The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

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THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER A revolutionary new history of the diffusion of Indian ideas, from the award-winning, bestselling author and co-host of the chart-topping Empire podcast Richly woven, highly readable ... Written with passion and verve Spectator Dazzling ... Not just a historical study but also a love letter Guardian An outstanding new account ... The most compelling retelling we have had for generations Financial Times India is the forgotten heart of the ancient world For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilisation, creating around it a vast empire of ideas. Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics and mythology blazed a trail across the world, along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific. William Dalrymple draws from a lifetime of scholarship to highlight Indias oft-forgotten position as the heart of ancient Eurasia. For the first time, he gives a name to this spread of Indian ideas that transformed the world. From the largest Hindu temple in the world at Angkor Wat to the Buddhism of China, from the trade that helped fund the Roman Empire to the creation of the numerals we use today (including zero), India transformed the culture and technology of its ancient world and our world today as we know it. Praise for William Dalrymple and The Anarchy A superb historian with a visceral understanding of India The Times Magnificently readable, deeply researched and richly atmospheric Francis Wheen, Mail on Sunday

Reviews

An outstanding new account of ancient Indias cultural conquest of the globe The Golden Road is an absorbingly literary history, a tale of tales ... Xi Jinpings China is currently much better at promoting itself as the heart of Asia. But it may ultimately prove no match for Indias primordial gift for myth and narrative, and this is what Dalrymple has so successfully channelled into The Golden Road. The plot, especially for South Asians, may be an old one, but its the most compelling retelling we have had for generations * Financial Times *
Dazzling ... The Golden Road, teeming with his own evocative descriptions of far-flung cave and forest temples, sculptures and wall paintings, is not just a historical study but also a love letter to a lost syncretic world of interacting and evolving religious creeds and intellectual movements, when Indian ideas transformed the world * Guardian *
Dalrymples own odyssey is equally laden to the gunwales with pages of astounding illustrations and arresting anecdotes, but its destination is always clear and its argument compelling * London Review of Books *
A more masterful and accessible survey of a world-changing traffic in commodities, creeds, scientific insights and artistic conventions than The Golden Road would be hard to find. The only surprise is that it has taken Dalrymple so long to address the subject. No one is better qualified to do so ... The breadth of Dalrymples research is a revelation and a delight ...What Tagore called the Greater India outside India knew no boundaries. Neither does this enthralling study * Literary Review *
A richly woven, highly readable account of the highlights of Indias outsized influence on the world. It is also a celebration of cosmopolitanism and cultural exchange, written with passion and verve and hinting at an optimism for Indias future of which Tagore himself would no doubt heartily have approved * Spectator *
A bold, sweeping narrative ... Highly readable ... Dalyrmple's book is also timely * The Australian *

Author Bio

William Dalrymple is one of Britains great historians and the bestselling author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Hemingway and Kapuscinski Prize-winning Return of a King. A frequent broadcaster, he has written and presented three television series, one of which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA. He has also won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Foreign Correspondent of the Year at the FPA Media Awards, and been awarded five honorary doctorates. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and has held visiting fellowships at Princeton, Brown and All Souls, University of Oxford. He writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and the Guardian. In 2018 he was presented with the prestigious Presidents Medal by the British Academy for his outstanding literary achievement and for co-founding the Jaipur Literature Festival. He is the co-host of chart-topping podcast Empire with Anita Anand. William lives with his wife and three children on a goat farm outside Delhi.