The Empire of Ideas

In APOCALYPSE (1931), his posthumously published last blast against Christianity, Western civilisation and its intellectual colonisation of the world, DH Lawrence rues how “Hindus” had been denied credit even for the discovery of the zero. Instead, the zero had come from the Arabs, like the “Arabic numerals”, because they were more “like us”. The artistic intelligence that informed the sculptures at Indian temples was Urdumheit, or primal stupidity. Between them, German Indologists and Victorian educationists did India immense harm, albeit from different ends of a Eurocentric agenda. Lawrence was not an exception but an example. That worldview, however, was already changing and not without help from French archaeologists and Indian nationalists who were also, often, first-rate historians. But then, those brilliant native minds got carried away.

The spurious distinction between ‘popular’ history and its academic variant is perhaps only a matter of style. A story needs to be told well. Simon Schama, for instance, is a living testament to that fact. And William Dalrymple does know how to tell a story, even if it has been told before in part. What will definitely endure is his case for the “Golden Road”, the name he gives the maritime trade routes that linked India with the Roman Empire and Southeast Asia, respectively, well before the end of Classical Antiquity and well after the early medieval age. The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World (Bloomsbury, 608 pages, ₹999) is a belated eulogy to “an empire of ideas” that had devel­oped into “a tangible ‘Indosphere’”. It is as much remembrance and celebration as introduction. At a time when the imperial tentacles of communist China have reached far and deep, appropriating almost all the glories of ancient Asia, Dalrymple’s book is, also, a necessary intervention. China, unlike India, has better told its story.

“What Greece was first to Rome, then to the rest of the Mediterranean and European world, so at this period India was to South-east and Central Asia and even to China, radiating out and diffusing its philosophies, political ideas and architectural forms out over an entire region, not by conquest but instead by sheer cultural allure and sophistication. In matters of science, as­tronomy and mathematics, India was to be a teacher of the Arab world, and hence Mediterranean Europe too.” That is the Indian story. The telling, evidently, is meant for a Western audience that has long forgotten its fascination with India and had never quite plumbed the depths of that fascination except in unaired academic attics. But the book is also essential reading for Indians.

A dichotomy had defined the Occident’s intellectual approach to India since the Enlightenment, summed up, reductively but usefully, by Thomas McEvilley in his The Shape of Ancient Thought (2002): “Many turned outside of Western civilization in search of an Other which could be used to unseat and overturn it. It was in this spirit that Voltaire… declared India, about which he knew little, to be the birthplace not only of religion but of civilization itself… The time was the so-called Oriental Renaissance, when it seemed briefly that India might replace Greece as the putative source of civilization. Though Voltaire promoted the idea, others were offended by it. Diderot… dismissed India as a place of ‘incredible extravagances,’ not to be taken seriously… Denigration of India went along with chau­vinistic support for Western civilization; extravagant praise of India, with disgust for some aspect of the West, usually what was conceived to be its overemphasis on rationalism. Already the situation was in place which Edward Said two centuries later would call ‘Orientalism’—the West’s use of Asia as a projected Other against which to define itself.” In this lay not only the ker­nel of colonialism, at least as inflicted on the subcontinent, but also the line of logic all the way down to early European Indolo­gists and Macaulay’s heirs. What it also eventually fostered was the nationalist revision that ultimately walked into its own trap.

The Battle of Actium in 31 BCE, in which Marcus Agrippa defeated the fleets of Mark Antony and Cleopatra on behalf of Octavian, thereafter Roman Emperor Augustus, was a boon for Indian traders as their commerce with Egypt increased mani­fold. For their precious cargo, which made India Rome’s biggest trading partner, Indian merchants returned with gold; so much gold that Pliny the Elder, the puritanical naval commander and naturalist, called India “the sink of the world’s most precious metals”. Yet the Romans were making as much as 270 million sesterces from taxing this trade, more money than from all subject nations put together. The record of a soldier at Hadrian’s Wall, the northern border of Roman Britain, purchasing a little Indian black pepper to spice up his meal demonstrates, for instance, how Indian goods were craved by not just the impe­rial elite. Roman coins found in southern India in their tens and thousands are but one kind of evidence. Despite the familiarity of Romans and Roman-Egyptians with the sea route to India, it was the Indian merchants who dominated this trade, having mastered the science of riding the monsoon winds long ago.

