There have been many “empires of the sword” but very few “empires of the spirit,” and India was one of them, said historian William Dalrymple, delivering a lecture in Bengaluru. He made the observation while speaking at the Bangalore Literature Festival on Sunday, December 15, about his latest book The Golden Road—How Ancient India Transformed the World.
During the lecture, the Scotland-born historian delivered a crash course on the main arguments of the book – that three ideas that emerged in ancient India “completely changed the world” – to a large, attentive audience.
The first of these “principal forms of ideas” was Buddhism. “As there are so few Buddhists [in India] today, there are few cheerleaders for Buddhism as an Indian idea. Buddhism is often thought of as foreign or exotic, something to do with China or the Silk Road. And yet, it is India’s most successful soft power export,” Dalrymple said.
The second phenomenon was the spread of Sanskrit and Hinduism across Southeast Asia. “Between 500 AD and 1200 AD, almost every Southeast Asian country was Sanskrit-literate and many of them adopted Hindu forms of kingship, and stories from India of the Ramayana and Mahabharata became second-nature,” Dalrymple said.
The third was the Indian numerical system, particularly the invention of the number 0. “Almost nobody outside this country is aware of this,” Dalrymple said. He said that Europeans came across this system from the Italian mathematician Fibonacci when he was a child studying them at his school in Morocco.
‘Silk Road a monumental untruth’
In The Golden Road - which one author described as a “balm to the wounds of centuries of colonisation” in the right-leaning magazine Swarajya - Dalrymple argues like many other scholars, that the Silk Road was an “invented idea.” He said that it was an intellectual construct coined by a German geographer and scholar named Baron von Richtofen in 1877 and first entered the English language in 1936 in translation. He made the case that ancient maritime trade with India as the centre predated the Silk Road, a network of ancient trade routes that connected China with the West.
Pointing to a map he “randomly” took from one of his books about the Silk Road at his home, Dalrymple said that the concept of the Silk Road that gained currency in the 1980s, “completely erased India’s contribution and its place at the centre of the ancient world.”
”I’ve become increasingly convinced that this idea is a lie, a monumental untruth. And the best possible demonstration of quite how untrue it is, is another map introduced by the Oxford University Archaeological Department this year,” he said.
The map he showed the audience on a projected screen, was one showing the presence of Roman coins all over the world. While the highest presence of Roman coins was in Europe, many Roman coins were also found along the Mediterranean coast, while a “trickle” was found along the Nile in Egypt, and a “scattering” in Yemen in North Africa, and “a few more” in Afghanistan.
“If this is the trade route, you’d expect signs of that trade to linger in the archaeology… But not one Roman coin has ever been found in China,” he said.
Pointing to the Indian coast on the map, he said that the reason there were dots indicating the finding of Roman coins along the Indian coast was because India was a principal trading partner of Rome. He said that there was no direct trade between Rome and China but there was “enormous” annual passage of goods and trade between India and Rome.
He said that the volume of trade was so high, that the Roman naval commander Pliny complained that “India is the sink of all the precious metals in the world and the drain of all the gold of Rome. And he’s furious about it. He blames the immoral society ladies of Rome, rather like some right-wing editorials here might fulminate about Lutyens Delhi … These immoral women wear see-through textile, by which [Pliny] means silk, and this terrible fashion among the young today to put black powder on their food, he [Pliny] means pepper,” Dalrymple said.
Buddhism
Dalrymple said that for the first couple of hundred years the Buddha was never represented in imagery except as a wheel or lotus. It was only when Buddhism left Indian shores that the newer Buddhists began to represent the Buddha in human form.
Ashoka’s adoption of Buddhism, and his promotion of those ideas eventually led to the spread of Buddhism not only in the Indian sub-continent, but all over the world, spread through Bactria and Afghanistan, from China to Philippines and Southeast Asia right up to Mongolia and Siberia, he said.
“It’s not just Buddhism that is spreading. With Buddhism came a whole lot of ideas about reincarnation, karma, time and geography, Jambudwipa … Over half the world lives in countries that now or once were dominated by religions that came from this country,” he said.
He said that the understanding of this influence is still growing, as new discoveries about the spread of Buddhism are made. Two years ago, archaeologists discovered the head of a statue of Buddha that resembled the Gandharan style of sculpture at a temple of the goddess Isis, in Berenike, a busy port in ancient Egypt.
“This was erected by an Indian sea captain of the 2nd century, during the reign of Philip the Arab of Rome, in a temple of Isis. An extraordinary find,” Dalrymple said.
Hinduism
After the fall of the Roman empire, the trade shifted East, towards Southeast Asia, from the shores of Mahabalipuram and Nagapattinam in Tamil Nadu, launching the start of Hindu influence from the 5th century.
“The Tamil trading guilds were badass. They were like the East India Company. They had their own mercenaries and forts. My friend [historian] Anirudh Kanisetti found an inscription that shows a corps of assassins doing their dirty work. They built a new trading empire in what is known as Suvarna Bhoomi, the lands of gold.” Suvarna Bhoomi is a reference to parts of Southeast Asia from where gold was imported by Indian traders.
Dalrymple pointed out several instances in which the influence of Hinduism is visible even today in the names of cities such as Ayodhya in Thailand and others across Southeast Asia. However, the people in the places that Hinduism had travelled to have fashioned these influences in their own ways. This was why one saw the Khmer king Jayavarman II portraying himself as Vishnu, unlike the practices among Indian kings such as the Cholas, who often showed themselves as being crowned by Shiva, but not as Shiva himself.
He also talked about how the Brahmins dealt with crossing the seas, an act that was considered taboo. “You’ll be surprised to know that they moved the goalposts.” Back then, for the Brahmins, India was defined as the land bound by the Indus on the west, by the Ganga on the east, and the sea to the south. “What they do is, they move the Ganges. And the river in the centre of Southeast Asia, suddenly is rechristened Mekong, which is Ma Ganga in Khmer.”
He showed the audience a picture of the headwaters of the Mekong showing “yonis and lingas carved into the river banks to sacralise the river.”
By the 9th century, Hindu and Buddhist temples in Southeast Asia were larger than those in India at the time, because while the Indian region was split into several kingdoms such as those of the Cheras, Pallavas, Pandyas, and Cholas, there were two “mega kingdoms” in Southeast Asia: “The Khmer empire, which, don’t tell Mr Modi, was the probably the largest Hindu empire ever, and the Srivijaya [modern-day Indonesia].”
Zero
Dalrymple also dealt with how Aryabhatta’s invention of zero as a number with properties of its own, travelled to Europe. “Zero as an absence has been there for centuries, as a placeholder. But as a number with its own properties, it gains a different power. And this is Brahmagupta’s great contribution. He comes up with definitions of zero. And these ideas spread out from India to the rest of the world.”