Overlooked by history? William Dalrymple on the forgotten might of ancient India

India is underrated in the conventional pecking order of great civilisations and empires. William Dalrymple, who has chronicled Indian history more than any other westerner, redresses that view.

The Scottish-born author of White Mughals, The
Last Mughal and a history of the East India Company, The Anarchy, has lived in India off and on since his first visit in 1984. Dalrymple, who also holds academic posts in the UK and the US and has won prizes for many of his previous 11 books, was well qualified to undertake what he told the Hindustan Times in 2020 would be “… a sweeping look at India’s colonisation of Asia, China and Europe during the short period between 250BC to about 800AD”.

Dalrymple’s task was monumental – his list of sources and bibliography runs to 146 pages – in arguing that India was on a par with and equal to China in the ancient and early medieval worlds. India’s favourable geographic position adjacent to ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome was an advantage. These were expansionist empires and attracted trade that harnessed the monsoon winds to travel back and forth on sea routes.

Some empires knew little of each other. The first reference to China in Rome, for example, was in 97AD. Rome did a lot of business with Indian merchants during the reign of Augustus (31BC to 14AD).

Romans paid in gold coins for spices, sandalwood, ivory, cotton, gems, teak and even exotic vegetables such as rhubarb. “This gold was the economic engine of early Indic cultural power,” Dalrymple notes. By comparison, the more expensive land-based “Silk Roads” westward from China were economically insignificant until the 13th century Mongol invasions.

Dalrymple does not rest his case on India’s economic and political clout. Unlike China, for much of its history India was not a united kingdom. It was a geographic entity extending south of the Himalayas and lying between the Indus and Ganges river basins.

Urbanisation began at the same time as in Europe, as iron ploughs and improved weaponry shifted nomadic pastoralism to settled farming, the rise of cities and stratified societies.

Buddhism provided for spiritual needs. It had been embraced by the philosopher-king Ashoka, the greatest of the ancient Indian rulers. He promoted its values of compassion, non-violence and moderation. Merchants spread these to all parts of Asia, including Japan, Korea and China.

This was some 200 years before the birth of Christianity. The link between religion and commerce reflected a view that wealth was a sign of good karma.

The Chinese traveller Xuanzang, who spent many years at the Buddhist centre of knowledge in Nalanda, northern India, published The Great Tang Dynasty Records of the Western Regions on his return.

Buddhism’s spread launched a period of prosperity for a united China in the short-lived Sui dynasty under Emperor Wen and later Empress Wu of the Song dynasty. Both championed Buddhism over Confucian thought.

China had its own intellectual Buddhist centre at Chang’an, the then imperial capital (now Xi’an), where two Indian monks, Vajrabodhi and Amoghavajra, were influential in the 7th and 8th centuries. “They brought new Indic ideas of cosmology, reincarnation, drug prescription, astronomy, horoscope astrology, ritual magic, calendrical computation and planetary prediction,” writes Dalrymple.

Back in the Indian heartland, Hinduism began to supplant Buddhism, creating the Khmer Empire in today’s Cambodia. At its peak, between the 9th and 13th centuries, it was larger than the Holy Roman Empire and created the world’s largest religious structure at Angkor Wat.

An intriguing feature of the Hindu expansion into Southeast Asia was its rejection of the caste system, higher status for women and lack of dietary restrictions – pork was hugely popular.

Under Jayavarman II, the Khmers built large-scale dams, reservoirs, irrigation systems and pyramids based on Indian engineering. Angkor was one of the world’s “great hydraulic civilisations”, and Cambodia was a “remarkably sophisticated centre of poetry, theatre and epigraphy” in Sanskrit, the sacred language of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism.

But perhaps the greatest legacy of Hindu knowledge was that of Brahmagupta (598-670 AD), whose work became the basis for modern mathematics through the invention of a 10-number system based on zero and nine units. It caused an intellectual revolution in Europe some 300 years later when it was introduced via Muslim scholars in Baghdad and finally Toledo, Spain, in 1085.

India has lagged China in the post-colonial period. Dalrymple believes India’s past shows it can transform outside ideas and then spread them abroad. Whether it can repeat that is a question yet to be answered.

The Golden Road: How Ancient India transformed the world, by William Dalrymple (Bloomsbury, $45),is out now.