This isn’t a review of William Dalrymple’s latest offering “The Golden Road”. Rather, the notes below are merely jotting from a jumble of thoughts (in no particular order) in my head after I finished reading yet another magnificent tome from a person who is probably the finest modern-day historian, with an India focus.
1. Between 250 BCE and 1200 CE, India was the world leader in knowledge, ideas and soft power and people in South-east and Central Asia and even China, admired India. India offered to the world its religion, art, music, dance, textiles, technology, astronomy, mathematics, medicine and the world lapped it up.
2. After Rome captured Egypt, for 300 years after that, a Golden Road of the open oceans caused Indian exports to flow to Rome and resulted in a drain of Roman gold/wealth into India. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, this Indo-Roman trade ceased and Indian businessmen began to focus on South East Asia. Across South-east Asia, Sanskrit became the lingua franca for the elites, who also adopted the worship of Hindu gods.
3. Buddhism became a pan-Indian religion under Emperor Ashoka and then spread into Sri Lanka, Tibet, China and Korea. Buddhism became popular, first with the merchant class, then with the ordinary people of South-east Asia. Theravada Buddhism remains the dominant religion today in much of that region. China has the largest number of practicing Buddhists in the world.
4. During the Indian era, there was a steady trickle of Indian preachers, artists and even doctors to China, which came increasingly under India’s spell. Wu Zetian, founder of the Wu Zhou dynasty, who ruled China for 45 years, was an admired of many things Indian. She officially elevated Buddhism above Taoism
5. Xuanzang (Huen Tsang) the Chinese traveler came to India for a 17-year, 6,000-mile journey, mainly to the great Indian centres of learning. Of this, he spent 5 years in Nalanda.
6. Nalanda was the best University in existence at that point in time. According to Xuanzang, lectures at Nalanda were given in a hundred different halls each day. The students studied diligently without wasting a single moment. They studied the texts of the different schools of Buddhism, as well as the sacred Vedas, logic, Sanskrit grammar, philosophy, medicine, metaphysics, divination, mathematics, astronomy, literature and magic. Nalanda’s library was nine storeys high and contained three divisions: the Ratnadadhi, the ‘Sea of Jewels’, the Ratnasagara, the ‘Ocean of Jewels’, and the Ratnaranjaka, the ‘Jewel-Adorned’. Any manuscript could be borrowed, though Nalanda regulations held that it must be stored in the niche in the monks’ cells next to the square central courtyard.
7. The great Khmer King Jayavarman II who united Cambodia, set the foundation of the Angkor period. Suryavarman II built the Angkor Wat, the largest Hindu temple in the world, dedicated to Lord Vishnu. The Khmers were allies of the Cholas and Jayavarman, Suryavarman et al were largely influenced by Indic values.
8. The rulers of Srivijaya (based in modern-day Indonesia) tried to double-cross the Cholas and Rajendra Chola retaliated by sending a Chola armada all the way to Sumatra, possibly in a joint operation with the ships of the Tamil merchant guilds.
9. The powerful Chief Vizier of Baghdad, Khalid ibn Barmak, was a Buddhist convert to Islam. The the Barmakids were an important Buddhist family from Balkh, which converted to Islam and became prominent members of the Abbasid court in the second half of the 8th century.
10. Genghis Khan’s campaign in Central Asia caused tens of thousands of Persian-speaking refugees to flee from to the plains around Delhi. As a result, Delhi became one of the world’s biggest cities and the centre of a cosmopolitan, culturally Persianate sultanate, full of learned madrasas staffed by refugee scholars, sheikhs, artisans and poets who had fled from Central Asia. Sanskrit and its vernacular derivatives Khari Boli, old Punjabi and Braj Bhasha, continued in use, but Persian became the court language as well as the language and diplomacy.
11. Invasions by Turks and Afghans did result in the destruction of many Hindu temples and Buddhist monastries, some of which were repurposed as mosques. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Indian school textbooks and most academic histories were written by left-leaning historians who underplayed the violence and iconoclasm that came with the Turkish invasions, partially in the interests of what they saw as ‘nation building’ following the terrible inter-religious violence that had taken place during partition.
12. It is unclear if Nalanda was burned or destroyed by Islamic invaders. However, it is a fact that Nalanda’s near neighbour, the great monastery of Odantapura, was destroyed by Bakhtyar Khalji’s Turkish troops. A similar fate was visited upon the monastery of Vikramashila.
These notes are not meant to be a summary of The Golden Road and do not even capture the essence of this wonderful book which runs to a little over 600 pages, of which, endnotes take up around half the space. Please do read The Golden Road yourself to appreciate it properly. The Golden Road is available on Amazon.
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