The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

by William Dalrymple

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Whether in art, culture, religion, science or, well, you name it, India has long been an essential driver of progress. This expansive survey of India's contributions is an ode to a nation too often misunderstood.

The internationally bestselling author of The Anarchy returns with a sparkling, soaring history of ideas, tracing South Asia's under-recognized role in producing the world as we know it.

For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilization, creating around it a vast empire of ideas. Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics and mythology blazed a trail across the world, along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific.

In The Golden Road, William Dalrymple draws from a lifetime of scholarship to highlight India's oft-forgotten position as the heart of ancient Eurasia. For the first time, he gives a name to this spread of Indian ideas that transformed the world. From the largest Hindu temple in the world at Angkor Wat to the Buddhism of China, from the trade that helped fund the Roman Empire to the creation of the numerals we use today (including zero), India transformed the culture and technology of its ancient world – and our world today as we know it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781639734146
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	04/29/2025
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

William Dalrymple is the bestselling author of nine books, including the Duff Cooper Prize-winning The Last Mughal, the Hemingway and Kapuscinski Prize-winning Return of a King, and, most recently, The Anarchy, a finalist for the Cundill History Prize and one of Barack Obama's favorite books of 2019. A frequent broadcaster, he has written and presented three television series, in addition to writing regularly for the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and the Guardian. In 2018, he was presented with the British Academy's prestigious President's Medal for his outstanding literary achievement and for co-founding the Jaipur Literature Festival. Dalrymple currently cohosts the podcast Empire with Anita Anand. He lives with his wife and three children on a goat farm outside Delhi.

Editorial Reviews

“Dazzling . . . Not just a historical study but also a love letter.” —Guardian

“[Dalrymple is] one of India's finest popular chroniclers . . . his great achievement is in assembling the disparate fragments of early India's engagements across the continent into a delightfully readable whole.” —New York Times

“An outstanding new account . . . The most compelling retelling we have had for generations.” —Financial Times

“Audacious . . . Mr. Dalrymple sets out to correct what he believes is a narrative wrong-the playing down of India and Indians in Western accounts of history . . . [he] must get credit for flying the flag of the land that has been lucky enough to become his obsession.” —Tunku Varadarajan, Wall Street Journal

“William Dalrymple's The Golden Road puts ancient and early medieval India at the heart of an empire of ideas, trade, science, religion and culture. In this masterful work, Dalrymple . . . aims to correct "India's often forgotten position" as a cultural and economic superpower that, in his telling, transformed Asia and much of the world.” —Nishant Dahiya, NPR

“In his masterful new work, . . . historian William Dalrymple argues that India has both the potential and the historical track record to catch up with its former peer to the northeast ... The Golden Road fills an important gap in our understanding of the intra-Asian relations that predated the arrival of European colonisers.” —Bloomberg

“Dalrymple's writing is always animated, enlivened by color plates that allow readers to readily envision the sights evoked here. A passionate tribute to the glories-and influence-of ancient India.” —Kirkus Reviews

“[A] magisterial and energetic account . . . This first-rate work is a must-read for any history lover.” —Publishers Weekly

“A masterpiece of its own, ancient yet thoroughly modern in its themes of globalization, cultural diffusion and soft power, as paradigm-shifting in its Indocentricity as anything I've read in popular history.” —LitHub

“This enchanting work of ancient history offers an important backdrop to understanding contemporary India.… The book might be considered a riposte to both right-wing and left-wing historiography in India; right-wing historians make fantastic claims that cloak India's real and substantial achievements, while those on the left prioritize social history in a way that displaces intellectual achievement. Dalrymple finds another India in the past: open to trade, tolerant, scientific, creative, and universalist.” —Foreign Affairs

“Historian Dalrymple's comprehensive and meticulously researched examination of ancient India reveals momentous and ubiquitous influences ... When considered holistically, as Dalrymple does so well, it's clear that India's impacts cannot be understated and have shaped the world for thousands of years.” —Booklist-starred review

“Marvelous.” —California Review of Books

“A sweeping new assessment of the Subcontinent's star player . . . Dalrymple makes his case through both exemplary scholarship and compelling storytelling. The reader will feel transported through time and space . . . [Dalrymple] challenges us to look at ancient India - and the entire world - in a whole new light.” —Elizabeth J. Moore, Washington Independent Review of Books

“Magisterial . . . Dalrymple is an energetic and learned histo­rian of India. In The Golden Road, he draws from siloed compartments of scholarship and synthesizes a new understanding of an age when “Indian culture and civilization trans­formed everything they touched.”” —BookPage

“Reading Dalrymple's prose is a lively journey for the modern-day armchair Marco Polo. The big picture is always present, but never at the expense of the adventure.” —New York Journal of Books

“The Golden Road is an important book.” —Chicago Review of Books

“[A]n extraordinary collection of stories that recount India's often-forgotten yet significant contributions to the ancient world.” —Meera Kymal, IndiaCurrents

“For pure prose style, it's hard to find a more pleasurable narrator than Dalrymple. His education in art history and his debuts as a travel writer always show through in his luminous prose.” —Asian Review of Books

“[The Golden Road] doesn't just deliver facts-it weaves them with story, evidence, and deep research . . . Revelatory . . . This isn't revisionist history-it's a distinguished recovery. And Dalrymple delivers it with intellectual rigor and lyrical elegance.” —Monita Soni, American Kahani

“Masterly.” —The American Conservative

From the Publisher

2025-01-14
A historian argues for the vital impact of India on the ancient world.

In his latest book, the esteemed author ofThe Anarchy (2019) and other titles makes a case for the “centrality of the Indian subcontinent as one of the two ancient economic and cultural hubs of Asia.” Because the 19th-century concept of the “Silk Road”—the overland trade route from China to the Mediterranean—is so universally recognized, the influence of India, to the south, is often overlooked, says Dalrymple. The Scottish historian, who lives in India, posits that the “regularity and predictability of [Asian monsoon] winds…have allowed millennia of Indian sailors to raise their sails and propel themselves at speed across the oceans that surround them; then, when the winds reverse, safely back again.” With them, they brought pepper, spices, ivory, cotton, gems, teak, and sandalwood—all in great demand in the Roman Empire. The resulting trade vastly enriched Indian coffers, subsidizing artistic output. This “Golden Road” then ferried Indian religious beliefs and culture eastward to China and Southeast Asia, where the “spectacular” temple complexes of Borobudur in Java (Buddhist) and Angkor Wat in Cambodia (Hindu) are evidence of the “ever-widening Indosphere where ideas and forms and stories first dreamed up in South Asia were being discussed, appreciated, adopted and adapted very far from home.” Perhaps the most influential of all exports, according to the author, are mathematical concepts such as zero, fostered by thinkers like Aryabhata (476-550) and Brahmagupta (c. 598-c. 668), which made their way to the Arab world and then to Spain and the West. The ancient world, too, was a global village. Although the book is dense with far-flung names, dates, places, and ideas, Dalrymple’s writing is always animated, enlivened by color plates that allow readers to readily envision the sights evoked here.

A passionate tribute to the glories—and influence—of ancient India.

Kirkus Reviews