Had it been centrally governed like today, India, too, could have been a thalassocracy as were once Athens, Carthage, Great Britain, Netherlands, France, Spain and Portugal. The Pallavas and Cholas were indeed sea empires, reaching as they did, respectively, their writs and cultures to Indonesia and Cambodia. But this is not news to the average child in India’s secondary schools.
Nor is the fact that Indian cotton, jewels, spices and handicrafts were fancied and coveted in Europe or that the zero, the decimal system, algebra, trigonometry and the algorithm were first developed here before reaching Europe and the world. At the outset, let it be said that historian William Dalrymple’s is far more likely to dazzle Western audiences. However, for Indians it carries scholarly impact.
Discussions of the Silk Road through Greece, Turkey, Iran, Ukraine, Arabia, Egypt, Spain, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan have so far dominated history discussions. It is further boosted by propaganda around China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Dalrymple challenges this narrative by proposing that exchanges between Rome and China was less driven by direct contact and much more through spread of texts via Buddhist monks and commerce along India’s maritime trade routes, particularly through the Red Sea.
This is the “Golden Road”, connecting Red Sea, Arabian Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean, Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea all the way up to Japan with the Mediterranean. India was a key i.