On the Golden Road

I picked this up thinking it would be about India, and the interesting thing is that it is about India and also isn’t. It’s one of those 2010s “X in World History” books, but the territory we call India doesn’t figure all that prominently; The Golden Road is really about the imprint India left on the rest of the world. Dalrymple opens in northeastern India with a sheltered lord undergoing an intense Saturn return (he was twenty-nine) and traces outward from there: the contact Alexander the Great’s armies had with Buddhism in India and what they carried back to the Hellenistic world, the trade between the Roman Empire and South Asia, the spread of Buddhism into Central Asia and China, and then eastward to Hinduism and its place in Southeast Asia. The last chapters follow the spread of Indian art and intellectual life to the Middle East through the Barmakids and onward across the Mediterranean, where it shaped Latin Christendom.

For all that it doesn’t dwell on India as territory, the book is remarkably good. I do think he overstates his case at times — India was important, and we can absolutely speak of an “Indosphere,” especially in Southeast and Central Asia, with a compelling argument that Indian culture reached as far west as the Euphrates and into China. But an “Indosphere” is a very different thing from “heavy Indian influence,” “weak Indian influence,” and “the general diffusion of ideas like numbers and zero,” and he conflates them more than he should. His argument about the end of the Indosphere is interesting. Hindu nationalists tend to point to the invasion of Muslims from Central Asia; Dalrymple pushes hard against that, arguing the transition to Islam happened differently. The Mongols never invaded India, but they hit Persia so hard that they produced a refugee crisis, and Persian Muslims became widespread in medieval India, especially around Delhi. That makes a great deal of sense to me, and I’d never thought of it that way before. Dalrymple’s book is well worth reading, even if it won’t be the comprehensive book on the subject.