Review : The Golden Road

And now for something completely different.

William Dalrymple's The Golden Road : How Ancient India Transformed The World was an obvious choice as a present-list request. Not least due to its gorgeous presentation, with its wonderful illustration on the edges of the pages... 

Yes, I'm a sucker for aesthetically beautiful books. I blame Thames & Hudson.

But also, of course, I wanted it because of the subject matter. I don't know much at all about ancient India (practically nothing), but I do know that that's a gap which deserves to be filled. There was Michael Scott's Ancient Worlds, which is a superb, thought-provoking book but doesn't really cover its own remit : it presents many very astute comparisons between Europe, the near and Middle East, and ancient China, but never spends much time at all on how they were connected (and omits India entirely). Then there was Peter Frankopan's outright offensive The Silk Roads, a book which has left a permanent bitter taste and is a very strong contender for being the worst book I've ever read. Characterising the peoples of the near East as nothing but perpetual victims of Western meddling and aggression, and an outrageously cynical view of the EU that comes dangerously close to drawing comparisons with Hitler's empire... nah, go fuck yourself, Frankopan.

So yes, a book about that rather large bit in between Europe and China, and how it affected the rest of the world, is very much needed and welcome. Step forth, Dalrymple.

The Review Bit

(This section turned into a bit of a rant. Feel free to skip ahead if you just want to know what the book says.)

Overall, it's... decent. Not great, but certainly not bad either, and Dalrymple could wipe the floor with Frankopan leaving nothing but an unsightly stain. Dalrymple's work is not without its own issues, but they're of almost entirely matters of style, not substance. In terms of content it's actually very good indeed, covering exactly its objective : to demonstrate that ancient India played an enormously influential role across a vast area from East to West, without ever slipping into the classic "they invented everything" nationalistic trope.

Well... he does occasionally slip into this kind of thinking a little bit, but I'll forgive him that – he just gets carried away from time to time and makes the odd claim that a casual bit of background searching easily reveals as false or overstated*. Far more often, he remembers that cultural exchange is a two-way street : yes, India was the source of some important and unfairly overlooked contributions to world history, but it too was changed by its encounters with other peoples. Dalrymple does not forget this.

* Two examples. One is that the Green Man found in medieval Churches is actually of Indian origin. This appears to be a not crazy idea, but very far from the whole story and certainly not without controversy. Secondly, Dalrymple gets the founding date of Oxford University wrong, and gets hung up on specific architectural features of universities as being of peculiarly pivotal importance. I think this is to the miss the point that academic types have always created their own institutes, and there's surely nothing especially Indian about the concept of a university. And a third, related irritation : specifying that a calculation was accurate to seven decimal places but without specifying the units, thereby making the accuracy completely unknown.

No, the real problems are in his presentation style. For example, and this may seem unduly petty, the extensive footnotes at the back of the book quickly become a source of frustration. They're the classic mixture of bibliographic details and additional commentary, occasionally spanning multiple pages and presenting vital caveats to what's given in the main text, so you'd be ill-advised to skip them. But so much of this could, and should, have been incorporated into the main body, and separating it all just makes the process of reading unnecessarily awkward.

Then there's a lack of references to the photographic plates. This is another very common problem among history books that's so easily solved ! Being interrupted by random and meaningless images is no help whatsoever, whereas being directed to them at key points in the text would massively enrich the whole experience. Worse, he often mentions the plate images but never says which one to turn to... c'mon, just give a figure number ! Likewise, shamefully, that wonderful illustration inside the cover and on the edges of the pages is nowhere referenced.

Much the biggest problem, however, is the writing style. This takes a lot of getting used to, often falling into a strange sort of third-person passive voice. Paragraphs begin and end almost entirely at random so that reading it is like walking along an unexpectedly bumpy pavement and being constantly tripped up; really, this is downright strange and not something I've much encountered before. 

Likewise, the larger textual structure does it no favours either : he begins each chapter with a summary of what will be presented, except it's never made clear when the summary has ended and the main narrative begins. This means that you don't quite know if he's just repeating himself or going into more detail – or if he's just gone mad and forgotten himself. Or indeed, if you've gone mad and forgot something obvious. It often feels like he's suddenly resumed an earlier discussion after going off on a truly almighty tangent for sixteen pages.

