The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed The World

This a remarkable book, and not only for the fact that it was researched on the field — the author did personally visit the historic sites he studies, from Kbal Spean, Koh Ker and Angkor Borei, Cambodia, to Borobodur, Indonesia -, or that its impressive (53 pages) bibliograpy should be a reference for all further research on the connection between India and Southeast Asia: like so many other books by Walter Darlymple, it makes you wonder whether the sorry state of our modern world could be fixed.

When he pre-launched his latest work in Delhi, March 2024, the author remarked ​“the shifting focus of Indian trade from the west coast to the east coast kicked off the expansion into Southeast Asia. With trade, India’s cultural influences and ideas moved too. Hinduism moved to the Mekong Delta and Buddhism to China respectively”. He added that he got ​“increasingly irritated with the idea of the Silk Road”(see Rama Lakshmi for The Print, 8 March 2024).

Cambodia is definitely the central point of this huge exploration, and for a reason: nowhere else the Indian influences through language (Sanskrit), art, spirituality, intermarriage — the founding myth of Kaundynia and Soma -, material culture, have been more fluidly integrated into the local traditions and social fabric. One remark about Khmer art reflects the author’s overall outlook:

From the beginning, [the artworks] sculpted in Cambodia have Khmer anatomy and physiognomy, and are stylistically distinct from their Indian models. Quite quickly, for example, the long skirts of the Tamil dhoti on the Indian versions of the figurine give way to a much shorter Khmer wrap. This is important, for it shows that from the very beginning of ​‘Indianised’ art in South-east Asia local artists and their patrons felt able to choose what aspects of Indian models they were interested in and had full control over what they wanted to adopt, adapt or completely discard. (p 181)

Known for his committment to ​“think out of the box”, the author also favorably cites Sanjeev Sanyal​’s ​“influential book”, The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History (New Delhi, 2017), decried by some Western scholars as too lenient to Hindu nationalism.

Earlier therorizations

Indianis(z)ation is in fact an awkward term to refer to this quite unique event in the history of mankind: the weaponless, duressless expansion of culture onto different civilizations. And to grasp this unprecedented spreading of Indian values to the Southeast Asian context in ancient times, one had to be devoid of ideological biases. 

The author aptly shows how growing Indian nationalism and French colonial vision of ​“saving Angkor” conflated into the ​“scientific” concept of ​‘Greater India’ :

‘Mother of Wisdom,’ wrote the archaeologist and epigrapher Sylvain Lévi, ​‘India gave her mythology to her neighbours who went to teach it to the whole world. Mother of law and philosophy, she gave to three-quarters of Asia a god, a religion, a doctrine, an art. She carried her sacred language, her literature, her institutions into Indonesia, to the limits of the known world.’ He added, ​‘She has the right to reclaim, in universal history, the rank that ignorance has refused her for a long time and to hold her place amongst the great nations, summarising and symbolising the spirit of humanity.’ Lévi’s colleague, George Coedès, wrote in a similar vein that ​‘the expansion of Indian civilisation to the East … is one of the outstanding events in the history of the world, one that has determined the destiny of a good portion of mankind’. The great Hindu and Buddhist monuments of South-east Asia may have looked a little different from their counterparts in India, but they were, nonetheless, the ​‘pure productions of the Indian genius, the deep meaning of which is apparent only to the eyes of the Indianist.’ 

The ideas of Lévi and Coedès were eagerly picked up by a generation of Indian intellectuals, many of whom were Bengali and some of whom had attended the University of Paris. In 1926 these nationalist historians founded what they called ​‘the Greater India Society for the study of Indian culture in East, South-east and Central Asia’. Rabindranath Tagore, the great Nobel Prize-winning poet, was invited to be the purodha or ​‘spiritual guide’ of the Society, and they set up their own journal, which continued to publish as late as 1958. Many of the contributing members were the finest Indian historians of the day, but – amplifying the preconceptions of their French colonial teachers – their work framed Indian influence in terms of ​‘Ancient Hindu Colonies in the Far East’, as R. C. Majumdar entitled a book that he published in 1944, at the height of the Indian Freedom Struggle, with its talk of ​‘an inferior civilisation’ being overwhelmed and colonised by ​‘a superior one’. Majumdar wrote that Hindu princes had conquered, settled and ruled South-east Asia, which, in Majumdar’s telling of it, delighted the locals who ​‘from this time forward … cheerfully submitted to their foreign masters and adopted their manners, customs, languages and religion. They were politically merged in the Indian elements and there was complete cultural fusion between the two races.’ This was, of course, long before the emergence of the idea of ​‘soft power’. In the first Bulletin issued by the Society, Dr Kailas Nag went even further, talking of ​‘India’s noble dynamic of cultural imperialism’ which ​‘soon won for India the ineliable empire over the vast continent, right across Tibet and China to Corea and Japan on the one hand and across Burma and Indo-China to Java and Indonesia on the other.’ (p 13 – 4)

