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Dalrymple’s The Golden Road Is Old Wine With A New Label, Perpetuates Colonial Stereotypes Of Indian History
Probal Roy Chowdhury and M Pramod Kumar
Dec 22, 2024, 02:16 PM | Updated Jan 22, 2025, 10:48 AM IST
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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.
2. The rise and spread of an egalitarian Buddhism formed the cultural, spiritual and intellectual foundation for this Indosphere as opposed to Vedic Hinduism which was caste ridden and orthodox.
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:
Yet somehow the Golden Road linking all these diverse forms and geographies into a single cultural unit, a vast Indosphere stretching all the way from the Red Sea to the Pacific, has never been recognised as the link connecting all these different places and ideas to each other; and up to now has never been given a name. (p. 4)
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.
Eight years ago, another popular historian of repute and an economist in his own right, Sanjeev Sanyal, published his Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean shaped Human History (2016), where he advocated for greater emphasis on the maritime history of India rather than a Delhi-centric view:
One of the things that this book hopes to show is the extent to which history looks different when witnessed from the coastlines rather than from an inland point of view... However, this completely ignores the rich maritime history that predated Vasco da Gama’s famous voyage. Thus, the Cholas of India, the Majapahit of Indonesia and the Omanis are mentioned almost as footnotes. This is the equivalent of telling European history with little reference to Athens, Venice or the Vikings. (p.14)
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.
However, Sanyal was not the first to discover this either, he was only bringing to focus what had been forgotten since the venerable historian Ramesh Chandra Majumdar wrote his pioneering work Indian Colonies in the Far East in 1927, almost a hundred years ago:
The story of Greater India is bound to be of absorbing interest, not only to every student of history but also to all educated people in this country. The Indian colonies in the Far East must ever remain as the high-water mark of maritime and colonial enterprise of the ancient Indians. But although extensive literature in French has grown up on this subject, hardly anything has yet been written in English. This alone accounts for the comparative apathy and ignorance in this matter which is generally noticed in this country. (p.12)
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 20th 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.
Dalrymple does acknowledge the work of early nationalist historians like RC Majumdar, but grudgingly, and is even critical of them for amplifying what he calls the preconceptions of the French colonial writers and their fascination with an ancient Hindu civilisation that dominated Southeast Asia.
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.
Dalrymple also exhibits a marked tilt in favour of Buddhism over Hinduism in his narrative. In fact, his views comparing these two religions are outlandish and outdated and would perhaps make even colonial orientalists like William Jones pale in comparison. Savour this unsavoury description of Hinduism for example, from Dalrymple’s work:
The fire sacrifices that had been the staple of the early Hinduism of the Vedas, composed a thousand years or more before the birth of the Buddha, were designed for a nomadic and tribal society; but in the flux of change, as India urbanised, these had begun to give way to increasingly elaborate and expensive ceremonies, sometimes involving the mass slaughter of large numbers of animals. Many seem to have yearned for a move away from blood sacrifices and towards religious practice more focused on good conduct and ethics. At the same time, the solidifying of the caste system and growing ideas of ritual purity had led to great social discontent. (p.26)
To his credit, Dalrymple is not alone in painting such a weird, exotic image of Hinduism to justify the rise and spread of Buddhism. The entire subaltern school since Ambedkar’s time has used the same stereotypes to chastise Hinduism and project Buddhism as the utopian and egalitarian alternative. In a series of articles published in The Indian Express in 1990, written in response to the release of the Mandal Commission report, historian Dr Meenakshi Jain exposed this false narrative which stratified Indian society into a rigid hierarchy:
The Mandal Commission report is based on a stereotypical image of the caste system and Hindu society that our colonial masters popularised with devastating effect in the 19th century. It is not generally known that the India of rigid social stratification and hierarchical ranking was largely a British creation and that in their attempt to comprehend and control the Indian social order; the British set in motion forces that transformed the older system in a fundamental way. As late as the 18th century. the hierarchical ordering of Hindu society was not an established fact over large parts of the subcontinent. As some eminent historians have pointed out, till that time alternative ideologies and styles of life were strong, indeed dominant, in much of India… It bears repetition that it was only in the 19th century with the “pacification” of large parts of the countryside that the Brahminical principles of social organisation could be said to have become operational on an all-India scale. Till then only ancient centres like Benaras could be truly regarded as Brahmin strongholds.Meenakshi Jain, “The Myth of Caste Tyranny,” The New Indian Express, 26 September 1990.