And even at the level of individual sentences, reading it can be quite the slog, and I frequently found myself trying to parse it into something intelligible – this one's more subjective than the others, I guess, but it just didn't work well for me. It doesn't help that Dalrymple refuses to ever dumb down even slightly, making the extremely long and unfamiliar names excessively hard to follow. The most common problem for me was that I wasn't even sure which country he was referring to and had to keep going back through the text (or consulting Google) to check. 

Individually these aren't major problems. Collectively, they become tiresome. Challenge me with complex new ideas, not by bewildering me with an onslaught of badly described facts or by making me flick the pages back and forth every two seconds.

And yet... he does stick to his remit. When he focuses on a single simple narrative, especially the chapter on the Empress of China, he shines. He raises, sometimes implicitly, some extremely thought-provoking questions and has some important points to make, without ever screaming about it : history comes first. And the ambitious scope of the work has clearly involved a great deal of research on a whole range of topics (politics, Hinduism, Buddhism, Roman history, the far East, mathematics) for which he deserves no small kudos.

This one is very difficult to rate, but I'm going with 6/10.  It's more of a case of missed opportunity for greatness than anything actually bad, but while some sections are really first-rate stuff, others are an awful long way off that. His rhetoric fails to stick the landing, rarely delivering the emotive impact it deserves.

Stuff I Found Interesting

I'm proceeding from a position of profound ignorance here, much more than with books on European history. You'll have to forgive me if I say things which are bleedin' obvious, especially when it comes to the religious aspects.

The Scale Of The Indosphere

If Dalrymple has a central point, then I suppose it would be the vast scale of Indian influence, both materially and culturally. Not one but two great religions sprang forth from the subcontinent, and its financial output was equally prodigious. Dalrymple stresses the book's title as being somewhat literal : unlike Frankopan, he explicitly describes silk as being of relatively minor importance. No, it actually was gold, he says, that drove the economics of trade. By some estimates, at the zenith as much as one-third of the Roman Empire's entire revenue was derived from trade with the East. Ships manned by a thousand people routinely carried the great wealth back and forth between Europe and Asia.

These trade links didn't spring from nowhere. Rather they'd been developing for centuries, possibly even millennia – but it was the unification of a vast area under the Pax Romana that prompted a massive expansion in trade. And while most of the ships were crewed by Indians rather than Europeans, there is evidence for at least some Romans actually present within India* : this was not a situation of passing the wealth along sequentially or by osmosis, but directly. 

* The Romans purchased so many Indian gemstones that Pliny described it as the "sink of metals", referring to the vast amounts of gold they sent in payment. While Roman merchants almost certainly visited India, the most famous personage from the West is surely Thomas, brother of Jesus. As with Buddhism in Egypt, however, even if this did happen, there's no evidence for any direct religious influence from West to East.

It wasn't just gold though. Spices are proverbially famous, with pepper being as widely available in Scotland as it is today (though nowhere near as cheap). Gems too were widespread, with Indian gemstones even being found at Sutton Hoo – well after the collapse of the Western Empire. Rather amusingly (if you're living in the Czech Republic), when the trade to the West finally did dry up, Dalrymple notes that "thereafter Indian garnets were replaced by inferior stones from Czechoslovakia and Portugal".

I have to wonder what role, if any, the loss of this Indian trade played in precipitating the fall of the Western Roman Empire. I'm guessing there must be an obvious reason why the causal link is actually the other way around, i.e. it was the collapse of the Empire that stopped the trade. Even so, it seems strange to me that a much bigger deal isn't made of this in histories of the Empire, both for its Eastern and Western halves – the loss of this much revenue cannot have been anything less than catastrophic for the remaining rump of Rome.

Spiritual Salesmen

If the material exports – to the east as well as Europe – were vast, so too were the religious and philosophical ideas of India of comparably profound influence. These were not purely directed to the east, with Buddha figurines found even in Roman Egypt (though this says very little about the presence of actual Buddhist adherents there). But they were, by and large, much more successful in South-East Asia than elsewhere.

I will emphasise again my pig-headed ignorance of both Buddhism and Hinduism. Of the former I'm largely limited to pop culture, so from my perspective professing a Buddhist lifestyle means either being a) a Shaolin monk possibly found inside the Matrix and generally being really badass; b) a tech CEO with billions of dollars and intent on making sure everyone knows how incredibly humble they are.