And he goes on:

Over the next seventy years, scholars in the region went out of their way to fight off not just the notion of ​‘Hindu Colonies’ but also the whole concept of ​‘Indianisation’ in general, which became almost a dirty word in South-east Asian university departments, to be used only when heavily hedged with inverted commas and qualifying adjectives. A younger generation of post-colonial archaeologists and art historians working in Vietnam and Cambodia were quick to minimise notions of Indian colonialism, and instead presented their Indic-influenced finds as part of a reciprocal relationship of ​‘acculturation’ and cultural ​‘convergence’ and exchange between India and South-east Asia. (p 15 – 6) [Author’s note: For the historiography of the Greater India Society see T. C. A. Raghavan, ​‘Etched in Stone: Archaeology and Geopolitics’, The Telegraph (India), 14 August 2020. Also Hermann Kulke, History of Precolonial India (New Delhi, 2108), pp. 267 – 71, and Susan Bayly, ​‘Imagining ​“Greater India”: French and Indian Visions of Colonialism in the Indic Mode’, Modern Asian Studies Vol. 38, No. 3 (July 2004), pp. 703 – 44. Two western historians who have gone out of their way to minimise Indian influence on South-east Asia are Claude Jacques and Michael Vickery.]

Pandit Nehru’s historic visit to Angkor and Banteay Srei in October 1954 can be put in that context, and even if the author doesn’t directly mention it, it is clear that the way Indian scholars and statesmen were reconsidering their country’s history at the time could not bring a significative change to their outlook on Southeast Asia:

During the days of Nehruvian rule in the 1950s and early 1960s, Indian school textbooks and most academic histories were written by left-leaning, Congress-supporting figures. These historians tended to underplay the violence and iconoclasm that came with the Turkish invasions, partially in the interests of what they saw as ​‘nation building’ following the terrible inter-religious violence that had taken place during partition. Today, under the current right-wing BJP government, the reverse is true and the destruction of Hindu temples is almost all that many in India seem to know of the complex but fascinating medieval period of Indo-Islamic history. (p. 291)

The Global Context

A world in turmoil:

The fall of the Western Roman Empire and the fraying and decay of much of urban life in northern and western Europe was followed by the incessant wars between Byzantium and Persia in the sixth century. This began with a partially successful Persian embargo on Roman trade with India which the Byzantine Emperor Justinian tried and failed to break. The Red Sea port of Myos Hormos was already in terminal decline by the fourth century; its rival Berenike was abandoned around 550 following a series of devastating raids by the much feared desert nomads the Byzantines called the Blemmyes. The wide-ranging effects of this can be seen in the fact that this was also the time that much-sought Indian and Sri Lankan garnets disappear from jewellery in Merovingian France: for the first time in many hundreds of years, Indian imports were no longer able to reach Mediterranean Europe. After that there came the disruptions of the Arab Islamic conquests of the early seventh century, culminating in the conquest and plunder of Egypt in 640 ce. 