In the contemporary world, Buddhism has become one of the fastest-growing religions in Australia and some other parts of the world. The rationale behind this trend is not hard to discern. For the Christian mind, Hinduism presents a bewildering multiplicity of ideas, deities, practices and rituals which are hard to understand through the black and white worldview of the Abrahamic religions — dominated by divisive dichotomies such as ‘believers’ and ‘non-believers’ and the “one god, one prophet, one book” framework. And therefore, Buddhism with a single prophet and simplified moral teachings (eightfold path) akin to the ten commandments, presents an easier alternative to embrace. No wonder, Dalrymple has fondly embraced Buddhism in his latest work:
For his contemporaries, Ashoka’s ideas must have been astonishingly radical, even revolutionary; they certainly changed the course of Buddhist history as dramatically as the conversion of the Emperor Constantine would change that of Christianity” (p. 38)... It (Buddhism) was universal, and like later missionary religions was intended to be spread to the ends of the earth (p.31)... There are those, especially in Hindutva circles, who maintain that Hinduism and Buddhism, both dharmic religions, are almost the same faith, that the Buddha was an incarnation of Vishnu, and that the distinction between them has been exaggerated. There are others, usually Buddhist, who regard Buddhism as having been driven out of India by a Hindu revival; and they point to prominent Buddhist shrines such as Badrinath that were taken over by Hindus. Most scholars, however, believe that it was the decline of Buddhism as a popular faith which gave Hinduism its opportunity… My own view is that there was almost always competition between the two faiths, and that in the end, over most of India, Hinduism won. (p. 341)
In stark contrast to this divisive narrative of Buddhism vs Hinduism that popular historians like Dalrymple have tried to legitimise, the real scholars of Buddhism had a totally different view. Thomas William Rhys Davids (1843-1922), one of the foremost scholars of Pali, who produced the first translations of ancient Buddhist texts, makes startling revelations about the Buddha in his seminal work Buddhism: Its History and Literature (1896), which would make Dalrymple, and his school of divisive historiography, run for cover:
Wherever he (Gotama) went, it was precisely the Brahmins themselves who often took the most earnest interest in his speculations... Many of his chief disciples, many of the most distinguished members of his Order, were Brahmins… But this is only one proof out of many of the fact we should never forget that Gotama was born and brought up and lived and died a Hindu… The Buddha himself was, throughout his career, a characteristic Indian. And, whatever his position as compared with other teachers in the West, we need here only claim for him, that he was the greatest, and wisest and best of the Hindus… (p.129-130)Rhys Davids, T. W. Buddhism: Its History and Literature
WhatsApp History #102: The Golden Age of Ashoka the Great
Dalrymple’s projection of Ashoka as one of the most remarkable figures of Indian history is yet another glaring example of colonial narratives which the author lends credence to:
The Emperor Ashoka was one of the most remarkable figures in all Indian history. He was also the man who helped raise Buddhism from what was still effectively a relatively small, even local cult, into one of the world’s great religions. (p. 32)
But Ashoka shuns both bloodshed and boastfulness. He makes no mention of the size of his empire or his wealth or power. Instead, in an earnest and highly individual, personal voice, he depicts himself as a gentle and compassionate ruler impatient to spread his ideas of non-violence, respect, morality and tolerance. (p. 38)
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.
British historian John Keay, in his book India: A History (2000), raises pertinent questions about the popular legends surrounding Ashoka’s life. He points out that most of what we know comes from Sri Lankan Buddhist chronicles, which exaggerate his pre-Buddhist lifestyle as cruel and indulgent to make his later conversion appear more glorious. He also argues that the Kalinga war casualties were highly exaggerated to strike fear into his enemies, that the edicts in Kalinga make no mention of his remorse or conversion, and that he never disbanded the Mauryan army after the war and his alleged remorseful conversion to Buddhism.
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 Saviour said to him, Fear not, Thomas, go to India and preach the word there for my grace is with you.’ Still Thomas resisted. ‘Wherever you wish to send me, send me,’ he replied. ‘But please somewhere else. I will not go to the Indians.’ But Jesus was not in a mood to be contradicted, even by his twin. He sold the reluctant apostle as a slave to an envoy of ‘Gondophares, King of the Indians’, who wished to make use of his skills as a carpenter to build him a palace. Thomas was duly shipped to India, via Socotra... According to tradition, he arrived in 52 CE, at a time when a king named Gondophares was indeed ruling from Taxila. If a Jewish carpenter named Thomas really did make it to India, as tradition maintains, he would probably have been regarded as yet another Yavana craftsman, of the sort frequently noted in early Sangam Tamil poetry. Indian Christian tradition maintains that he founded seven churches across southern India before he was martyred by ‘jealous Brahmins’ in 68 CE, in Mylapore near modern Chennai… Whether or not there is any historical truth in the legends of St Thomas, early Christian missionaries were certainly active in southern India.” (p. 71)
This myth was long debunked by Ishwar Sharan in his book The Myth of Saint Thomas and the Mylapore Shiva Temple (1991). In his foreword to the book, Belgian Indologist, Koenraad Elst, writes:
While the belief that Thomas settled in South India came about as a mistake, the claim that he was martyred by Brahmins was always a deliberate lie, playing upon a possible confusion between the consonants of the expression “be ruhme”, meaning “with a spear”, and those of “brahma” (Semitic alphabets usually don’t specify vowels). That was the gratitude Hindus received in return for extending their hospitality to the Christian refugees: being blackened as the murderers of the refugees’ own hero. If the Indian bishops have any honour, they will themselves remove this false allegation from their discourse and their monuments, including the cathedral in Chennai built at the site of Thomas’s purported burial (actually the site of a Shiva temple). Indeed, they will issue a historic declaration expressing their indebtedness to Hindu hospitality and pluralism, and pledge to renounce their anti-Hindu animus. (p.15)
