While archaeologists and solid scholarship show that India was at the center of the ancient world, historian William Dalrymple argued that the myth of the Silk Road made India more peripheral than it actually was.
“People keep repeating in book after book this map of what is called the Silk Road. We are told that in ancient times the main east-west trade was this line that ran from the Mediterranean Sea to the South China Sea. That its modern version is called the Maritime Silk Road, which bypasses India from Guangzhou via the Strait of Malacca,” the historian said at the NDTV World Summit on Monday.
“The book I’ve just written – The Golden Road – argues that this is a completely false premise. This map is remembered and rooted in comparison to the actual history of Roman trade with India. The pattern is revealed by the new map released by the University of Oxford this year,” Mr Dalrymple said.
He details the impact of India’s growing soft power on the culture, education, religion and civilizations of the rest of the world from 250 BC to 1200 AD.
“This is not about the Indian century, it is about the Indian millennium spanning from about 250 BC to 1200 AD when India was the center of the world,” he said while speaking at the summit, the theme of which was ‘The India Century’ .
“Look at this extraordinary image that was recently uncovered during an archaeological dig in Egypt. You can see very clearly that it is the head of the Buddha. What is surprising is that the marble has been carved from a place that Now Turkey. It was found in a temple on the coast of the Red Sea. It seems extraordinary that a Buddha would turn up in Egypt, but it shouldn’t be when you consider that the Buddha’s head was in Egypt, 6,000 miles to the west of India. Also found at a distance of 5,000 miles east of Angkor Wat is an entirely Indian planned project. In the galleries of Angkor Wat, you can see the Battle of Kurukshetra, Krishna and his Gopis. Why is it surprising that India dominated Asia for 1,000 years?” asked the historian.
Answering his own question, the historian said that colonialism was partly to blame.
He said, “Partly, this story is clearly about colonialism, how Macaulay and others like him said that a shelf of good English books was equivalent to the entire native literature of India and Arabia.”
The historian pointed out that in ancient India, Rome and India were each other’s main trading partners, and not China. Underlining the importance of the country, he said that the Romans knew every coast of the western coast of India and they could not get Indian products in sufficient quantity.
“Here is a map of the hoards of Roman coins discovered by archaeologists. None are found east of the Pamirs of the Oxus. Not a single Roman coin hoard has been found in China. But there are notable concentrations of Roman gold around the coasts India is rich in Roman coins, India and Rome were major trading partners of each other in the early millennium BC,” he said.
The very Indian-looking gods and nymphs seen floating above Buddhist temples in China tell the story of the greater influence of Indian art, the historian said.
“Indian ideas soon began to spread through Afghanistan and Bamiyan to China, where by the second and third centuries we find the Buddha appearing in China. Originally Buddhism was simply a religion brought to China by traders, but By the 5th and 6th centuries, the historian said, “we find Gupta sculptures being copied by the Chinese all over Guangzhou and moving eastward into the heartland of China.”
Historian described Nalanda University as the Oxbridge of ancient India, which attracted students from all over the world, including Korea and Japan.
“Nalanda – Oxbridge, the Ivy League, the NASA of ancient Asia – was visited not only by monks from China, but also by monks from Nepal, Korea and Japan. Its library contained science, mathematics, astronomy, everything from this extraordinary place. He said, “Look at the plan of the various monasteries and university buildings in Nalanda, it is similar to what we find in Oxbridge.”
Sanskrit emerged as the language of diplomacy and culture spreading from Kandahar to Bali, he said, adding that the Palawa script formed the basis of various Southeast Asian scripts such as Khmer and Thai.