In time, the Arabs would revive the Red Sea trade, and with the foundation of Quseir, the new Islamic Red Sea port, Egypt would again become the terminus for a profitable trade with India; but for two centuries or so the western trade routes were stilled.36 As the Roman trading fleets dwindled and then disappeared, the place of the Romans as the main trading partners of the ports of India was partially filled by the great Sasanian Persians and the Ethiopians of Axum, both of which empires were then at their peak. Indeed, passing Persian vessels on their way to China play a major role in the travel tales of Buddhist monks wishing to catch ship eastwards. But this trade, important as it was, could not replace the extraordinary volumes of gold that had been pouring into India at the peak of the Roman Red Sea trade. As supplies of Mediterranean gold reaching India guttered in the fifth century, Indian overseas trade began to realign to face East. If gold was no longer arriving in massive quantities from Rome, then Indian merchants, managed and marshalled by a series of newly founded trading guilds, would have to bring it instead from the long coastlines and islands of Suvarnabhumi. As the Golden Road to the west began to close up, the eastern branch grew ever more important, as great fleets of Indian merchants began heading east. (p 173 – 4)

Sanskrit:

But for a millennium and a half before then, from about 250 bce to 1200 CE, India was a confident exporter of its own diverse civilisation, creating around it an empire of ideas which developed into a tangible ​‘Indosphere’ where its cultural influence was predominant. During this period, the rest of Asia was the willing and even eager recipient of a startlingly comprehensive mass transfer of Indian soft power, in religion, art, music, dance, textiles, technology, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, mythology, language and literature. Sanskrit had been a profoundly sacred tongue for at least a millennium before the Common Era, but at some point between the first century bce and the first century ce, Sanskrit was reinvented as a literary and political language, the start of an astonishing transformation of its use that saw Sanskrit literary culture rapidly spread all the way from Afghanistan to Java. Indeed, in time, as Sheldon Pollock has shown, Sanskrit, ​‘the Language of the Gods in the World of Men’, became the lingua franca across much of Asia and left a permanent mark on the map from Balkh (Sanskrit Bahlika) to Singapore (Sanskrit Simhapura). The name ​‘Java’, for example, derives from the Sanskrit Yavad dvipa, meaning ​‘the island shaped like a yava’, or grain of barley. Indeed, so deeply immersed in Sanskritic culture did the elites of South-east Asia become that they began renaming their towns and settlements after the most celebrated places of Indian mythology.6 To this day, the ancient capital of Thailand is named Ayutthaya after Ayodhya, Lord Rama’s capital in the great epic poem the Ramayana, while the national airline of Indonesia is Garuda, named after the god Vishnu’s mount. The spread of Sanskrit brought all of Indian literature, arts and the sciences in its wake. Out of India came not just pioneering merchants, astronomers and astrologers, scientists and mathematicians, doctors and sculptors, but also the holy men, monks and missionaries of several distinct strands of Indic religious thought and devotion – Vedic, Shaiva and Vaishnava Hinduism, or Sanatana Dharma as some prefer to call it, as well as Theravada, Mahayana and Tantric Buddhism. (p 2 – 3)

The Silk Road ​“invention”:

The centrality of the Indian subcontinent as one of the two ancient economic and cultural hubs of Asia, and of its ports as the principal places of maritime east – west exchange, has also been partially obscured by the seductively Sinocentric concept of the ​‘Silk Road’, an overland trade route said to stretch ever since antiquity all the way across Asia from China to Turkey and the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. Despite its modern popularity the idea of a Silk Road was completely unknown in ancient or medieval times: not a single ancient record, either Chinese or western, refers to its existence. Instead, it was invented as late as 1877 by a Prussian geographer, Baron von Richthofen, who, while engaged in a geological survey of China, was charged with dreaming up a route for a railway linking Berlin with Beijing with a view to establishing German colonies and infrastructure projects in the region.35 This route he named die Seidenstraßen, ​‘the Silk Roads’ – the first use of the term. It was not until 1938 that the term Silk Road appeared in English, as the title of a popular book by a Swedish explorer, Sven Hedin. Since then, the term has captured the global imagination and the ​‘reopening’ of the Silk Road has been announced by President Xi Jinping of China as part of his Belt and Road Initiative. In this way, the idea has been effectively co-opted and actively mobilised as part of Chinese foreign policy, partly to obfuscate its economic and military projections of power. It has now been elevated to unquestioned fact. Following Richthofen, maps of the overland Silk Route linking east and west, the Mediterranean with the South China Sea, often feature a single small arrow pointing south from Kashgar down towards the Himalayas. That arrow is labelled: ​‘To India’. The real economic action, the map implies, took place between China and western Europe; India was an almost passive observer of, and a lucky recipient of largesse from, the main highway of intercontinental commerce running far to its north. The reality is very different. Although overland trade routes through Iran were clearly of central importance when Mongol rule stretched from the Mediterranean to the South China Sea during the thirteenth century, this was not the case during the classical and early medieval era. Indeed the Roman Empire and China actually had only the haziest notions of each other’s existence – vaguely aware of each other, but almost never in direct contact. (p 16 – 7)

[ADB Input: to illustrate our review of The Golden Road, we have selected some of the few depictions of Angkor by contemporary Indian artists:]

Cambodia: Chapter 8, ​“He Who is Protected by the Sun”, p 199 – 230

The title refers to Suryavarman II, the builder of Angkor Wat, and there are numerous considerations on what makes the Angkor complex a unique archaeological and spiritual site.