In fact, there is a whole chapter on Dalrymple in the book where Koenraad Elst provides an elaborate rebuttal to an article written by the former in The Guardian in the year 2000, promoting the myth of Thomas’s journey to India and his alleged murder by Brahmins:
The article “The Incredible Journey” by William Dalrymple in The Guardian, London, on 15 April 2000, is a wonderful exercise in pushing the beliefs of the “minorities” ― in fact, local enthusiasts of a global movement, helped by the foreign headquarters with resources and strategy ― to the utmost. There is no document supporting the fond belief of the Christians [that St. Thomas arrived in Kerala in 52 CE] (p. 322)
It is ironic that while Indian historiography has long moved on from this untenable myth of Saint Thomas, Dalrymple is still hooked on it! While refuting Dalrymple’s fairytale narrative of Saint Thomas, Koenraad Elst sounds equally prophetic about Dalrymple’s claims on Indo-Roman trade:
With all his rhetoric slamming open doors, such as that there was a lot of trade between Malabar and the Roman empire ― which we already knew ― he has only one piece of hard evidence to claim, viz. the coins by king Gondophares confirming the Acts’ mention of such a king, and that already by 19th-century British archaeologists… (p.322)
While the alternative view on Ashoka did find a place in the endnotes, Dalrymple does not even bother to mention that his favourite tale of Saint Thomas coming to India is strongly contested and is nothing more than a missionary ploy to legitimise evangelism in India.
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.
Excavations at Nalanda have revealed structural damage, ash layers, and signs of burning, which are consistent with accounts of the site being attacked and set on fire. Reports from the ASI excavation campaigns (1915-1937) led by Hirananda Shastri documented the recovery of burnt wooden beams and charred manuscripts, suggesting damage by fire that aligns with the historical accounts of destruction. Inscriptions found at Nalanda indicate an abrupt decline, correlating with the time of Bakhtiyar Khilji’s invasion.
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:
…the loss of the collected manuscripts and books of these great institutions of learning ranks as a civilisational catastrophe on a par with the burning of the Library of Alexandria… Large-scale desecration of Hindu, Jain and Buddhist monuments continued across India during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Several of the early Turkic sultans were energetic iconoclasts and made a point of building their mosques from the rubble of destroyed temples, in some of which can still be seen the defaced sculptures of their Hindu and Jain predecessors. (p. 290)
However, on the very next page, while discussing the role of the left leaning historians in suppressing such inconvenient details of Indian history, he feels compelled to add his signature style right-wing bashing to ensure a balancing act:
During the days of Nehruvian rule in the 1950s and early 1960s, Indian school textbooks and most academic histories were written by left-leaning, Congress-supporting figures. These historians tended to underplay 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. Today, under the current right-wing BJP government, the reverse is true, and the destruction of Hindu temples is almost all that many in India seem to know of the complex but fascinating medieval period of Indo-Islamic history. (p. 291)
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.
Dalrymple credits the popularisation of Indian numerals to Fibonacci (ca.1170–ca.1240/50CE), and Emperor Frederick II (reigned 1220-50 CE) of the Holy Roman Empire, who took a keen interest in Fibonacci’s work Liber Abaci (ca.1202CE), and how this brought about a revolution in the way Europe did mathematics, trade and finance.
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:
For that reason, his manuscript is a very different and much more practical text than the abstract Brahmanical speculations of Aryabhata or the more astronomical and astrological focus of the Sindhind. (p. 245)
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?
My research is good research, yours is sketchy at best
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:
There are estimates given by Angus Maddison who has analysed ancient history and come up with figures of GDP and GDP per head but honestly, I think, these figures rely on very, very slim evidence.
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 what Dr Manmohan Singh, former Prime Minister and the architect of India’s liberalisation programme, had to say about Angus Maddison’s work, in his acceptance speech of the Honorary Degree awarded to him, by Oxford University in 2005:
There is no doubt that our grievance against the British Empire had a sound basis. As the painstaking statistical work of the Cambridge historian Angus Maddison has shown, India’s share of world income collapsed from 22.6 per cent in the year 1700, almost equal to Europe’s share of 23.3 per cent at that time, to as low as 3.8 per cent in 1952.
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.
However, the purpose of this review is not to run down Dalrymple’s work – far from that. The Golden Road is rich in historical detail and deserves to be read and critiqued by all students of Indian history. However, his narrative has far more loopholes, chinks and slants than the recent coverage in the media would have us believe. We have only discussed here a few selected narratives from the book which deserve to be debated.
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.
Probal Roy Chowdhury is Director, Centre for New India Studies, and Professor, Department of English, at Sister Nivedita University, Kolkata. M Pramod Kumar is Assistant Professor, Amrita Darshanam International Centre for Cultural and Spiritual Studies, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore.
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