According to Dalrymple the latter is not entirely the result of a modern perversion of the religion. Early Buddhists, he says, saw the need to make money as (at worse) a necessary evil, with asceticism being a later development : how could you possibly reach Nirvana on an hungry belly ? Indeed the earliest monks seem to have been well-known for all kinds of modern vices; many early stories seem to have had no problem with having merchants as the heroes. It was even possible to reach Enlightenment, much as in Christianity, through gifts to monasteries. It's all in marked contrast to Hinduism, which viewed businessmen as being on the same level as "sadists and lepers". And the Buddha himself was depicted not as reclining in passive contemplation, but as powerful and muscular – which Dalrymple describes in lurid, almost homoerotic tones. 

Buddhism also suffered from the same twisted misinterpretations and misuse as Christianity. There were Buddhist warlords and rulers who proclaimed themselves to be Buddhist deities, even the reincarnated Buddha him (or her*)self : Maitreya – which for me is interesting in explaining the name of a popular local restaurant. Early Buddhism might not have required intense physical suffering, but did demand intense spiritual endurance, with multiple lifetimes being needed to reach Nirvana. But even this relatively limited degree of... well, let's be honest, purely imaginary hardship proved unpopular : the need for tangible gods and benefits, says Dalrymple, is what led to its downfall in India**.  Even the rise in the beliefs in Buddhist equivalents of saints and angels (to whom, unlike the Buddha himself, one could appeal directly) was not enough to stop the decline. Hindu ideas went much further, with their gods not being adverse to naked bribery.

* The Empress of China is a truly fascinating figure who appears extremely bipolar. She appeared to attend lectures by scholars out of both a genuine interest in what they had to say and out of pure ego to see what she could use for propaganda. Her tyrannical crimes are likely exaggerated, but even according to her own confessions she was ruthless in the extreme. The whole chapter feels like listening to a description of two entirely different people. And it was under her regime, both enlightened and totalitarian, that Dalrymple says is when Indian influence over China reached its zenith.
** I find this a rather interesting mirror of the decline of magical, mechanical beliefs and the rise of spiritual, religious ideals in the West, as per Keith Thomas. Though of course it's more complicated than that, as within a few centuries, Buddhist monks had become widely known as devotees of self-discipline in line with the modern stereotype.

If Dalrymple sometimes gets suspiciously enthusiastic about the masculine virtues of early Buddha, he's certainly no less, err, red-blooded when it comes to the voluptuous curves of the ladies in many a Hindu temple. But there's a serious point to these opposing sorts of religious practise, the supposed spiritual enrichment through self-denial versus the apparent magical ecstasy of physical indulgence. What comes across to me here are two great rival theories of humanity. First, there's the Star Trek model : it's easy to be a saint in paradise. That is, only by reducing physical distractions can we hope to improve our minds and become better people. Second, there's the Dune model : we only achieve our best when we struggle against adversity, with physical hardship being necessary to develop our mental discipline and essential in overall self-improvement.

With the rise of AI, this is extremely topical. Will we do better when all the answers are provided to us*, or is this a poisoned chalice ? If we need some middle ground in which to truly flourish, where exactly is this ? When does struggle engender fortitude and intelligence, and when does it become destructive ? Or vice-versa, when does an excess of luxury lead to decadence and decline and when is it simply a reward or an incentive, or even a necessary condition to excel ?

* Neglecting hallucinations, here meaning when an LLM comes up with an answer which has no connection to reality.

Answering this may not even be possible, so let's move on. If the dichotomy of luxury and hardship is a common theme among religions, a more specific similarity is found when it comes to graven images. Even Buddhism, now so associated with monumental architecture, had some early adherents who were aghast at the ideas of images of Buddha : why imprison him in an image of the humanity from which he had strived to escape ? There seems to be a tension between the need to have a focus of worship – a literal icon – and the desire to escape such pettiness, the urge to think oneself above such things. Again, perhaps, the conflict between luxury and depravation is at work.  

In this very specific instance I will venture an answer : visual imagery does no harm whatever. The map is not the territory and a 70-ft Buddha statue is not the Buddha himself. Images, graphs, charts, all help the mind far more than they ever hinder it. So there, that's a major religious dilemma definitively solved for all time. Hooray !