We can only urge readers to check on this particular chapter, in particular the part on Pashupata influence on Ancient Cambodia, only highligting some of the author’s insights across the book.

Chola Empire and the specificity of Angkor:

The rise of the Chola’s Khmer allies culminated a century later in the building of the largest and most magnificent Hindu temple in the world at Angkor Wat. The temple alone covers over 500 acres. Beyond stretches a palace complex, pleasure lakes and the quarters of the Khmer capital city so vast it can be seen from space. It is a temple town which is based almost entirely on architectural forms first pioneered in India, and whose genius flowed from Indian religious, technological, literary and artistic inspiration; yet it was never an Indian city. It is the ultimate statement of how much the Khmers absorbed Indic culture but also made it their own. As Rabindranath Tagore put it after visiting South-east Asia in 1927, ​‘Everywhere I could see India, yet I could not recognise it.’ Indeed there was nothing of the scale of Angkor at the time in India, the centre of the Hindu world to which the Khmers looked as a holy land. Angkor Wat is roughly contemporary to the great south Indian Chola temples of Tanjore and Chidambaram, and the Khmers and Cholas, the two great powers of the Indian Ocean world, were firm allies and in close diplomatic dialogue. Nevertheless, although the largest Chola temples are around five times the size of anything that preceded them in India, the Khmer temples still dwarf their Indian contemporaries several times over. Representing a massive increase in scale, Angkor is not just the most spectacular of all Indic temples, it is the largest religious structure built anywhere in the ancient or medieval world. Its builder was the greatest of all South-east Asian rulers, Raja Suryavarman II, ​‘He Who is Protected by the Sun’, who was anointed king in 1113 by the venerable Brahmin Divakara Pandita and performed sacrifices to the spirits of the ancestors. The gifts included ​‘two fans of peacock feathers with golden handles, four white parasols, ear ornaments and golden bowls, workers, elephants and sacred brown cattle’. (p 227)

The appeal of science:

By the twelfth century, the Khmer Empire was at its height and stretched across the region, controlling, with varying degrees of authority, modern Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and Laos. At this moment of climax, it arguably had the widest geographical reach of any Hindu empire, embracing as it did almost all of mainland South-east Asia at a time when South Asia was fractured into a mosaic of competing states and polities. At that point it also dwarfed its only Christian rival, that of the Byzantines. The Khmers were consummate hydraulic engineers. For hundreds of miles around Angkor, a dense network of villages was set amid a patchwork of fields, canals and reservoirs that controlled the monsoon floodwaters to enable wet-rice agriculture. This in turn sustained a population that well exceeded a million people. The great temple complex at the heart of Angkor represented a quantum increase in scale from anything in South Asia and contained many radical stylistic innovations; but it was still firmly based on architectural forms, religious ideas and mythologies that first took shape in India. This is all the more surprising when one considers the geography of Cambodia, lying as it does so near to China, with a large resident Chinese population and frequent visits by Chinese junks sailing up the waterways of the Mekong. Yet the Khmer kings traced their ancestry not to Confucius, or any mythical Chinese forebear, but to an Indian named Kaundinya. Nor were Chinese philosophical and religious systems such as Daoism and Confucianism ever successfully exported to Cambodia. Instead it was Hindu and Buddhist gods that were introduced. Buddhism remains the dominant religion in Cambodia and across South-east Asia today. But perhaps it is in scientific rather than spiritual ideas that India stood out most dramatically. Only the ancient Hellenic world equalled it as a powerhouse of new concepts in mathematics and astronomy. By the time of the great fifth-century mathematician Aryabhata (476 – 550 ce), Indian astronomers had correctly proposed a spherical earth that rotated on its own axis, while using the decimal system and calculating the length of the solar year to an accuracy of seven decimal points. ​‘I dived deep in the ocean of astronomical theories, true and false,’ wrote Aryabhata, ​‘and rescued the precious sunken jewel of true knowledge by the means of the boat of my own intellect.’ (p10‑1)

