‘There was a whole world in the ancient caves in the Deccan,’ says William Dalrymple

The Golden Road comes after you’ve completed your East India Quartet on which you spent 20 years. And it connects you to the first sites like Ajanta and Ellora that piqued your interest when you came to India as a backpacking teenager in 1984. Can we start with how The Golden Road returns you to your first love—the ancient world and archaeology?

I remember this, even as young as age five or six, there is a note­book somewhere saying, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ And it says, ‘an author and an archaeologist,’ which isn’t so far from what I am doing just short of my 60th birthday.

I spent all my time at school bicycling around, looking at long barrows and round barrows, and my holidays digging on archaeological sites from the age of 16 onwards, with a trowel in my hand. My first trip to London was to see the Tutankha­mun exhibition. I had a very Scottish childhood, and I begged my parents to take me to Tutankhamun, which was on display at the British Museum. And that was who I was.

It was going around India and being faced with all the complexities of the colonial, and all the different periods of India’s history that ended up with me going to Cambridge to study Indian history. I went into India as an archaeologist and my travels were very closely aligned around Sanchi, Ajanta and Ellora, and a lot of the Southern temple sites. I think my younger self would be enormously surprised—and possibly a bit disap­pointed—to know that I spent most of my career writing about the most recent millennium of history and for the last 20 years as late as the 18th century. Which would be very surprising to my younger self because growing up my father used to drag me around country houses, which was his enthusiasm, and I would in return demand that we visit at least one Megalithic site.

But why were you always intrigued by these ancient sites?

It’s always been my thing to be out travelling. Looking at stuff, reading about history and the circle of going somewhere, photographing it, reading about it, planning another trip has always been the main engine of my life. That’s what I love do­ing. If I won the lottery tomorrow, it’s what I’d carry on doing.

And this book started in the early days of doing The Anarchy [The Relentless Rise of the East India Company, 2019], when I went down to Ajanta and saw this newly restored Ajanta Cave 10 mu­rals which no one had written up, and in fact there was no sign saying they’ve just been restored. There were all these incredible early Buddhist murals dating from 150 BC, so that’s 700 years ear­lier than the famous Ajanta paintings. These two caves, 9 and 10, are from a different period and have the earliest Buddhist frescoes in the world. And the ASI—being the ASI—restored it beautiful­ly, but then didn’t bother telling anybody or doing anything that was available to the public. So, I spent a couple of months going down to the Deccan and basing myself around Aurangabad and going out to see all the cave sites, including the ones outside Pune, Karla and Bhaja, and realised there was a whole world here and this was this was something that had always excited me. So, when the tour for The Anarchy was over, and I was exhausted from travelling, lockdown locked in. And I was able to just start reading about all the stuff and I spent the whole of that first lock­down—March, April, May, June, July—just deep in the books. By the time that I finally got out of lockdown in July and flew back to Britain for the summer, the architecture of this book was already firmly in place. I had the whole book conceived with the three parts—Buddhism, Hinduism, Mathematics.

What were some of the challenges of writing about ancient India, when the sources were limited compared to sources of history for your previous books?

I was very used to writing in periods which were full of first-per­son material and my style is very biographical. I was always following individual biographies and creating a landscape peopled with first-person accounts and in the case of the four Company books, you had not only the fantastically detailed East India Company documents which is one of the reasons I moved back to Delhi in 2004. The National Archives—which many people complain about—are an incredible resource. If only because most historians go to London, which contains the East India Company headquarter accounts. While the National Archives in Delhi contains everything from their headquarters in India in Fort William. So, you’re getting a much more accu­rate account actually in the Delhi papers, because what arrives in London is dressed up for the consumption of their bosses. And so, if they’ve screwed up, you see all the documents about them screwing up in Delhi, but they’re all given a nice spin by the time that disaster has been reported to London and all sorts of creative editing has taken place.

The sources of history in this book, the material objects, are fas­cinating; there are ship records, graffiti in caves by traders, and of course, coins and papyrus and paintings. Is there an unusual object that you found that told an unusual history?

