One-Way Traffic

The sun​ still sparkles on the sapphire sea at Mamallapuram. The shoppers and sightseers still dawdle along the harbour front, gawping at the astonishing sculptures carved on the rocks behind: the gods and goddesses, bare-breasted and smiling; the lions, water buffalo, cobras and, of course, elephants. Nothing much has changed since the seventh-century poet Dandin, the greatest Sanskrit storyteller, sauntered along the prom ‘with eyes blossoming wide in wonder’. Nothing, except that there are no ships riding out at anchor any more.

In the heyday of the Pallava dynasty, from around 600-900 ad, Mamallapuram was probably the greatest seaport in India. On the monsoon winds, great ninety-foot long, three hundred-ton, lash-lugged vessels carried Indian textiles, steel swords and brass buddhas to the furthest corners of south-east Asia – Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia – bringing back on the north-easterly monsoon pepper, spices, camphor, resin and, above all, gold from the newly discovered mines of Sumatra and Sarawak. They carried with them hundreds of passengers exporting every variety of Buddhism and Hinduism, their Sanskrit language and their art and architecture. At ports along the Mekong Delta, statues and temples face the water as they do at Mamallapuram. At Angkor Wat and Borobudur in the Eastern highlands of Java, the local merchants and potentates built Buddhist temples in the Indian style, only ten times the size. Just as the greatest surviving Greek temples lie mostly in her colonies across the sea, at Paestum, Segesta and Agrigento, so the greatest monuments of Indic civilisation lie at its furthest Eastern reaches. The reproductions of St Martin-in-the-Fields that adorn many New England townships are only a modest parallel to the startling impact of Indian architecture on the whole of South-East Asia.

But the Western seas around India were alive too, and had been for centuries earlier. The wealth of India had been a legend in the Mediterranean since the fourth century bc, enhanced by Alexander the Great’s forays. India, not China, was Rome’s greatest trading partner. The sea was, after all, the fastest and most economic mode of travel in the pre-modern world. As William Dalrymple points out in The Golden Road, ships could carry much larger cargoes than camels and sail around wars, blockades and ambushes.

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. He identifies the sea-lanes rather than the overland tracks as the ‘golden road’ that created the wealth of the ancient world, and places India, rather than China, at the heart of the story. This could have been a ferocious demolition job on the received wisdom. In fact, it is an eirenic exploration, in which he never speaks unkindly of his rivals – for example, Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads – or of the dozen other new or newish books listed on Amazon that have ‘Silk Roads’ as part of their title; the topographical section of the London Library has a whole Silk Roads shelf. This is evidently an idea that still has traction. After Dalrymple, it looks unmistakably on the skids.

The concept was first energetically promoted as late as 1877 by the Prussian geographer the Baron von Richthofen, a relative of the more famous Red Baron whose ‘Flying Circus’ dominated the aerial combats of the Great War. Richthofen Senior had been tasked with dreaming up a route for linking Berlin with Beijing, with a view to establishing German colonies in the East and markets for German industry. So from the start, Richthofen’s idea of the Seidenstrasse had an ulterior motive (unlike the term’s first innocent surfacing forty years earlier in Die Erdkunde, by another German geographer, Carl Ritter). Today, from the other end of the supposed route comes the promotion of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, accompanied by a map on the Unesco website showing a direct overland passage, said to have been pioneered by the Chinese envoy Zhang Qian, who died in 114 bc and is now an official Chinese national hero.

Dalrymple will have none of it. The Seidenstrasse of Richthofen’s imagination barely existed in antiquity. There was scarcely any direct trade between China and the West until the Mongols flattened the barriers in the 13th century, making the trip possible for Marco Polo, who never mentions the term. As for silk, yes, it was China’s most famous export (though paper and gunpowder have been rather more influential in world history), but it usually reached Rome only indirectly, mostly by boat, via India, where much of the stuff was actually manufactured. It was dwarfed in value by the tons of Indian pepper, spices, ivory, cotton, teak, sandalwood, rhubarb and precious stones (until the 17th century India had the world’s only diamond mine, at Golconda outside Hyderabad). When Alaric the Visigoth held Rome to ransom in 408 ad, he demanded, on top of gold, not silk but 3000 lbs of black pepper.

