History as taught in India is a 19th century colonial construct. It is heavily Delhi-centric, ignoring other important histories like that of the Eastern Seaboard and its audacious seafarers who sailed all the way to China in ships made of watertight nagchampa wood. The Cholas in their heyday a millennium ago are called a thalassocracy or maritime empire. But by cultural influence, not military conquest, for culture sailed like a bird perched on the shoulder of commerce. Southeast Asia and China know this, as do Indians on the East Coast.
But modern India has not told her ancient tale well either to herself or the world, a task newly accomplished by William Dalrymple’s book, The Golden Road – How Ancient India Transformed the World. Nobody has done this since AL Basham in The Wonder that was India in 1954, a book widely read in Southeast Asian universities. And Sanjeev Sanyal in his magnificent account of our maritime history in The Ocean of Churn in 2016. So, let’s first review a few things that we Asians do know about ourselves.
We know that Buddhist missionaries were sent to Sri Lanka by Ashoka, and westwards and north by the Kushans. We know that Xuanzang, the Chinese pilgrim, travelled across India in King Harshavardhana’s time. China was officially a Buddhist country in the 7th-8th century under Empress Wu Zhao, China’s first and only woman ruler and her court had a strong Indian influence.
{{/usCountry}}We know that Buddhist missionaries were sent to Sri Lanka by Ashoka, and westwards and north by the Kushans. We know that Xuanzang, the Chinese pilgrim, travelled across India in King Harshavardhana’s time. China was officially a Buddhist country in the 7th-8th century under Empress Wu Zhao, China’s first and only woman ruler and her court had a strong Indian influence.
{{/usCountry}}In the southern Thai port of Srinakharinwirot, there’s a fabulous maritime museum, which honours the ‘Chonlas’ as the Thais call the Cholas. This town, called Tamralinga by us and Ligor by the Portuguese, was a regular Chola port of call. In Japan, the Hachimangu Shinto shrine has a statue of the goddess of learning labelled Benten-Saraswati. The word Zen comes from Dhyan for meditation. Balinese Hindus pray, “Namachivaya, Namachivaya”, which is old Tamil for “Namas Shivaya”. Sri Lanka still calls India ‘Dambadiva’ in Sinhala from our name for ourselves, ‘Bharatavarshe Jambudvipe’.
A Pallava prince married a Vietnamese princess. Nandivarman, a younger son from that line was brought back to Kanchipuram to continue the dynasty. Over 1,300 words in the Korean language are apparently of Tamil origin. At home, the Tamil word for porcelain is peengaan, from Pyongyang, which was a centre for fine ceramics, brought back by our merchants. So, the word is over a thousand years old, and witness to who met whom and where.
In the 11th century, Vijayatunga, the capo of Sumatra in the Srivijaya confederacy, harassed Chola merchants on their China route. They complained to their king, Rajendra Chola. He built a blue-water navy and sent his fleet to teach Vijayatunga a lesson. The Cholas subdued the Srivijayans, collected tribute – and went back. No military colonization, no ‘conquest’. Thus, do the Vietnamese, among others, write of “the impact of China and the influence of India”.
Meanwhile Egyptian pharaohs to the west dressed, and were mummified in fine kapas, Indian muslin exported from the coast of Gujarat. Indian mathematics, chess, astronomy and astrology went to the Arab world. The Uzbek mathematician al-Khwarizmi, wrote a book, Upon Calculation with Hindu Numerals on ‘Sind-Hind’ as the Arabs called Indian numbers. This book went West and formed the basis of mathematics there, replacing clumsy Roman numerals. The biggest trading partner of the Roman empire was India. The holy city of Ujjain was the prime meridian of the old universe of discourse.
Our name for the Arabian Sea is Ratnakara, and the Bay of Bengal is Mahodadhi, the Great Ocean of Milk. Besides all those who sailed these seas, so did the Panchatantra, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. The Panchatantra was translated into Pahlavi by the priest Burzoi and then into Arabic as Kalila wa Dimna, named after two jackals in the Panchatantra called Karataka and Damnaka. These stories too went West, reflected in Aesop’s Fables. There are massive statues in Indonesian city centrums of the Parthasarathiyam, of Arjuna and Krishna in their chariot. Ghatotkacha is a pet of the Indonesians. The Ramayana became the Epic of Asia, with versions as far as Mongolia, several Southeast Asian art forms and an International Ramayana Dance Festival in Thailand in which as many as 10 Asian countries dance it their way. Angkor Wat, the biggest Hindu temple in the world, was built in Cambodia.
This last was the spark that lit Dalrymple’s interest in ancient India and acquainted him with a number of the points above. The outcome, researched and written over five years, is The Golden Road, about the ‘Indian millennium’ from around 250 BCE to about 1200 CE. It covers three areas across 10 chapters. The first section traces the spread of Buddhism in Asia. The second section follows Hinduism and Sanskrit in Southeast Asia. The third section explores the influence of Hindu sciences, particularly mathematics on the West. Written very engagingly, often drawing from new finds in archaeology and artefacts, the book recreates what Dalrymple names the ‘Indosphere’, which Asia, in respect to herself, calls the ‘Indic world’. We also learn tidbits about ourselves, that South Indians traded pepper for amphorae of Italian wine and olive oil, that Buddhist monasteries in India were luxuriously wealthy and financed trade expeditions.
The book is embellished with colour illustrations, from Avalokiteswara Padmapani in Ajanta to the East India Company. Rich in historical detail, it recounts how Fibonacci used Indian numbers and Indian accounting. This led to modern banking, including the Medici fortune and the East India Company. Here we could well recall the irony that ‘wootz’, the Indian steel that went to make Arab swords, came back to attack India, as did the East India Company. In sum, Dalrymple has pulled off a great service to the history of the world, which is largely unknown out west and to many in India. As he says, European school children know about Archimedes but not about Aryabhata, the Indian whose numbers they use.
I suggest that The Golden Road be required reading for every Indian for a better-informed perspective on Bharatavarshe. One beyond the calamitous overdose of Delhi and the reactive counter view of some that ancient India was mainly a land where “fair-skinned maidens spoke in Sanskrit to milch cows”, to quote writer Bill Aitken.
Renuka Narayanan is a journalist and author. Her latest book is Learning from Loss.