The Sale of Spiritual Science 

If hardly presenting anything comprehensive on Buddhist or Hindu beliefs, Dalrymple certainly manages a good introduction for the likes of ignoramuses like me. It's abundantly clear that both religions had incredibly complex, sophisticated, and immensely varied beliefs and practises. Dalrymple at least manages to convey some of the basics of how different these mental worlds were (and are) from modern Western concepts.

Two examples will suffice. First, there's the practise of snake worship. The books I've read recently on mythology of European cultures make it clear that snakes were interpreted in a variety of conflicting ways. They could be seen as symbols of regeneration and healing due to shedding their skin, and also of wisdom. But they could also be seen as villainous and evil, tempting Eve in the Garden but also simply eating people (especially, of course, in the case of dragons, which were regarded as the greatest of all serpents).

But if snakes were sometimes valued, nowhere have I read of anything of actual worship of snakes in Europe. Indeed, it's hard not to view this as some sinister, Indiana Jones-style evil cult. Sadly Dalrymple doesn't go into much depth on this, really only mentioning that snake worship was sometimes widespread. The interesting, and again implicit question, is what distinguishes a cult of pantomime villainy from a real world case of misguided ideals. I suppose the former would be when believers found not only religious salvation, but actually took emotional pleasure in inflicting pain on their enemies while earnestly believing in its spiritual necessity. There's little hint of this with the snake worshippers. Which is a bit of a shame, if you ask me.... still, there's clearly a marked difference from Western traditions here.

The second example are mandalas. You see them used as decoration often enough (I've got one on a pillow), but they could also be used as visual spells. In extreme cases, temples and maybe even cities were based on these intricate patterns. In the case of a temple, at least, the idea seems to have been to induce an altered state of consciousness. Walking through the dark and twisting tunnels, with torches and drums manipulating the senses into a kind of trance, the sudden emergence into full sunlight at the summit must have been an overload. The skills to design such a structure, replete with baroque levels of overwhelming aesthetic detail in a harmonious symphony of geometry, were formidable indeed.

The idea of mechanical, ritualised magic blends easily into more rational, scientific ideas about how the world works (again, see the posts about Keith Thomas' Religion and the Decline of Magic). Unsurprisingly then, the same skills needed to formulate complex magical rituals and objects also expressed themselves in more straightforwardly scientific discoveries. Science was highly prized, with several top-level diplomatic treaties making the exchange of scientific texts a key feature. Some of these included translations of much earlier foreign texts, such as those of Aristotle (Dalrymple's period is mainly c.0 – 1,000 AD); again, he does not pretend that India invented everything. 

But perhaps India's greatest contribution was the number zero*. Claims of just how profound a shift this was are, well, innumerable, but I've never found them all that convincing. To say that the absence of a thing can itself count as a thing does not, in my view, necessitate some genius-level philosophy. How many apples do I have ? No apples. How 'bout I represent that with a symbol ? Sure, no problem. This is nothing terribly difficult.

* Whether this really did come from India is, unsurprisingly, disputed.

The real achievement, as Dalrymple and others make clear, is the place value system of numbers. Once you start using the position in the written sequence to represent the size of the number – units, tens, hundreds, etc. – then the invention of zero is inevitable. This doesn't happen at all with Roman numerals, or other systems which use symbols to represent entire numbers rather than as a sequence. And that shift does require some genius-level philosophy, as great and radical as switching from base-ten mathematics to binary.

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Dalrymple has done a hit-and-miss job of presenting material that is nearly always interesting. I recorded in my notes that "the only thing that saves it is the content", which is strange but true.

Nevertheless, Dalrymple gets his main points across loud and clear. For several centuries, India was home to some of the greatest civilisations on the planet. Its architecture, religious beliefs, scientific discoveries, and sheer volume of material output had deep influence from the Roman Empire to Java. As Indian gems can be found in Dark Age burials in England, so too are there to be found Indian-inspired temples in an active volcano in the far East.

Too much of this influence has been forgotten by the West, arguably deliberately suppressed by the colonial British in their attempts to civilise a subcontinent that had, very clearly, had its own civilisations for millennia. Those civilisations were frequently alien to modern ideals, with exotic (and unashamedly erotic) temples, worship of snakes, mythical monkey armies, and complex magical symbolism. Yet they also played no small role in influencing those same modern ideals, pointing to an ancient world more interconnected than we usually assume. In our popular histories, at least, India has been neglected and forgotten for far too long.