteller’s grace, the award-winning author unveils the journey of a civilization that bridged cultures, enriched trade, and transformed the world as we know it. In an exclusive conversation with NewsX, the author and historian delves into the essence of this trailblazing Indian legacy and more.
Here are excerpts from the interview with William Dalrymple:
NewsX: What is your fascination with India? Your father has history here as well, but what does India mean to William Dalrymple?
William Dalrymple: Well, I first turned up here spectacularly ignorant, and unknowingly of any of the history or any of the background, aged 18. And I’m still here now, at aged 59. So, it certainly appealed—I’ve been here for 40 years. I think what India means to me changes every few years, because it’s been such a long time, and I’ve had many different careers while living here. I’ve been a foreign correspondent, I’ve run a literary festival (I still run one), I’ve been a photographer, a historian, a travel writer. But India, I still feel, is for a writer, which I’ve been at all stages of my life—it feels slightly like being a child in a sweet shop. There is so much that is of interest. I’ve spent the last 20 years writing about the East India Company, but over the last five years, I’ve disappeared down a rabbit hole of ancient India. Every bit is interesting—if not more so than the stuff I’ve been doing for the last 20 years. I just feel that India is so vast, and its history is even vaster, that I could spend another 10 lifetimes here and still not run out of material to write about—books, podcasts, articles, TV shows. It’s just so rich in every way—geographically, temporally, culturally. I haven’t even begun to touch the surface in 40 years. There’s so much left to discover.
NewsX: In terms of the idea that India is the ancient Greece of Asia, which is something that’s been said since your book has come out, and also looking at the expansion of India through religion, through, like you’ve said, astrology, astronomy, the numeral system that we use—how has that spread worked?
William Dalrymple: So there are certain parts of the world which took on the big questions of humanity—why are we here, how big is our world, what is our relationship with the gods, with the heavens, how do we understand our place on Earth, what’s our conception of duty and morality? Ancient Greece is one of those, and that’s very well known thanks to the British and the colonial project, which made everybody study the classics, and so on. Ancient China is another one, and in the last 30-40 years, China has been very good at telling a story through the Silk Road.
This image has been created of China as the terminus of all the world’s early trade routes and how everything ended up in Shangan and modern Xian. Well, India has been slightly left out of all this. Indians know that they have this great ancient culture; they know that it’s the source of mathematics, and they know the great Indian mathematicians like Aryabhata and Brahmagupta. But in a weird way, no one outside India has taken this in.
No one—I mean, you and I both went to school in Britain, and we learned about people like Pythagoras and Archimedes by the age of six or seven, but Brahmagupta or Aryabhata simply don’t figure in English curriculums or anywhere else in the world for that matter. So I think the Indian story, while known here in India, has not traveled in an odd way in the way that the Chinese story or the Greek story has.
People in America simply don’t know about the wisdom of ancient India, the inventions that were made here that traveled around the world, and the sophistication of ancient Indian thought. Often, I think in the Indian diaspora, you get a frustration and a muddle. So you get the character in the Sanju Basa Goodness Gracious Me series who says, ‘Everything comes from India—Leonardo da Vinci, India; the Royal Family, India,’ and so on.
I think this book is an attempt to, in a sense, give a very clear factual basis for that, to say clearly without sort of a nationalist spin, without sort of being a tub-thumping “India first” sort of nationalist, that all the amazing things that India did—and you don’t have to bring in the kind of stuff of WhatsApp forwards from uncles claiming that there were nuclear weapons in the Mahabharata or helicopters in the Ramayana or whatever it is—because the true story is extraordinary.
NewsX: What the book does is it really does display the importance of India in so much of our lives and another ancient civilization that we look at and especially us growing up in Europe and in Britain. The Roman Empire is something that we study a lot more than anything that you’ve mentioned in the book. I want to look at that trade between India and the Roman Empire and the wealth that was transferred as well.
William Dalrymple: This is very, very important. As I said, China has been very good at sort of making itself the center of World Trade. At this moment in London, there are two exhibitions: there’s the Silk Road Exhibition at the British Museum and the Silk Road Oasis show at the British Library. These are fantastic shows—I don’t want to in any way knock them—but there’s an India-shaped hole in both of them.
India, in the early centuries, was the principal intermediary with the Roman Empire and the Western classical world. While Rome and China never had direct relations and never exchanged embassies, there were annual enormous fleets leaving Roman Egypt and traveling down the Red Sea. It would take only two months to get from the Red Sea coast all the way to Kerela or Gujarat or the mouth of the Indus, and then back again when the monsoon reverses, as it does every year.
NewsX: You end The Golden Road with the question: Could it happen again? Is this the new golden age for India?
William Dalrymple: Economically, it definitely will be. Any economist will tell you that by the end of this century, there will be three major economies: America, India, and China. Which of those will be number one is uncertain.
Ten years ago, I would have bet on China, but China has faltered while India has grown. The surprise is how America has stayed in the game. Politically and culturally, it’s harder to predict, but economically, India is clearly on track to become a superpower.
Watch the full interview:
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