When this westward trade collapsed in the fourth and fifth centuries, ultimately with the Persian blockade and the loss of the Red Sea to the Arabs, Indian merchants turned towards South­east Asia—Suvarnabhumi, or the lands of gold. By the seventh century CE, Southeast Asia was a central part of the Indosphere, although Indian sailors on the east coast had been trading with the region by the second millennium BCE while Malabar teak or Indian ivory and red marble had made their way to Mesopotamia by c 2500 BCE. But the culmination of it all was the “building of the greatest and most philosophically complex Buddhist structure in the world in Borobudur in Java, and the largest of all Hindu temples, not in India but at Angkor Wat in Cambodia”, the latter being the largest religious structure built anywhere when its Khmer builders boasted “the widest reach of any Hindu empire”.

Why is this story not better known? The two obvious culprits are Victorian Indology and the over-specialisation of historical research. But there was also an overt political reason. Postcolonial Southeast Asia reacted against Indian cultural claims which had their genesis in mid-century French Indologists and archaeologists, such as Sylvain Lévi and George Coedès, looking at India’s role as a civilising, colonial mis­sion akin to what the French at the time, and Europeans for long, had seen them­selves as doing. When Indian historians picked up the thread, they took pride in the colonial strain of the argument, fall­ing into the very trap they wanted India to escape. RC Majumdar and Kailas Nag, of the Greater India Society for the Study of Indian Culture in East, South-east and Central Asia founded in 1926, for instance, saw the expansion eastwards of Indian culture as a superior civilisation overwhelming an inferior one by the sword. Southeast Asian scholars, in contesting this view, however, went too far themselves. While there is no evidence of Buddhism and Hinduism, and the ideas and forms they took with them, entrenching themselves in Southeast Asia through violence (yes, Rajendra Chola burned the Srivijaya ports in 1025 but only to protect Chola commerce and his Khmer allies), it is also a fact that “the cultural flow was overwhelmingly one way.”

If “gold was the economic engine of early Indic cultural power”, it was the scientific ideas that had the more dramatic impact, given that the number symbols still in use, the decimal system, algebra, trigonometry, astronomical discoveries, (the revolution of the zero that transformed mathematics and these numerals are indeed “the nearest thing the human race has to a universal language”)—all passed to Europe from India via Abbasid Baghdad. Fibonacci’s popularisation of the “Arabic numerals” seeded the “commercial revolution that financed the Renaissance and… as these ideas spread north, the eco­nomic rise of Europe”, and ultimately, European colonisation of where the ideas originally came from.

This was the Golden Road’s contribution to civilisation. Yet this “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.” In contrast, the Silk Route—invoked by Xi Jinping in promoting the Belt and Road Initiative—was largely a myth and completely unknown in ancient and medi­eval times. The term die Seidenstraßen (Silk Routes), long held to have been coined by Prussian geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen, birthed a Sinocentric worldview of Asia which ob­scured where the “real economic action” was. Not only were very few Roman coins found in China but Rome and China hardly knew each other. Chinese goods, in fact, passed through Indian ports, as a supplement to the main commerce, and there is no evidence of an overland east-west trade route linking China with the Mediterranean at the time. The Sinosphere was very small.

If the telling of Dalrymple’s story is aimed at the West, there is also a message for the Indian reader, and it’s not too subtle. It should be read partly because it is questionable how many Indi­ans know the story beyond Angkor and Borobudur, or Bali and Indonesian Ramayanas. And partly because it tries to strike a bal­ance between perspectives. A glorious ancient India is ideological anathema to the Left. The Right won’t be pleased either because it might see Hinduism, except in the Khmer domain, reduced to a footnote on caste and the laws of Manu. Yet the timeline of the Golden Road broadly begins with Buddhism spreading to distant lands, taking Indians across the seas again long after the fear of the kalapani had closed their ports.

The Golden Road, with an exhaustive bibliography, is a product of hard work, much travel, more research and much of it fresh since things are being unearthed in this field almost daily, coherently putting together an unenviable load of information and drawing a connecting line of logic through it. It satisfies BN Seal’s rule: “Historical comparison implies that the objects compared are of co-ordinate rank.” India’s “forgotten position as a crucial economic fulcrum, and civilisational engine… as one of the main motors of global trade and cultural transmission” was “fully on a par with and equal to China.” Without sounding jingo­istic, one might safely say: once far more significant than China. Truth has no statute of limitations. If Christopher Columbus was indeed a Spanish Sephardi Jew, does it matter that it took centu­ries of speculation and two decades of scientific investigation to finally establish that fact?

ancient IndiaAncient Indian historyAsiabooksCivilisational legacydebateWilliam Dalrymple