The Golden Road by William Dalrymple review: 'a wonderful book'

William Dalrymple | Contributed

Leaving through some old papers I came across a cutting, 30 years old, from The Independent - a piece in which the writer disparaged the best-known British travel writers, the youngest of whom was William Dalrymple. His fault, apparently, was that he was "obsessed with the past."

The comment looked silly then, but it looks absurd now, for it has long been clear that Dalrymple is primarily a historian and an erudite and wonderfully entertaining one at that.

He has lived much of his life in India, and India has been his great subject. The subtitle of this new book is "How Ancient India Transformed the World". It is a wonderful book and, though Dalrymple is too knowledgeable to deny the achievements of the British Raj, the book reminds us how brief our Indian empire was.

Some chapters are devoted to Buddhism and Hinduism, which both undoubtedly had great influence throughout Asia. These were fascinating enough to have me turn aside for a day to read Kipling’s Kim again, this reminding me that, deeply as these religions interested him, he also said where there is Islam “there is a comprehensible civilization".

Nevertheless, readers as baffled as I am by some of the Buddhist and Hindu gods and goddesses will surely still delight in the chapter on the woman who rose by conspiracy and murder from being the Emperor of China's Fifth Concubine to being Emperor herself - a real horror who nevertheless promoted Buddhism. One of her courtiers said that in the next reincarnation he would be a cat and the Empress a mouse; whereupon all cats were banished from the imperial palaces. 

The first chapter deals fascinatingly with trade between India and the Roman Empire, making the point that the first trade routes between India and Europe were maritime. Indian jewellery, spices, cottons and silks were in huge demand in the Roman Empire, fleets sailing west to the Red Sea by one season's monsoon winds, returning east when the monsoon winds later changed direction.

There was huge demand for Indian products in the Roman Empire, that demand draining it of gold. Perhaps it was this imbalance of trade that contributed to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, rather than, as Gibbon thought, Christianity.

Medieval Europe owed much to India, knowledge coming first by way of the Arab sultanates in Spain. The most important of European borrowings was in the field of mathematics. The numerals we use and have conventionally called Arabic are actually Indian, and it was Indian scholars also who conceived the idea of zero; it's no surprise that Indian mathematicians are today so important in computer studies.

One of the most immediately interesting passages deals with the 13th century Hohenstaufen Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, known as "Stupor Mundi". He employed Michael Scot, known in Border legend as a wizard, as his astrologer and maths teacher. Frederick himself, meanwhile, several times excommunicated by the Pope, corresponded with scholars all over Europe and the Levant.

This is a wonderful book. Read it through in delight, acquiring knowledge, perhaps even wisdom. Then you will surely return to read much of it again. My only complaint is that the maps are too sketchy and faint for my ageing eyes.

The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World, by William Dalrymple, Bloomsbury, £30