The Golden Road

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.

In the millennium and a half from c. 250 BC to 1200 AD, Indian art, religion, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics and mythology blazed a trail across the world – a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific.

Here, William Dalrymple draws from a lifetime of scholarship to highlight India's 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 culture and technology of not only its ancient world, but of the world as we know it today.

With a mind-boggling mastery of sources, Dalrymple weaves a thrilling tale of India’s cultural hegemony, not forgetting its invention of mathematics and related disciplines still in use today - Andrew Lycett, Spectator A terrific story, told with tremendous brio - Dominic Sandbrook, The Times An outstanding new account of ancient India’s cultural conquest of the globe … The Golden Road is an absorbingly literary history, a tale of tales ... Xi Jinping’s China is currently much better at promoting itself as the heart of Asia. But it may ultimately prove no match for India’s 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 it’s 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 In his masterful new work, The Golden Road (Bloomsbury, April 29), historian William Dalrymple argues that India has both the potential and the historical track record to catch up with its former peer to the northeast . . . The Golden Road fills an important gap in our understanding of the intra-Asian relations that predated the arrival of European colonisers. - Kishore Mahbubani, Bloomberg A multifarious and engaging narrative, which, like Indian trade, takes us in many directions, peppered with lively stories and charismatic individuals - Independent A richly woven, highly readable account of the highlights of India’s 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 India’s future of which Tagore himself would no doubt heartily have approved - Spectator As always, Dalrymple writes with great knowledge and verve, and with telling details - Richard Harries, Church Times Dalrymple is erudite and wonderfully entertaining … This is a wonderful book. Read it through in delight, acquiring knowledge, perhaps even wisdom. Then you will surely return to read much of it again - Allan Massie, Scotsman William Dalrymple’s luminous new book … In brilliantly excavating the Golden Road in the current age of the Silk Road, Dalrymple’s book is both contemporary and altogether foreign. It does not so much explain the present as indicate the long and even insurmountable distance between then and now - New Statesman A pioneering new book based on methodical historical research to showcase the huge loss for the world in misunderstanding and misrepresenting India - iGlobalNews As with Dalrymple’s earlier books, The Golden Road is full of adventurous tales ... Woven into the text are some of his own travels, lushly described ... Dalrymple doesn’t talk down to his reader, with words like fascicles, quincunx, thalassocracy, voussoirs and grimoire abounding. And the 288 pages of text are backed by a prodigious ninety-two pages of notes and a fifty-six-page bibliography - Inside Story Dalrymple’s 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 Dalrymple’s 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 Dalrymple is at his artful best in his account of how the knowledge of several mathematical concepts and astronomical discoveries passed from ancient India to eighth-century Baghdad through an eccentric family of Muslim royal viziers who had once been rectors in a Buddhist monastery in Afghanistan - Observer A wonderful storyteller, he’ll make you fall in love with India all over again - Indian Link A bold, sweeping narrative ... Highly readable ... Dalyrmple's book is also timely - Australian Anybody who’s interested not only in the history of India, but really in the history of the entire world, should be reading this - Monocle An epic narrative exploring India’s profound influence on the world, particularly through its contributions to mathematics, religion, and trade. This work showcases the “astonishing gifts” India has given humanity, weaving together historical threads that have often been overlooked or misunderstood - Eastern Eye A book as glorious as its name implies ... The jigsaw pieces that he puts into place, as he takes us down the Golden Road, are backed up with an astonishing 200 pages of source notes and bibliography to clarify and verify his position. Surely a most joyous rabbit hole to go down once the book is read - Irish Times Riveting ... Dalrymple brings to his defence of this term [the Indosphere/Golden Road] the boyish energy and eagerness that have marked his writing since his youthful travel book, In Xanadu (1989) ... The sagas of the East India Company and the First Afghan War have seldom been more thrillingly depicted - Telegraph It has long been clear that Dalrymple is primarily a historian and an erudite and wonderfully entertaining one at that ... It is a wonderful book and, though Dalrymple is too knowledgeable to deny the achievements of the BritishRaj, the book reminds us how brief our Indian empire was - Scotsman Huge in scope ... Dalrymple, a really well known and loved as a historian, has written a stack of books about India and this is a culmination of all of them ... As with all of Dalrymple's books it's so accessible, so well written, really clear, so even though it's packed with information it's just so readable and so fascinating - Breakfast with Michael Clarke In exquisite prose, Dalrymple outlines the influence of the subcontinent upon global technology, astronomy, art, religion, music, mathematics, literature and mythology - BBC History Magazine Compelling history from the bestselling historian persuasively argues that India thoroughly deserves a place among the great civilisations for its exporting of culture and ideas over centuries through ancient Eurasia - New Zealand Listener

William Dalrymple is one of Britain’s 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 President’s 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.