Indian Brahmins in mainland Southeast Asia:

The first evidence that Indian Brahmins were beginning to join the traders on their voyages to the Lands of Gold comes from Chinese sources. A Chinese text of 400 ce talks about a thousand Indian Brahmins living at the small coastal court of Tun-sun on the Malay peninsula: ​‘the people practice their doctrine and give them their daughters in marriage. In consequence, many of these Brahmins do not go away.’ (p 203) — Several sculptures have survived of these early Brahmanical courts, including an image of a royal consecration carved on an early Khmer lintel from Kampong Thom in central Cambodia. Here the king sits in an open pavilion with long lines of bearded Brahmins stretching out on either side of him. Their hair is piled up in dreadlocked beehives, they wear long pendant earrings and they are naked but for a neatly wrapped sampot around their waist and a Brahmin’s chord slung over the shoulder. Two Brahmins adjacent to the King pour holy water over him in the act of lustration or consecration. Over the years which followed, the Brahmins began encouraging rulers to swear devotion to the Hindu gods. They also began to weave themselves into local power structures through intermarriage.(p. 204) 

Indian traders and jewellers:

There is growing archaeological evidence that Indian merchants even brought with them skilled artisans to refine on site and to work the gold they bought in Sumatra, Borneo, the Malay peninsula and Thailand. At the early temple site of Krabi in Thailand, archaeologists recently found a goldsmith’s touchstone etched with the earliest Tamil inscription in South-east Asia; it is written in the Tamil-Brahmi script of the first to third century ce, and proclaims itself the property of ​‘Perumpatan’ – the ​‘Great Goldsmith’. Nearby were found gold coins with a bull on the front and a double-masted ship on the reverse.Elsewhere in Thailand, the recent discovery of a third-century bce jewellery mould along with four thin circular gold foils in a distinctly Indian style suggests that Indian jewellers were at work here as early as the Mauryan period, in the third century BCE. (p 7) — Indian traders not only distributed their own ornaments and jewellery, but also shipped on many Roman products such as bronze lamps and even rather good counterfeit Roman intaglios manufactured in Tamil Nadu and Kerala. These seem to have been passed off in South-east Asia as the original Roman goods, rather like the fake Louis Vuitton and Gucci bags found in the region’s bazaars today. (p 177)

Finding Zero

Whp invented zero? The debate has been ongoing since Dr. Amir D. Aczel’s Finding Zero: A Mathematician’s Odyssey to Uncover the Origins of Numbers (New York, 2016). Some useful additions from the book:

• “For at exactly the time when the quincunx of Angkor was rising out of the Cambodian jungle, Indian numbers, the idea of zero and the algorithm were all arriving on the distant shores of Spain and Italy. This transformed for ever the way not just Europeans but, in time, the whole world would understand the mysterious alchemy of higher mathematics. These innovations would assist in kicking off a revolution in commerce, leading ironically to the creation of trading companies that would pioneer the domination of Europe over Asia in the centuries to come.” (pp. 230 – 231). 
• “Brahmagupta described zero as the answer you get when you subtract a number from itself. He also worked out some basic properties that zero must have such as when zero is added to a number or subtracted from a number, the number remains unchanged; and a number multiplied by zero becomes zero. He wrote down in Sanskrit verse a set of arithmetic rules for handling not only zero but positive and negative numbers, another of Brahmagupta’s innovations. ​‘Positive divided by positive, or negative by negative, is affirmative,’ he wrote. ​‘Positive divided by negative is negative. Negative divided by affirmative is negative.’ These basic rules of mathematics for the first time allowed any number up to infinity to be expressed with just ten distinct symbols: the nine Indian numbers plus zero. The rules are still taught in classrooms around the world today.” (pp. 243 – 244). 

