There have been many “empires of the sword” but very few “empires of the spirit,” and India was one of them, said historian William Dalrymple, delivering a lecture in Bengaluru. He made the observation while speaking at the Bangalore Literature Festival on Sunday, December 15, about his latest book During the lecture, the Scotland-born historian delivered a crash course on the main arguments of the book – that three ideas that emerged in ancient India “completely changed the world” – to a large, attentive audience. The first of these “principal forms of ideas” was Buddhism.
“As there are so few Buddhists [in India] today, there are few cheerleaders for Buddhism as an Indian idea. Buddhism is often thought of as foreign or exotic, something to do with China or the Silk Road. And yet, it is India’s most successful soft power export,” Dalrymple said.
The second phenomenon was the spread of Sanskrit and Hinduism across Southeast Asia. “Between 500 AD and 1200 AD, almost every Southeast Asian country was Sanskrit-literate and many of them adopted Hindu forms of kingship, and stories from India of the Ramayana and Mahabharata became second-nature,” Dalrymple said. The third was the Indian numerical system, particularly the invention of the number 0.
“Almost nobody outside this country is aware of this,” Dalrymple said. He said that Europeans came across this system from the Italian mathematician Fibonacci when he was a child studying them at his sc.
