Dalrymple’s The Golden Road Is Old Wine With A New Label, Perpetuates Colonial Stereotypes Of Indian History

When a popular historian like William Dalrymple publishes a new book which, and for a change, focuses on the intellectual, scientific, and cultural influence that India wielded over the ancient world, instead of the usual medieval tropes which we find in his earlier works, the world is bound to sit up and take notice. And the mainstream media did and how!

Day after day, week after week, we have been bombarded with book excerpts, reviews, interviews, podcasts and spin-offs based on Dalrymple’s latest book The Golden Road. It was as though Delhi was going to polls early, with The Golden Road as its manifesto!

Now that the dust has begun to settle down, we would perhaps do well to dive into the book itself and see what new insights it has to offer. Dalrymple’s book is based on the following broad narratives which are central to the overarching theme:

1. ‘The Golden Road’ — a maritime trade route linking India to diverse lands from the Red Sea to the Pacific, an ‘Indosphere’ which has not been given due weightage in mainstream Indian historiography.

3. Ashoka’s reign was a golden period as he helped spread Buddhism and India’s cultural influence worldwide.

4. India’s contributions to mathematics and the sciences, and how this knowledge travelled to Europe through the Arabs.

Old wine with a new label

Dalrymple’s claim that he is the first to recognise this maritime route which was more important than the much-hyped silk route is disingenuous:

While he is right in pointing out that the maritime route was far more significant for India in terms of its economic value and the cultural influence it spurred, he is not the first one to do so.

Sanyal’s book covers many themes which seem to recur in The Golden Road — from the maritime trade route which is central to Dalrymple’s narrative to Xuan Zang’s travels in India and India’s influence in Southeast Asia.

The term Indosphere was coined by the American linguist James Matisoff (b.1937) to indicate the extended area of India’s linguistic influence in South, Southeast and East Asian regions. The term “Greater India” was coined by the French historian and Indologist George Cœdès (1886-1969) in the early 20^th century. Cœdès used the term to describe the cultural and civilisational influence of India on Southeast Asia, particularly through the spread of Hinduism and Buddhism.

WhatsApp History #101: Buddhism more egalitarian than Hinduism?

In a recent interview with The Indian Express, William Dalrymple blames the rise of WhatsApp history on the failure of Indian academics to communicate authentic historiography to the public. But one wonders how perpetuating outdated and divisive colonial stereotypes of Indian history through his book, is any better than the WhatsApp history that he deplores.

WhatsApp History #102: The Golden Age of Ashoka the Great

Dalrymple’s work is full of praise for Ashoka and the advantage that Ashoka’s missionary zeal is said to have provided in spreading Indian culture and Buddhism to the rest of the world.

Some of the myths surrounding Ashoka have been repeatedly challenged by historians: that he converted to Buddhism years before the Kalinga war, was known for his cruelty and called ‘Chandashoka’ by his people, and continued violent expansionism after the Kalinga war, showing no remorse as the edicts claim.

While Dalrymple notes that writers like Sanjeev Sanyal disagree with the conventional portrait of Ashoka, he chooses to follow Patrick Olivelle’s biography, Ashoka: Portrait of a Philosopher King (2023), which he considers widely accepted as authoritative.

These questions do not deserve to be confined to the endnotes as they are central to the main narrative. Dalrymple should explain why he chooses to go with Olivelle’s portrayal of Ashoka despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Otherwise, the argument that Olivelle’s work is “widely accepted as authoritative” is just a smokescreen to continue perpetuating the colonial stereotypes of Indian history.

WhatsApp History #103: St Thomas was murdered by jealous Brahmins

More nefarious than the myth of Ashoka endorsed in this book is the lie of Saint Thomas coming to India and getting murdered by evil, jealous Brahmins which the author presents almost as gospel truth:

The decline of Nalanda

Dalrymple disputes the belief that Nalanda’s decline was primarily due to Turkic invasions. According to him, Nalanda was in decline for centuries and was burned several times before the arrival of the Turks. Dalrymple’s claim is based on a paper published as part of the proceedings of the Indian History Congress, Vol. 73 (2012) and an article by Anirudh Kanisetti in The Print.

Perhaps, the only instance where Dalrymple does not add a sarcastic caveat about the right wing, Hindutva and the BJP is when he describes the burning of the manuscripts at Odantapura and Vikramashila:

This is a very unfair and inaccurate opinion of the situation today. For the first time since independence, the National Education Policy (NEP 2020) and the National Curriculum Framework for School Education (NCF-SE) are making a solid and sincere attempt to integrate Indian Knowledge Systems into the school curriculum (this is an ongoing effort and it will take a couples of years for the changes to become clearly visible). And the scope of this integration extends far beyond temple destruction and is in fact more focussed on the positive contributions of India to mathematics, the sciences, and other domains of knowledge – which happens to be one of the central themes of this book.

Arybhata’s ‘Brahmanical’ speculations

Dalrymple has included a chapter on India’s contributions to mathematics and astronomy and tries to show how Indian knowledge systems (IKS) travelled to Europe through the Arabs.

However, apart from this, Dalrymple meanders away into the causes for the decline of India’s intellectual influence during the medieval period and does not do much justice to the wealth of information that is today available on India’s contributions to mathematics, astronomy and other sciences. Other popular works like George Ifrah’s Universal History of Numbers (2000) are far more comprehensive in their coverage of IKS. But as with other such works, Ifrah’s work finds no mention in Dalrymple’s book.

Here too, we notice Dalrymple wading into unnecessary value judgments and controversy. For example, he considers the Bakshali manuscript and its author Chajaka to be more ‘practical’ compared to Aryabhata and his ‘Brahmanical’ speculations. According to Dalrymple, Chajaka was a metal worker near a Gandharan monastery and was possibly making metal statues for the Buddhist monks and therefore his manuscript had a more immediate practical application than the woolly-headed Aryabhata who was merely conjuring astronomical theories based on abstract ‘Brahmanical’ speculations:

Would Dalrymple classify the theoretical work of Albert Einstein and other Jewish scientists as ‘Judaical’ speculations as opposed to the more ‘practical’ German scientists like Werner Heisenberg or Otto Hahn who worked for the German nuclear weapons programme during World War II?

In a recent interview with The Asian Age, Dalrymple makes this astoundingly arrogant dismissal of reputed economic historian Angus Maddison’s work with reference to his book:

The screenshot above shows a post by Dalrymple dated June 13, 2020 wherein he seems to be recommending Angus Maddison’s figures on historical GDP data. So, what changed in four years for him to now dismiss Maddison’s data as ‘slim evidence’?

This is a generic problem that we find with Dalrymple’s book: while he can make a claim based on a single papyrus found at Oxyrhynchus – the exact value of goods traded between India and Rome; he is dismissive of Angus Maddison’s painstaking work based on hard economic data as “slim evidence.”

Dalrymple tends to get carried away by his own narrative so much that he ceases to acknowledge the works of other scholars like Sanjeev Sanyal or Angus Maddison who have made the same discoveries about India’s economic or cultural strengths, which he is now touting in his latest book.

We must acknowledge though that Dalrymple has begun to overcome his compulsive obsession for the Ganga-Jamuni Tehzeeb and has finally begun to explore and understand the deeper civilizational ethos of Bharata. We must all encourage him to look beyond his prejudices and biases which would make future generations regard him as the last white Mughal of Indian historiography.

The Golden Road is important not because it offers something radically new but because it marks an important transformation in the psyche of one of India’s popular historians.