India radiates kindly light across the East

‘Everywhere I could see India, yet I could not recognise it.’ So said India’s great national poet Rabindranath Tagore of South-East Asia, after travelling there in 1927. Tagore was fascinated by how elements of ancient Indian culture had found their way eastwards: gods, temple architecture, the Sanskrit language and the great epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. A nationalist but also a universalist, Tagore welcomed the reshaping of these ideas by the people who received them, a process whose fruits he encountered in Malay literature and Balinese dance. He even hoped that one day a ‘regenerated Asia’, making creative use of its shared cultural heritage, might heal the world of the wounds he believed had been inflicted on it by the modern West. 

The Golden Road is William Dalrymple’s attempt to piece together the story of which Tagore found traces on his travels: India’s transformative influence on the world around it between the 3rd century BC and 1200 AD. He writes:

What Greece was first to Rome, then to the rest of the Mediterranean and European world, so at this period India was to South-East and Central Asia and even to China, radiating and diffusing its philosophies, political ideas and architectural forms.

The result was what Dalrymple, borrowing from his fellow historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, calls the ‘Indosphere’: great swathes of Asia which became host to Indian religion, music, dance, art, astronomy, mathematics and more. 

The very breadth of this story, Dalrymple suggests, has frustrated its telling until now. It has ended up divided across different academic specialisms while falling victim to the scholarly fashions of the past half century. Writers have preferred to emphasise the way recipient societies engaged with, and reworked, incoming ideas rather than risk repeating the colonial-era trope of a single sophisticated culture civilising the savages.