Even if most of the East-West trade never went near the supposed route of the Seidenstrasse, the volume of it was still huge. Calculations based on one of those invaluable scraps of papyrus from the rubbish dump at Oxyrhynchus suggest that customs taxes on trade with India may have generated one-third of the total income of the Roman exchequer. Roman commentators were in despair about the drain of gold to India. Pliny the Elder called India ‘the sink of the world’s most precious metals’ – the converse of the complaint under the Raj that Britain was draining the wealth of India. Pliny also loathed the taste of pepper. Tacitus grumbled that ‘for promiscuous dress and the sake of jewels, our wealth is transported to alien and hostile countries.’ In economic terms, silk may have been no big deal, but its slithery, see-through quality outraged fogeys such as Seneca.

When Rome gained control of Egypt, trade really took off. Strabo calculated that now six times as many ships were leaving for India each year. The suicides of Antony and Cleopatra eventually brought prosperity to the seaports of Tamil Nadu, Mamallapuram not least among them. But Richthofen’s Seidenstrasse really does seem to be the road less travelled – even, during most of the first millennium ad, the road not taken at all. Less mild-mannered than Dalrymple, Warwick Ball in Rome in the East (1999) dismisses it as an academic ‘myth’. Ball is a distinguished archaeologist who has spent fifty years digging in the regions of West Asia that would have been a key part of the Silk Road. To get the full force of the Ball-blast, we must quote at some length:

The existence of the ‘Silk Road’ is not based on a single shred of historical or material evidence. There was never any such ‘road’ or even a route in the organisational sense, there was no free movement of goods between China and the West until the Mongol Empire in the Middle Ages, silk was by no means the main commodity in trade with the East and there is not a single ancient historical record, neither Chinese nor classical, that even hints at the existence of such a road. The arrival of silk in the West was more the result of a series of accidents than organised trade. Chinese monopoly and protectionism of sericulture is largely myth. Despite technology existing in ancient China far in advance of anything in the West, most of it did not reach the West until the Middle Ages (usually via the Mongols) when much of it was already up to a thousand years old. Both ancient Rome and China had only the haziest notions of each other’s existence and even less interest, and the little relationship that did exist between East and West in the broadest sense was usually one-sided, with the stimulus coming mainly from the Chinese. The greatest value of the Silk Road to history is as a lesson – and an important one at that – at how quickly and how thoroughly a myth can become enshrined as unquestioned academic fact.

It’s a valuable achievement to shunt off the Silk Road into a permanent siding, but Dalrymple’s book has deeper and even more provoking resonances, which indirectly challenge the way history is usually written. First of all, this long sweep of time – the book begins in the fifth century bc and ends in the thirteenth century ad – is mostly a saga without soldiers. Post-colonial Indian historians have pointed out that there is no evidence to show any large-scale Indian military activity in South-East Asia before the Chola raids of the 11th century. Indian influence was spread by merchants and sea captains, but also by monks. The Buddhist monasteries of Northern India and Afghanistan became rich centres of economic activity, as medieval monasteries were to become in Europe, lending at interest and sending out missionaries far and wide. The Buddhist message was taken northwards by adventurous monks and eventually reached China and captivated the mercurial former concubine, the Empress Wu, who proclaimed Buddhism the state religion. Religious conversion and economic expansion went hand in hand. Greater Angkor is reckoned to have had a population of a million or so at a time when London had only 20,000 inhabitants. Chiefs and kings took the names of Hindu gods. The Brahmins brought with them not only their faiths and their epics but also the previously unknown art of writing. Sanskrit inscriptions, like Roman coins, turn up at the furthest flingings of Indian influence. Yet everything was subtly changed by the prevailing local cultures. When Rabindranath Tagore visited South-East Asia in 1927, he wrote: ‘Everywhere I could see India, yet I could not recognise it.’

In these enterprises, trade did not follow the flag, because there was usually no flag to follow. These were not colonies of conquest, or servile satrapies. They were zones of peaceful influence, expanded by merchants and monks and not by force of arms. Strabo records, with some contempt, that the merchants who had travelled from Rome to Egypt and on through India as far as the Ganges, were ‘merely private citizens’ and of no use in describing the places they had seen.

Dalrymple calls all this the ‘Indosphere’, attributing the coinage to Simon Sebag Montefiore (elsewhere it is attributed to Professor James Matisoff, a celebrated coiner of neologisms). But however we wish to describe it, the phenomenon is achieved, if not quite without firing a shot, at least without the deployment of huge armies or indeed of organised nation states. Only briefly under the Emperor Ashoka was India a united state, apart from the far south. And even Ashoka’s legacy was more one of spreading the ideas of Buddhism than of perpetuating the idea of nationhood. All the same, a sense of India seems to have been always in the air. Strabo reported that Alexander the Great had talked to holy men in India who conceived of their homeland as stretching ‘from the mouth of the Indus in the West to the mouth of the Ganges in the East, from the mouth of the Ganges to the tip of southern India and from there, again, to the mouth of the Indus’.