The art history is quite unwritten and as with those early Ajanta murals, there are major things which either haven’t been studied or are only now being studied and the field is moving quickly. An example of that is Gandharan art, which everyone in India knows very well. Those great Buddhas from Peshawar, Pakistan and Afghanistan, these incredibly handsome black figures of Maitreya hung with amulets, and looking as if he just emerged from the gym. Everyone had always thought of those as the legacy of the Alexander’s Greek legions left stranded in Afghanistan and who converted to Buddhism. That turns out to be completely wrong, and there’s a whole world of Gandha­ran studies. Particularly out of Oxford, [Professor of Ancient Art] Peter Stewart has been editing nearly 10 volumes now on Gand­haran studies and what’s clear is that the Bactrian Greeks were out of the picture by about 100 BC. The last Bactrian Greek coin, I think in Haryana is 100 BC or 150 BC and these Gandharan images of Bodhisattva and Buddha begin mid or late 1st century AD, in other words, at least 100-150 years after the Greeks have disappeared from the picture. And it is a reflection of this intense trade with Rome. Which again is a new field and at the moment there are very important excavations taking place in Pattanam, Muziris, Kerala. And in the sister site, which is Berenike on the Red Sea.

Those chapters about the Red Sea trade and the Gandharan Roman link could not have been written even 10 years ago. This is a field which is moving fast now, and I think will be new to many lay people, who have not followed the scholarly debates in India.

You mentioned earlier how biographies appeal to you…

It’s not just a matter of it appealing to me. It allows one to write a form of history which is alive rather than deadening. And in India, in particular, partly because of the dominance of Marxist schools of history which were dominant in Indian universities until very recently, as well as all the other things that the Right complains about, means that there’s been far less concentra­tion on culture and religion and much more on economics and much less on biography and personality and much more on market forces. So, the history you get out of Marxist history is about the unseen forces of history, the sociology and the economics as the principal driver. And I just think that doesn’t equate with our own experience in the present day.

Personalities do make an enormous difference and with­out succumbing to the Great Man theory of history—that everything is determined by one sort of Napoleonic genius or something—the direction of history can be changed by the particular drive of one person, whether it’s Henry VIII who wanted to get remarried, and the whole Reformation took place in English history, or whether it’s Ashoka’s remorse after the Kalinga Wars in Indian history, you know these things make a vast difference.

The Golden Road has some fascinating characters like the fifth concubine who became Empress Wu Zetian—who had a huge role in promoting Buddhism in China. The Confucian scholars were quick to vilify her. What were some of the challenges in creating a fair portrait about a character like that?

She’s a particularly difficult case because we don’t have anyone from her coterie writing their own account of that period. Almost everything that we have is vilifying and yet you know, reading between the lines you can see where the criticism is coming from—a very male and very Confucian, patriarchal perspective. I don’t think there’s any doubt about the main historical outlines of her reign, and it was clearly a very ruthless and bloody one that left a trail of exiled ministers, dead princes and murdered rivals. It is a story that is very familiar in China. There’s recently been an enormous soap opera, though I think in the Chinese version they’ve missed out, what to me, was the crucial part of the story, which is what she does in order to defy the Confucian patriar­chy—is to rely on Indian trained Buddhists.

You write about the great Indian exports, like Buddhism, the ep­ics, maths. But I am also curious about what did not get exported. For example you write; “Some aspects of Indian civilisation made almost no impression on South East Asia. The caste hierarchy never crystalised here.” Why do you think that is the case?

So, it wasn’t just the absence of a caste hierarchy. It’s fascinating that while Hinduism became an astonishing force in the courts of Southeast Asia and Indian Brahmins were hugely dominant from the 6th century onwards, bringing with them not just Hindu kingship as an institution, so that all the rulers rename themselves, but also took on the rights and the practises of Hin­duism, with abhisheka ceremonies and consecrations and so on. But they also brought literacy, numeracy, and administration. So, they just came across the seas and brought exactly the skills that they’d offered to the rulers in India to those in Southeast Asia.

But from the beginning, from the very earliest figurines of Vishnu that were fished out of the Mekong Delta from the 5th and 6th centuries and the very earliest Shivalingas, they’re all slightly different from anything in India. And so from the beginning, all the figures have Khmer features. That’s the first sign. And they wear ‘sampots’, which are the Khmer lungis, but a very different sort of wrap to that used in India. So you never ever confuse any sculpture in Southeast Asia with anything produced in India itself. And that difference diverges as time goes on, so you get not only an absence of caste. Pork remains the most popular dish in Southeast Asia. You get female Brahmins officiating in the temples and in the royal temples particularly, and the architec­ture and the art spins off in its own directions. Although you can see the influence, for example, of Gupta or Pallava or Chola models. And as Tagore famously said when he arrived at Angkor Wat, ‘Everywhere, I could see India. Yet I could not recognise her.’

