Reviewed by Harriet
India has always had a great attraction for me. I didn’t manage to go there until I was in my thirties, but I’ve visited countless times since then and hope I’ll do so again before too long. There are so many wonderful places to explore connected with the country’s long and fascinating history. Although I knew a little of this, William Dalrymple knows a great deal more and reveals it in his latest book, subtitled ‘How Ancient India Transformed the World’. In itself, this idea is challenging. Was it not the Chinese who did that, with their Silk Road, trading with Western countries in the early Middle Ages? Well no. Long before that, India was sending precious goods – gems, gold, silver, textiles, glass, spices and much more – to places as far away as the Roman Empire, Japan and Korea. And they would be paid handsomely for these luxury items – according to Dalrymple there are more Roman coins in Indian museums than anywhere else outside the Empire itself.
But the transformation of the subtitle refers to far more than this lucrative trade route. Ancient India was a famous fount of knowledge, mostly to be found in its great university monasteries. The most famous of these was Nalada, in Kanchipuruan, South India. Much is known of this owing to a book written in about 700 AD by Xuanzang, a Chinese Buddhist scholar, in which he describes his seventeen-year 6000 overland journey to Nalada. There were several thousand priests, lecture halls and temples, and the 10,000 scholars studied:
the texts of the different schools of Buddhism…the sacred Vedas, logic, Sanskrit grammar, medicine, metaphysics, divination, mathematics, astronomy, literature and magic.
The library was six stories high, and Xuanzang studied there for five years, copying out the Sanskrit manuscripts which he would take back to China. But all these things had been known in India for at least 250 years, making it what Dalrymple calls a ‘tangible “Indosphere”’ in which Sanskrit, a language dating back at least a millennium before the Christian era, was used to spread learning to diverse regions. Buddhism and Hinduism, though technically opposed, in practice seem to have mingled when it came to the profound knowledge that fascinated scholars. And among the places that shared that fascination was Baghdad, where in about 817, Kwarizmi, an Arabic philosopher and mathematician, became the head astronomer and developed an intense love of the Indian mathematical system. His book, Kitab-Algbr, introduced his readers to ‘the Indian calculating system using the nine characters’, and proved to be the foundation of algebra (the name taken from the title), geometry, trigonometry, equations and much more besides. Above all he taught the Arabs the importance of the idea of zero, ‘the tenth figure in the shape of the circle’, enabling the use of the decimal system.
Meanwhile, Xuanzang, having finally made his way back from India, was accepted as the spiritual mentor to the failing Chinese Emperor Taizong, who he hoped would promote Buddhism as the religion of the court. The Emperor died before this could be achieved, so he transferred his request to Wu Zeitin, an extraordinary woman who had started her life as the Emperor Taizong’s fifth courtesan and had worked her way up by various underhand means to become immensely powerful, and eventually an Empress in her own right. Among other things, she commissioned the building of numerous Buddhist temples and monasteries, the biggest library in the then known world, images, and statues, the biggest of which was a fifty-five-foot high image of Vairocana Buddha, ‘Lord of the Universe and the Primordial Principle behind all that exists’. The image remains today, as do many of her constructions. Unfortunately, she was also a murderess, and despite attempting to expiate her sins in later life, she was finally deposed and died a few months later. However, she had succeeded in her vision of making China the new centre of the Buddhist world, which it remains still.
Dalrymple writes with enthusiasm and conviction, and makes this impressively researched book enjoyably readable. There are a hundred pages of notes, over fifty of bibliography, and a glossary for those unfamiliar with the terminology. Reading it has made me want not only to return to India but also to visit two huge ancient temples further afield, one at Borobodur on Java, and the other at Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the largest religious structure ever erected anywhere in the world.
Harriet is one of the founders and a co-editor of Shiny.
William Dalrymple, The Golden World: How Ancient India Transformed the World (Bloomsbury, 2024). 978-1408864418, 496pp., hardback.
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