One more source [ADB Input]

In closing, we’d like to add to the author’s impressive source aggregation a text by Abul Kasim Said bin Ahmad bin Sayid ​“The Spaniard” (Almeria, ⁴²⁰⁄₁₀₂₉, Toledo ⁴⁶²⁄₁₀₇₀), from his Tabakat al umam (Categories of People), published by Pere Louis Cheikho (Beyrouth, 1912). In his article ​‘Les grands rois du monde’ (Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, University of London, Vol. 6, No. 2, A Volume of Indian Studies Presented by His Friends and Pupils to Edward James Rapson, Professor of Sanskrit in the University of Cambridge, on His Seventieth Birthday, 12^th May 1931, pp. 329 – 339), French orientalist Gabriel Ferrand tanslated the part on India (‘Science in India) that hadn’t been translated earlier. Excerpts [please resituate offensive terms in historic and cultural contexts]: 

Le premier des peuples dont il est question ici est celui de l’Inde. C’est un peuple qui possede d’abondantes richesses et des ressources considerables, qui comprend de puissants royaumes; la sagesse lui a ete reconnue; dans toutes les branches de la science, la preeminence lui a ete reconnue par tous les peuples anciens et les generations passees. Parmi tous les peuples, l’Inde est le pays qui, dans la succession des siecles, a ete le pays d’origine de la sagesse et la source de la justice et de la science du gouvernement ; pays des gens de pensees superieures et d’opinions sublimes, des sentences universelles, des produits extraordinaires, des merites merveilleux. Quoique leur couleur les classe dans la première categorie des Noirs, ils n’en font pas moins ainsi partie de l’ensemble des Negres; mais Allah le Tres-Haut les a exemptes des mauvaises qualites des Negres, de la vilenie de leur caractere et de la sottise de leur pensee; il a donne aux Indiens la superiorite sur bien des peuples parmi les bruns et les blancs. 

Certains savants en astrologie pretendent attribuer cela a une cause: ils pretendent que Saturne et Mercure se partagent l’influence sur le caractere des Indiens. L’influence de Saturne sur leur organisme a consiste a noircir leur couleur; celle de Mercure a epure leur intelligence, a adouci leur caractere, tandis que Saturne contribuait à la surete de leur raisonnement et a leur eloignement de l’erreur. C’est ainsi qu’ils ont a ce point la purete des vertus et la surete du jugement. Ils different en cela des Zangs (ou Negres de la cote orientale) et autres. C’est ainsi qu’ils sont adonnes à la formation de la geometrie. Ils ont la plus parfaite et la plus grande maitrise du mouvement des etoiles et des secrets de la sphere, et dans les sciences exactes. En outré, ce sont les plus savants des hommes dans la connaissance de la medecine, les plus experts dans la connaissance de la force des medicaments, les plus experts dans la connaissance les caracteres des elements et les particularites des choses creees. Leurs rois ont une noble conduite, des principes de gouvernement louables, une administration parfaite.

[“The first of the peoples here spoken of is that of India. They are a people who possess abundant wealth and considerable resources, including powerful kingdoms; wisdom has been recognized to them; in all branches of science, preeminence has been recognized to them by all ancient peoples and past generations. Among all peoples, India is where, in the succession of centuries, originated wisdom, the source of justice and the science of government; country of people of superior thoughts and sublime opinions, of universal sentences, of extraordinary products, of marvelous merits. Although their color places them in the first category of Blacks, they are nevertheless part of the whole of the Negroes; but Allah the Almighty has exempted them from the bad qualities of the Negroes, from the vileness of their character and the stupidity of their thought; he gave the Indians superiority over many peoples among the browns and the whites.

Some scholars in astrology claim to attribute this to a cause: they claim that Saturn and Mercury share the influence on the character of the Indians. The influence of Saturn on their organism consisted in blackening their color; that of Mercury purified their intelligence, softened their character, while Saturn contributed to the surety of their reasoning and their distance from error. This is how they have to this point the purity of virtues and the surety of judgment. They differ in this from the Zangs (or Negroes of the eastern coast) and others. This is how they are devoted to the formation of geometry. They have the most perfect and the greatest mastery of the movement of the stars and the secrets of the sphere, and in the exact sciences. Moreover, they are the most learned of men in the knowledge of medicine, the most expert in the knowledge of the strength of medicines, the most expert in the knowledge of the characters of the elements and the particularities of created things. Their kings have a noble conduct, praiseworthy principles of government, a perfect administration.”]