A Forgotten Superpower: William Dalrymple’s ‘The Golden Road’ Unearths Ancient India’s Global Legacy

William Dalrymple’s ambitious new work, “The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World,” recently released in the U.S., represents a significant recalibration of our understanding of ancient global influence. Through meticulous research and vivid storytelling, Dalrymple challenges conventional Western-centric and Sinocentric historical narratives, presenting compelling evidence for India’s central role in shaping world history during a period spanning roughly from 250 BCE to 1,200 CE.

A Forgotten Superpower

The cornerstone of Dalrymple’s thesis is that for over a millennium, India functioned as “the center of the world,” exerting profound economic, cultural, and intellectual influence across vast swathes of Eurasia. As Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University, notes in his review in the Foreign Affairs, during this period “India could plausibly be considered the center of the world” with “Indian goods flow[ing] west” while “India was Rome’s largest trading partner.”

The book argues that this influence traveled along what Dalrymple terms “The Golden Road” — an extensive network of maritime trade routes that connected India to civilizations from Rome to Japan. “Forget the Silk Road,” writes Dalrymple, as quoted in Fara Dabhoiwala’s review in The Guardian, presenting instead a vision of India’s Golden Road, which “stretched from the Roman empire in the west all the way to Korea and Japan in the far east.” This bold repositioning challenges what Dalrymple calls the “seductively Sinocentric concept” of the Silk Road, which he argues “barely existed in antiquity,” writes Tanjil Rashid in the Financial Times.

Economic Giant of the Ancient World

The scale of ancient India’s economic reach is staggering according to the reviews. The Guardian cites Pliny the Elder’s accounts that India had become “the sink of the world’s most precious metals” due to Rome’s insatiable appetite for Indian luxury goods. Roman imports from India during this period were “probably worth over a billion sesterces a year” when “the yearly wage of a Roman soldier was about 900 sesterces.”

This economic relationship was so profound that, as The Guardian review notes, “Indian museums are said to hold more Roman coins than any other country outside the former empire.” Even at Hadrian’s Wall in distant Britain, “Roman soldiers craved Indian pepper to spice up their meals.” At its peak, “the customs fees raised by Roman officials accounted for one-third of the entire revenue of the Roman Empire.” 

Indian traders, skillfully harnessing monsoon winds, transported coveted goods including textiles (particularly the “see-through” muslins that scandalized Pliny), spices, gems, hardwoods, and sophisticated handicrafts. The Guardian quotes Pliny’s complaint that this trade existed merely “to enable the Roman matron to flaunt see-through clothes in public,” which the reviewer notes “only underlines that, 2,000 years ago, the fabulous lightweight muslins and other cottons manufactured in India had become the most coveted textiles in the world.”

Cultural and Religious Diffusion

Perhaps even more significant than goods were the ideas that traveled along these routes. Dalrymple’s work traces how Buddhism, originating in India’s heartland, eventually transformed the cultural landscape of East Asia. As Alok A. Khorana, a creative fiction and non-fiction writer from Ohio, notes in his review in LitHub, “It was not only texts that were transmitted—soon to follow were pioneering merchants, astronomers and astrologers, scientists and mathematicians, doctors and sculptors…holy men, monks and missionaries.”

The evidence of this cultural diffusion remains visible across Asia. According to Mehta, “The grandest monuments of Hinduism can be found not in India but in Cambodia, notably at Angkor Wat.” Khorana elaborates that this complex is “four times the size of Vatican City,” while “the world’s most complex Buddhist structure—the mysterious Borobudur temple in Java, Indonesia—was constructed based on texts brought by two Tantric masters from India.” Dalrymple estimates that “over half the world’s population today lives in areas where Indian ideas of religion and culture are, or once were, dominant.”

As Mehta observes, “Even in the sciences and especially in mathematics, India was indispensable; the ten-digit numeral system spread west from there through the Middle East to Europe.”

This influence extends to fundamental aspects of cultural identity throughout Southeast Asia. “Thailand’s ancient capital is Ayutthaya after Ayodhya, Lord Rama’s capital in the Hindu epic Ramayana. The national airline of Indonesia… is called Garuda, after the vehicle of the Hindu god Vishnu.” Even writing systems across pre-Islamic Southeast Asia developed from the Pallava-style Brahmi script of South India, forming “the basis for almost every pre-Islamic script in South-east Asia, including Khmer, Javanese, Lao, Thai and Malay” Khorana asserts.

India’s Intellectual Revolution

Particularly transformative was India’s contribution to mathematics and science. While the development of zero is widely attributed to Indian mathematicians, Dalrymple illuminates lesser-known accomplishments. According to Khorana, “a full thousand years before the Copernican revolution in Europe, twenty-three-year-old Indian mathematician-astronomer Aryabhata had calculated the movements of the planet, knew that the earth rotated on its axis and even the length of the solar year to an accuracy of seven decimal points.”

A century later, “the great scientific genius Brahmagupta further developed the idea of zero into a set of arithmetic rules handling both positive and negative numbers.” These mathematical innovations eventually traveled westward through translations reaching Baghdad, spread throughout the Islamic world, and were later taught to the young Italian mathematician Fibonacci.

As Mehta observes, “Even in the sciences and especially in mathematics, India was indispensable; the ten-digit numeral system spread west from there through the Middle East to Europe.” Khorana argues that this mathematical transmission was instrumental in “seeding the commercial revolution that financed the Renaissance and…the economic rise of Europe.”

Literary Legacy

Indian narrative traditions also made extraordinary journeys. According to the Financial Times review, “Indian tales such as The Ramayana, the ancient Hindu epic, captured the imaginations of virtually every civilization in the old world.” These stories were “translated into myriad languages and recorded in manuscripts housed in libraries in Baghdad and Alexandria.”

Critical Reception and Contemporary Relevance

Most reviews consistently praise Dalrymple’s work for both its scholarly depth and storytelling prowess. The Financial Times calls it “outstanding,” the Guardian “dazzling,” and reviewer Alok A. Khorana describes it as “paradigm-shifting in its Indocentricity.” While drawing extensively on existing scholarship, Dalrymple’s synthesis represents a significant original contribution.

Mehta suggests the book serves as “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.” In its place, Dalrymple “finds another India in the past: open to trade, tolerant, scientific, creative, and universalist.”

Perhaps most importantly, as Khorana eloquently concludes, the book reminds us that “immigration, trade, the mixing of peoples and languages and thoughts and ideas and religions” are not modern phenomena but “simply the shared history of humanity.” In an age of resurgent nationalism, Dalrymple’s exploration of ancient India’s far-reaching connections offers a timely reminder that “we have always been a deeply globalized, interconnected, mongrel world. Those who continue to harken for a ‘pure’ past will find it only by fictionalizing it.”

(Top image by William Dalrymple).