It is the brutal irruption of large armies that eventually breaks up and extinguishes the Indosphere. The Mongol hordes cut off trade to the North and East; the Turkic invasions bring North India under the rule of the Mughals; in the West, the unstoppable force of Islam has already smashed the trade routes, only for them to be revived under the more civilised caliphs. If The Golden Road has a fault, it is that it does not spend enough time on the downslope. The withering and extinction of free trade by force majeure is one of the undersung songs of history. Dalrymple might reckon that he has already served his time on that front, with his histories of Mughal India and of the ultimate triumph of the East India Company. But the story here does need to be completed by a fuller account of the way the empire-seeking Europeans – the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French and the British – imposed their trade monopolies and built their own ports at strategic points along the Indian coastline: the British at Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, the latter only a few miles north of the half-deserted Mamallapuram. From first to last, Britain’s trade policy was ruthlessly self-seeking. As Lord William Bentinck said of the consequences of allowing textiles from British mills into India: ‘The misery hardly finds parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton weavers are bleaching the plains of India.’

But Dalrymple does give full measure to the last and greatest achievement of the Indosphere: the spread of much of culture that we recognise as distinctively modern. The innovations range from the invention of the algorithm to the delights of the Kama Sutra, all reaching their apogee around the sixth and seventh centuries ad. In mathematics, the written sign for zero and the numerals that we call Arab are only the most conspicuous achievements. The great mathematician Aryabhata (476-550), in his masterwork composed when he was only 23, covers square and cube roots, the properties of circles and triangles, algebra, quadratic equations and sines, and contains a decent approximation of the value of pi at 3.1416. All this, being written down in a few crisp lines of Sanskrit verse, took centuries to be translated into Arabic by the scholars of Baghdad, and thence into Latin by Fibonacci of Pisa and then again into English by Michael Scot of Melrose (1175-1232) and Adelard of Bath (1080-1142). So alien was this new science to the dumbclucks of the West that Michael Scot was remembered in Dante’s Inferno and in Sir Walter Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel only as a sinister sorcerer. The oldest Latin MS containing what we must now call Indo-Arab numerals, the Codex Vigilanus, dates from only 976 ad. Its author, Vigila, frankly admitted: ‘We must know that the Indians have a most subtle talent and all other races yield to them in arithmetic and geometry and the other liberal arts.’ Fibonacci, apart from bequeathing his sequence, also imported the latest Arab accounting methods, which he learned as a boy travelling with his merchant father in Algeria, and which became the basis of double-entry book-keeping and modern commerce. Once again, we see in the Indian intellectual tradition the marriage of practical and theoretical science. And India invented chess too, although it reached us via Persia. Rukh is a Persian word meaning ‘chariot’ and ‘checkmate’ comes from Shah maat! – ‘the King’s frozen.’

No less crucial in the formation of ‘the West’ as we know it was the evolution of the university system from the early Buddhist monasteries in Northern India into the madrasas and thence into Oxford, Cambridge and the Sorbonne. The lineage of those secluded quads with their communities of dedicated scholars is clear. There was no greater example than the university of Nalanda in Bihar, with its endless courtyards and temples and its ten thousand monks and scholars. Dalrymple describes in alluring detail the three thousand-mile pilgrimage in 629 ad of the Buddhist monk Xuanzang from the Chinese capital to visit this amazing place. No freshman from the sticks can ever have had his mind more thoroughly blown by the uni experience. This is perhaps the most brilliant example of the traffic running predominantly one way from China to India. It was India that was so often the destination and the hub.

Dalrymple is well aware of the perils of overegging the India-first thesis. He quotes Sanjeev Bhaskar’s Goodness Gracious Me sketch: ‘Christianity? Indian! Leonardo da Vinci? Indian! Royal Family? Indian!’ But you cannot come away from The Golden Road without a strong sense of the peculiar, enduring qualities of the Indian tradition: its mercantile zest, its restless search for ultimate truth, its longstanding adherence to non-violence and consequently to vegetarianism (the ideal of ahimsa dates back to the sixth century bc). Nor can we ignore the persistence of those qualities in the remarkable success stories of the Indian diaspora today: not just the billionaires and politicians and novelists – the Tatas, Ambanis and Mittals, the Sunaks, Patels and Varadkars, the Naipauls, Rushdies and Desais – but also the tech geeks in Silicon Valley, the countless GPs and pharmacists, the convenience stores which are always open. We can safely forget the Silk Road, but we cannot forget India or the Indians.