SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Before the Silk Road, there was India's Golden Road, says historian William Dalrymple. It was a route that ran from the Roman Empire in the West, to Korea and Japan in the Far East, enriching the world with spices, gems, oils, ivory, language, goods, literature, science and people, faiths and ideas that changed the world. His new book is "The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed The World," and William Dalrymple joins us now from Houston on his U.S. book tour. Thanks so much for being with us.
WILLIAM DALRYMPLE: A great pleasure, Scott. Thank you having me on.
SIMON: You call India a crucial economic fulcrum and civilizational empire. How did it influence the world? Or maybe I should say, where do we begin telling how it influenced the world?
DALRYMPLE: Well, most obviously, in its philosophies and ideas. Over half the world today lives in places that once were, or are now, strongly influenced by ideas that came out of India - ideas like Buddhism and Hinduism. But more universally - and I think people don't realize this - India is also the source of the number system we all use. In the West, we call it Arabic numbers because the West...
SIMON: Yeah.
DALRYMPLE: ...Got it from the Arabs. But the Arabs got it from Indians. Without it, we wouldn't have any of the higher mathematics that we all live on today - no algebra, no algorithms, no binary.
SIMON: And the decimal system and zero, for that matter.
DALRYMPLE: Exactly. And I think over the last 40 or 50 years, people have come to realize that how many of these ideas came to Europe from the Arab world. But I think people are still largely unaware in the West that all these things came originally from India.
SIMON: What do you think has made many of us in the West unaware of India's contribution?
DALRYMPLE: Well, I think the colonial phase of India's history, when the Victorian British ran down the subtlety and brilliance of Indian learning - people like Macaulay in the 19th century used to say that a single shelf of a good English library is worth all the native literature of India and Arabia. And although we laugh at those attitudes today, the import of those ideas still exist in our education system. Most of us, for example, will have learnt about Pythagoras or Archimedes in his bath, shouting eureka by our seventh or eighth birthday. But very few people will know, for example, that Aryabhata came up with the exact circumference of the Earth, the distance from the Earth to the moon and the fact that the Earth is heliocentric - that we travel around the sun. This was discovered in India a thousand years before Galileo. And it's astonishing, really, that in the 21st century - that so few people are aware of this.
SIMON: How did India's central position kind of open it to the world centuries ago?
DALRYMPLE: It's the meteorology. It's the winds. India lying under Tibet is the beneficiary of an extraordinary unique wind system, which means that when Tibet freezes over in winter, the winds blow in. And when it thaws in summer, the winds blow out. And this means that, uniquely, in India, you have the monsoon winds, which blow in one direction six months of the year, very fast, and then reverse those and blow back in again. So this is a kind of unique gift that means that India has always been the center of a maritime trading network and why, historically, we've always had big Indian trading communities from the West Coast in places like East Africa and Aden and the Red Sea. And on the east coast of India, you've had Tamil and other east coast Bengalis in Singapore and in Burma.
SIMON: Tell us about the Indian influence on faith and belief, beginning with the birth of Buddhism.
DALRYMPLE: Today we often think of Buddhism as being a very otherworldly religion. And, you know, in Hollywood movies, Buddhist monks are sort of symbols of mysticism and intense spirituality. But early Buddhist monasteries were banks which lent merchants money, where merchants would shelter. We have inscriptions from Indian sailors who report repaying the money lent to them by Buddhist monks and giving gifts to the monasteries as interest. So this extraordinary expansion of Buddhism - Buddha was, you know, a historical figure who lived in the mid-fifth century B.C. in the Gangetic Plain on the banks of the Ganges. And his ideas spread out, in about 500 years, all over Asia. So there's this whole world, which is totally transformed in every direction around India.
And that's not true in reverse. You know, you don't find a Chinese philosophy taking over India, but you do find an Indian philosophy - Buddhism - taking over China and other Indian ideas of Hinduism - Sanskrit taking over Southeast Asia. In fact, there's this whole world called, by some scholars, the Sanskrit Cosmopolis, where you have this Indian sacred language, Sanskrit, being used all the way from Afghanistan, all the way to Bali in Indonesia, right through.
SIMON: So let me ask you to tell us how you've explored some of this thinking and this history. You didn't just look this up on the internet, did you?
DALRYMPLE: I didn't (laughter), no. This was five years of work. I've traveled all over Southeast Asia. And this, I have to say, you know, is stuff that specialist scholars know about. But in an odd way, it hasn't reached popular consciousness. And I think it's time that changed. India is one of the world's most important civilizations. Within a few years, it'll be, again, the third-biggest economy in the world. And it's time that we learnt this stuff and gave it the honor and the centrality in human civilization that it holds, but we remain, in the West, very ignorant about it.
SIMON: You pose the question toward the end of your book - has India's moment come once again? And you raise this question, too - what sort of India will it be?
DALRYMPLE: Well, that's the great question. I'm very optimistic, economically, about India. But who knows what sort of India we will see. I mean, we're - India has now got a very authoritarian right-wing government. It doesn't always treat dissent with warmth, shall we say? And I think history shows that India is at its most creative when it is most open, when it is willing to receive and give ideas, as well as put them out. And for that, we must remain hopeful.
SIMON: William Dalrymple's new book, "The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed The World." Thank you so much for being with us.
DALRYMPLE: Thank you, Scott. Great pleasure. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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