How a WhatsApp message inspired William Dalrymple to write 'The Golden Road'

Historian William Dalrymple was in a massive Hindu temple complex in Cambodia when he got an image of the Berenike Buddha (right) on WhatsApp. (Berenike Buddha image via Wikimedia Commons)

When historian William Dalrymple visited the Ajanta Caves in Aurangabad for the first time in a decade in 2014, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) had just completed some conservation work in Caves 9 and 10 of the historic site, including undoing some of the damage from a 1920s conservation effort when an Italian restorer had put shellac on the walls.

"Shellac is a varnish which, it turned out, in the Indian environment attracted dust, particularly batshit, and the whole caves blacked out. So they were never photographed," says Dalrymple, as we speak at a Mehrauli cafe on a mid-October morning. "Caves 9 and 10 are 150-100 BC, so they're a full 600, if not 700, years older than the other caves. And they contain the oldest murals in Buddhist art," Dalrymple adds.

At the time, Dalrymple was still writing 'The Anarchy', his last book in 'The Company Quartet' focused on India during British Raj at the time. But he was so impressed by what he saw in these caves that he took six months off to write about ancient India's soft power exports including Buddhism and Buddhist art in newspapers and magazines.

Once 'The Anarchy' was out in the world, Dalrymple set out to research ancient India for his next book - 'The Golden Road'. "This book would not have possible 10-11 years ago," says Dalrymple. Apart from Caves 9 and 10 at Ajanta, Dalrymple says more historical evidence has become available in the last decade. Case in point: the Berenike Buddha.

Dalrymple was at Angkor Wat in Cambodia when he got a WhatsApp message. Someone who knew about his love of archaeology and of Egypt had sent him a picture of the Berenike Buddha, which was excavated between January 2018 and January 2022. Dating back to sometime between 90 and 140 AD, the Berenike Buddha was further proof of the geographical spread and the historical antiquity of ancient India's trade with the Roman Empire.

Standing in the massive Hindu temple complex in South-East Asia, Dalrymple was awestruck at ancient India's soft power and sphere of influence - from where he was in Cambodia to the Berenike dig site in present-day Egypt; a spread he would refer to as the Indosphere in 'The Golden Road'. Berenike was a major port for Indian exports headed to Rome.

The Berenike Buddha had been found inside a temple dedicated to Isis, the Egyptian sun goddess. Remarkably, the Berenike Buddha head also bore unusual sunrays-like markings.

Dalrymple says after the Covid travel restrictions lifted, starting in 2021, he began travelling across India and abroad for research, finding many sites including Borobudur in Indonesia and Angkor Wat in Cambodia with sparse crowds. "There were praying monks, but the travel groups were missing," he recounts. Borobudur is a massive 2,500 square meter Buddhist temple complex in Central Java dated back to the 8th-9th century.

Berenike Buddha (Image credit: Szymon Popławski/Berenike Project via Wikimedia Commons)

'The Golden Road' released on September 5, in the centenary month of an article reporting the rediscovery of an ancient Indian civilization at Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro in 'The Illustrated London News'. Soon after, Dalrymple went to the UK. Moneycontrol interviewed him upon his return to India in October. Edited excerpts from the interview:

Your books over the last couple of decades have centered on India during British Raj. What inspired the shift to ancient India in 'The Golden Road'?

Well, there are a number of answers to that question. First of all, my children and family took the view that I had written the same book four times, and it was about time to do something different. I thought they were different, but that was their comment (laughs).

So, after (spending) 20 years on the 18th century, it was time for a complete change. And this (book) is going back to what was my original love and interest. When I was a kid, it was always the ancient world that I was obsessed with. My very first trip to London was to go and see the Tutankhamun exhibition in the British Museum when I was about eight years old. And I begged and begged to see that, because ancient Egypt was then my absolutely obsessive love and interest. I was reading all the children's books on ancient Egypt and Canopic vases and mummification and mysteries of the pyramids and all that sort of stuff. As a teenager, I spent every summer holiday on archaeological excavations in Orkney, in Devon, in Repton. So when I first came to India in 1984, the first things I went out to look at were Sanchi, Ajanta, Ellora and the ancient sites. I think my teenage self would have been very surprised to discover that their middle-aged avatar ended up writing about the 18th century.