That said, as we all know, Hinduism within India is very re­gional. Even within India, there are vast differences in different ar­eas of the country. But in Southeast Asia it was radically different.

Earlier you mentioned the two kinds of historians in India. And I found it interesting how you mentioned it in the book as well. Why did you feel the need to mention it in the book?

I think it’s an essential part of the landscape. No one who works in history is not aware that we’re in the middle of a major culture war and that there are two sides in the sense lined up on the playing field against each other. And to try and find your way through primary sources without being overly influenced by one side or the other is an important but difficult task.

I am obviously an outsider. On my first trip to India, I took as much pleasure in Sanchi and Ajanta as I did in the Taj Mahal. They all dazzled me and what I saw on that first trip in ’84 has kept me going. But I don’t feel that because I enjoy the Taj Mahal, that I can’t also enjoy Ajanta and Sanchi, and I have the same sense of wonder looking at both.

So there’s been some Twitter sort of musings of why on earth is this man who likes the Mughals possibly writing about ancient India? To me it’s just not an issue. It’s all stuff I’ve always loved. And as an art historian, I’ve been writing about this material for 40 years and there are whole chains of articles in the New York Review of Books going back to the early ’90s where I’m writing about Buddhist carvings and so on. But it is the first time that I’ve written a big history book on the pre-Islamic period alone, although there’s a lot of this stuff, for example in Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, which was as recently as 2009.

Has your very popular podcast changed your writing? Are you hearing yourself talk about it all in your head first?

No. But it has changed my life, in that for the first time, it’s allowed me to pay off my mortgage. As a writer you live a pretty precarious existence, relying on books. And while I’ve always been very lucky and sold very well, it is fairly hand-to-mouth, even if you’ve got bestsellers in India, America and Britain.

The podcast is a completely different game. Literally this month I paid off my mortgage, so it’s made a massive difference to my circumstances. And it’s an extraordinary thing because every week, 8,80,000 people download that podcast, and it’s still growing. And it’s been a massive success, but it is something self-contained. It takes two days of my week, one day of reading and one morning with Anita recording it. My life is busier now, but I am less poor.

It has affected absolutely the number of people that turn up at events and the number of people buying the book. And it’s far more global than anything I’ve ever done before. A podcast isn’t stopped by national boundaries. We have a heavy correspondence. We have a whole world of letters and emails being written every week about something we said. And the letters come in from, Mongolia, Madagascar… as well as the more obvious parts of the world.

The thing that affected the book more was a complete ac­cident, which was that my publisher, my editor, retired. Just before I was about to finish the book, and through a failure of communication, Bloomsbury in London didn’t keep a slot for this book, this time last year when it was originally due to come out. So, it got delayed a year and I had—which I’ve never had for any book ever before—a whole year to work on the notes, which is one of the reasons why there’s quite so many notes, to send it out to scholars to check.

And there are a few errors still and those will be cor­rected. But I think this is the most carefully fact checked. Everything has been gone over and improved and polished and sanded and varnished. And it’s so much better a book than it was when I originally handed it in last May and June. That extra year has been the biggest blessing because this is an area—which, unlike the East India Company, which I knew backwards by the time that I was writing The Anarchy—I’d always loved, but was not a specialist in, by any stretch of imagination. And so it took a lot more work. It’s nice being able to do something as serious as this, while at the same time do­ing something as popular as the podcast. A lot of research goes into the podcast, but it definitely has a lighter tone.

This is one of your thinner books, but it has 200 pages of notes.

My particular method of working is, and I learned this from Steven Runciman, in any period of history, there will always be disputes about different sources or you know the two sources that you have will disagree on fundamental things and in quite a lot of history books you end up with in a sense, the bonnet is open and the historian will discuss whether account A is right or account B is right. And then come to a conclusion of what actually happened. My method of working has always been, and Runciman does this very well too, is to decide what you think happened. And present it as you can as what happened and then justify that at length in the footnotes. Which means you get a much smoother experience as the reader, but there’s hopefully enough in the footnotes to satisfy the scholars about why I’ve said that this happened. I reserve the arguments for the notes and tell the stories in the text.

bookscultureIndian civilizationSilk RoadsThe Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the Worldtrade