A review of William Dalrymple’s ‘The Golden Road’
Indo-centrism and polycentrism
While I usually enjoy reading Dalrymple, his new book left me feeling quite ambivalent. In it he tackles very different time periods and subjects to what he has worked on in his earlier historical books, and hence he relies heavily on existing academic writings by historians and other scholars (this book has Notes and Bibliography sections spanning 150-odd pages). I happen to be familiar with some of the works he cites in this book. Which is why I was surprised to see that many of his major arguments and conclusions differed in varying degrees, sometimes substantially, from those of the scholars whose works power Dalrymple’s important synthesis.
The excellent Indian journal-magazine The India Forum published my review last week. Here’s the link. I have copied some paragraphs below.
(To my surprise, and to his credit, William Dalrymple wrote a cordial Reply to my Twitter post about this review. He also wrote a letter toThe India Forum, and below (after the quotes) I've posted his letter and my short response.)
If we take the Indocentrism with a fistful of salt, The Golden Road is a great, eminently readable book. My hope is that it will be the last of the great books in its genre.
…
The glowing Eurocentric accounts of past historians are replaced in this book by a modest but nevertheless definitive Indocentrism: “India […] set the template for the way much of the world would think and express itself, and would significantly alter the trajectory of the history of a great swathe of mankind. For more than a thousand years it was a garden that issued the seeds that, once planted elsewhere, flowered in new, rich and unexpected ways.” There are few layers of nuance in the book’s luscious servings of arguments, particularly when it comes to interactions of South Asians with people from Southeast Asia and the Arabic world. Even though Dalrymple on occasion alludes to the presence of multi-way exchanges, even disinterest in some South Asian ideas, the evidence is eventually left out of his main thesis of Indocentrism. He notes that casteism and “ideas of ritual impurity and elaborate bans on eating with members of different castes” were rejected by the communities in Southeast Asia, and specifically in Cambodia, women remained owners and disposers of property, “something from which the wider Indian Brahmanical tradition excluded them.” But these ideas are not followed through, and The Golden Road remains largely about a one-way traffic of ideas and materials out of “India”.
……
There is, after all, a fatal weakness in the voluminous oeuvre of one-way traffic works that extol a single civilisation and how it supposedly changed the world: they all overlook the fact that a culture, and the world around it, are not mutually exclusive but instead are constantly shaping and co-creating each other. In the case of The Golden Road, it means that most instances of the “literature, arts and the sciences” the author describes as “Indian” gifts to foreign lands, might have geographically appeared first within the subcontinent, but conceptually they can hardly be pinned down to a single geography or “civilisation”. Mark Twain’s assertion that “when a great orator makes a great speech you are [actually] listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men” captures this point forcefully on a human scale.
Dalrymple's letter to the magazine:
I thank Kiran Kumbhar for an interesting and thought-provoking review. It's a well written and effective piece and I'm grateful for the balanced tone in which it's written. But it is itself full of odd gaps.
It focusses exclusively on the two short chapters of the book that talk about the arrival of Brahminism in South-East Asia, but doe not at any point discuss, or even show any signs of having read, the six out of ten chapters where I have written about the diffusion of Buddhism. Indeed the word Buddhism does not once appear in the lengthy review, although it is the subject of two thirds of the book.
Here there is a far more varied group of characters from a far more diverse backgrounds to the Brahminical immigrants to Cambodia,and in fact that variety is one of the main themes of the book. If the reviewer had read to the end of the introduction he would, for example, have come across one of the donors to the coastal monastery of Ghantasala in Andhra who describes himself as a great sea captain, a mahanavika, and the son of a prosperous local rice farmer and landowner. This was a time when some of the children who might usually be expected to follow their fathers into agriculture instead left home to become sailors and merchants on the seas.
Here he would also have come across discussion of the 'pizza effect' where Hindu or Buddhist ideas from South-east Asia found their way back to India, enhanced and transformed by the work of theologians and artists of Maritime South-east Asia. There are many other examples in the book of Chinese and Persianate ideas taking root in South Asia, as ideas passed backwards and forwards. Nor does the review discuss the way that Chinese, Abbasid and later European intellectuals actively sought out Indian ideas, from yogacara texts to mathematical and astronomical ideas, of their own volition and through their own agency and initiative, the subject of four other chapters. Far from 'docile and passive recipients' many made difficult journeys of thousands and miles to seek knowledge that fascinated them, whether Xuanzang, the subject of chapter four, Khwarizmi in chapter eight or Fibonacci in chapter ten.
So while the review makes for startling reading, it's criticisms are far from representative of the book as a whole. If the reviewer had read and discussed the other eight chapters beyond the two on South-East Asia, he would have come to a very different conclusion, and given a very different impression, to the chest thumping Brahminical Indocentricity presented in the review.
My response to Dalrymple's letter:
I am truly grateful to William Dalrymple for responding (above) to my review of his book.
In my reading of the (full) book, the impressions I came home with were indeed the primary theses of explicit Indo-centrism and implied Brahman/uppercaste-centrism. (I am afraid that the mahanavikas were most probably not from Bahujan communities.) There are certainly examples of multi-way exchanges in the book, which are also acknowledged in the review, but in my reading these did not eventually flow into the overarching arguments that undergird the book's narrative. In the review I have attempted to convey to readers that even as they read this wonderful, important book, we must also be cognisant of the multi-causal, multi-regional, and multi-pathway trajectories of all our major cultural and scientific ideas, something different from the dominant popular understanding that a few cultures or 'civilisations' have been uniquely a source of genius compared to others. ("In matters of science, astronomy and mathematics, India was to be a teacher of the Arab world, and hence Mediterranean Europe too.")
On a different note, it is extremely generous and professional of Dalrymple to respond cordially to my review.