I've actually written a great deal about this (ancient India) in art history and journalism over the years; on the Pallavas and Cholas and Ajanta, you'll find a whole stream of articles over 30 years. But I've never written it in book form other than a fair bit about the Cholas in 'Nine Lives'. So it's long overdue. There was a moment when I nearly abandoned 'The Anarchy' (2019), in fact, to write about this period. Because 10 years ago, in about 2014—I hadn't written 'The Anarchy' yet, but I was in the research for it—I went off, just for a holiday, to Ajanta for the first time in a decade. And I saw in Cave 9 and 10 these wall paintings that were very unfamiliar. I'd written on Ajanta, so I knew paintings well, and I'd never seen these.

I took photographs and made inquiries, and it turned out that the ASI had just restored the murals of Cave 9 and 10, which had been recognized from the beginning to be the very earliest caves—most of Ajanta is about 500-550 AD; these two caves, Cave 9 and Cave 10, are 150B to 100 BC, so they're a full 600 years older, if not 700 years older than the other caves - and they contained the oldest murals in Buddhist art. But when they were conserved in the 19th century, the Nizam of Hyderabad got in Italian restorers who covered the murals with something called shellac, which is a varnish, which it turned out, in the Indian environment attracted dust, particularly batshit, and the whole caves blacked out. So they never were photographed; by the time photography turned up, these were completely obscured.

The ASI beautifully restored them in 2013-14 and then never told anyone. No papers were written about the conservation of them, not about the art history which is the oldest paintings in Indian art if you put aside Bhimbetka and the early prehistoric cave shelter paintings. They're the very oldest paintings in Indian classical art, certainly. So I took six months off and wrote a whole series of articles in the 'New York Review of Books' and 'Marg' and 'The Guardian' about these new discoveries and got heavily into that and wrote various other articles about early Buddhism.

But then my editor said, 'Come on, you've got to get back to "Anarchy"'. When I finished 'Anarchy', I knew what the next book was going to be (about). I started reading and the moment I really logged what the story would be was when I received that image on my WhatsApp, which is a new head of the Buddha which turned up in Egypt. It's in marble; it's sort of Gandharan in style, but it's different because it's got a sunburst of sun rays if it's crossed with Sol invictus or Mithras or Surya. And the fact that it turned up in Egypt, 5,000 miles to the west of India. And I happened to be in Angkor Wat when it turned up. So this idea of being 5,000 miles west of India and seeing all this Indian influence, while I was 5,000 miles east of India and also seeing all this Indian influence, the idea crystallized at that point and it became about the global diffusion of Indian ideas.

That's the geographical spread that you call the Indosphere in the book?

Exactly that. So it's not a book about India, it's a book about the diffusion of Indian ideas outside India. One or two of the reviews have expressed surprise I spend so much time talking about China or the Arab world. Because it's not a book about India; this is a book about Indian ideas leaving India. As it's subtitle says.

It's possible that we've been spoiled by movies like 'Ponniyin Selvan' where we see shipbuilding, seafaring and some of the science that went into navigating the seas. So perhaps more time could be spent on these aspects of sea trade in the book?

You could easily have done that, and it's a good argument. It's my understanding that India, or the ASI specifically, had not invested until recently in marine archaeology. So there has been very little of the sort of thing you've seen in Singapore where they have two or three big shipwrecks in the Asian Civilizations Museum in Singapore; the Belitung (wreck) and others. And we know much less about Indian ships and Indian shipbuilding than we almost certainly will do in 10 or 20 years, because the ASI apparently has now founded a maritime archaeology unit. We are going to start seeing Indian wrecks, which are located but not yet brought up, coming up from the bottom with their cargoes. But it's a good point. I could easily have written more about shipbuilding, but to be honest, there isn't a huge amount there. The best work on that is by Himanshu Prabha Ray, who's written very well on that.

