‘The Golden Road’ by William Dalrymple Doesn’t Romanticize India — It Restores It to Its Rightful Place
- This seminal work has reignited my curiosity, deepened my pride, and reconnected me to a past I somehow always sensed.
Rarely does a book not only educate but completely reshape your understanding of the world. “The Golden Road” by William Dalrymple has done just that for me. I haven’t been this absorbed, delighted, or moved by a historical narrative in years. This book doesn’t just deliver facts—it weaves them with story, evidence, and deep research, much of which I’ve followed over the past two years through Dalrymple’s photographs of cave paintings, ancient sculptures, inscriptions, and coins.
“The Golden Road” has become a companion. I wake up with it—sometimes in the presence of a remorseful Ashoka or an ambitious Kanishka expanding the Kushan Empire. I fall asleep imagining the ancient Confucian scholar Xuanzang copying sacred texts under Nalanda’s bright lamps, guided by the great Yogacharya Silabhadra.
I find myself in dark caves where monks once slept by oil lamps, or marveling at Roman coins and the carved footprints of the Buddha after he received Nirvana at excavation sites. Compelling echoes of a world we’ve forgotten to remember in the din of current affairs.
Dalrymple describes this book as a “personal grouch,” a passionate response to how India’s central role in world history has been repeatedly sidelined. And he doesn’t just argue for India’s place—he proves it, dismantling the myth of the touted “Silk Road” as the dominant trade route of the ancient world.
He shows instead that India’s real impact flowed along the Indian Ocean’s maritime routes, powered not by conquest, but by knowledge, trade, ideas, and the monsoon winds.
One of the most revelatory parts of the book for me was learning about the Roman-Indian trade routes we were never taught in school. Dalrymple vividly brings to life the ports of Berenike, Myos Hormos, Barbarikon, Barygaza, and Muziris—where amphoras of Roman wine and gold coins were traded for Indian pepper, silks, and cotton.
India drained nearly a third of Rome’s treasury because the affluent world simply couldn’t get enough of what we offered.When Roman gold dried up, Indian traders pivoted east toward Suvarnabhumi—Southeast Asia’s “Land of Gold”—carrying their culture with them.
What moved me most was not just the historical insight but the soul with which Dalrymple tells the story. He brings to life the monks who were allowed by Buddha to act as financiers, the merchants who ran sophisticated global networks.
The Ramayana and Jataka tales had long imagined these lands, and their reality emerged in places like Sarawak, the Mekong Delta, and the Khmer Empire. Even today, Garuda and Ganesha are worshipped across Indonesia—living proof of an influence spread not through colonization but through shared imagination.
Dalrymple also celebrates the role of the monsoon winds, which Indian sailors mastered, enabling trade and cultural exchange across vast distances. These winds carried Indian traders to East Africa, Singapore, Burma, and beyond, embedding Indian communities along both coasts of the Indian Ocean.
What moved me most was not just the historical insight but the soul with which Dalrymple tells the story. He brings to life the monks who were allowed by Buddha to act as financiers, the merchants who ran sophisticated global networks. He paints how Buddhist ideas took root early in receptive Southeast Asia, but how only—after war, famine, and the fall of the Han dynasty—China too began to embrace these teachings.
Buddha appeared in Daoist temples. Gilded statues filled monasteries. A golden figure with a nimbus who entered the dreams of a Ming dynasty monarch to a spiritual Godhead reshaping lives and empires. As someone who has long felt that India’s contributions have been smudged out, “The Golden Road” felt like a kind of vindication—but more than that, a homecoming.
Dalrymple doesn’t romanticize India—he restores it to its rightful place. Through mathematics, medicine, spirituality, and art, India was not a passive participant in global history, but a beacon—one of the world’s great engines of civilization.This isn’t revisionist history—it’s a distinguished recovery. And Dalrymple delivers it with intellectual rigor and lyrical elegance.
“The Golden Road” has reignited my curiosity, deepened my pride, and reconnected me to a past I somehow always sensed. I am still reading this magnificent story but I will carry this book with me—not just in thought, but in how I understand history, how I teach my children, and how I see India’s place in the world.
I wish I could have shared it with my dear dad. He always gifted a copy of Jataka tales to every child who was born in his circle of family and friends. This is how social studies should be taught: with story, with soul, and with truth.
With one foot in Huntsville, Alabama, the other in her birth home, India, and a heart steeped in humanity, Monita Soni writes as a contemplative practice. She has published hundreds of poems, movie reviews, book critiques, and essays, and contributed to combined literary works. Her two books are My Light Reflections and Flow Through My Heart. You can hear her commentaries on Sundial Writers Corner, WLRH 89.3 FM.