Tell us about your research for this book... there's 100 pages of endnotes and 50 pages of bibliography!

(Laughs) I would regard that as an asset and reviewers have, but fair enough, each to their own.

So, when you're writing about this period, it's a very different discipline to writing about the 18th century. In the 18th century, you have this, I mean, incredible embarrassment of detail. The East India Company kept every receipt it ever issued, and they're all there either in the Indian National Archives or in the British Library in London. The British Library allegedly has 35 miles of East India Company and Raj material in its stacks.

Here there are whole periods of 100 years, often without a single reference of any sort. One is often in the dark, and then you get these miraculous moments when someone like Xuanzang turns up and then Xuanzang's biographer also turns up and suddenly the lights go on. It's like finding yourself in a nightclub where you've been stumbling around on the dance floor and suddenly the lights go on and you can see everything around you clearly.

So there are multiple sources. Firstly and most importantly, archaeology. And that's very important particularly to the story of Indian trade. There have been recent excavations in Muziris and Berenike.

There's a lot of art history, and one of the great pleasures of this book has been looking in detail at this art history, which I've always loved and written about for years, but this gave a real opportunity to do a deep, deep dive, particularly into the Southeast Asian materials, which I was not so familiar with, although I've been several times to Cambodia before, and Java, which I'd never been to at all, but it was wonderful.

There is a great deal of epigraphy, a lot of it printed up now in multiple volumes by the ASI. Similarly, there's a project of Khmer epigraphy published by the Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO), based mainly Siem Reap in Cambodia, and I spent time there with them.

And then there's travellers' accounts and Saints' biographies; for example, the long section on Vajrabodhi, the Pallava prince turned wonder-working tantric, which has survived.

So you stumble from bright spot to bright spot. There are suddenly these lives which illuminate themselves: Xuanzang, Vajrabodhi, Chinese Empress Wu Zetian, Fibonacci, the Barmakids—in between these sorts of oases of light, there's often very dark areas which are completely obscure and of which we know nothing at all.

One of the pleasures of (writing) this book was how fast this field is developing, and I'd say about half of this book would have been impossible to write as recently as 10 years ago; when you think of the Muziris papyrus, the digs in both Pattanam and Muziris, and in Berenike. New work on Buddhist sites in Sri Lanka, including the discovery of Mahinda's stupa at Rajagalla, which is a newly excavated site.

Here is Mahinda's recently excavated stupa at Rajagalla in Sri Lanka pic.twitter.com/pUL6KYeKut
William Dalrymple (@DalrympleWill) March 9, 2024

The discovery of the whole story of the Barmakids and how they took Indian numbers and learning to Arabia. And then there's a huge and growing bibliography on South-East Asia; there's a group of young scholars led by Andrea Acri, who's been working on the Khmer materials and the Indonesian materials, and there's been a whole series of volumes of essays produced in the last three or four years, including some very good work by Indian scholars. And there is a great deal of work on Tamil sources too; particularly Dominic Goodall in Pondicherry [also formerly associated with the EFEO] has made all sorts of links between the Tamils and the Khmers and the sort of things that the Khmers had in their libraries; those have now been looked at in detail.

None of this was written 10 years ago. In some ways this has a similar shape to A.L. Basham's 'The Wonder That was India', which is written in the 1950s, but the world has changed a great deal in that time, the scholarly world. And while there's very little in this book that's completely new, I think it's the first time all this stuff has been gathered together. Because the important point is that these things, while some of them are well-known, they're often regarded as existing in different silos. So the Hinduisation and the Sanskritisation and the Indianisation of Southeast Asia is one topic. Buddhist studies often comes under a different heading and a different room in the libraries and the museums and different government and university departments; often a lot of that's appropriated by China as part of the narrative of the Silk Road, which I simply don't believe in in this period. I don't think there was a Silk Road (at this time); I think it's a later thing. And that's a very important part of the story because, this month alone, there are two exhibitions in London about the Silk Road ('A Silk Road Oasis: Life in Ancient Dunhuang' at the British Library and British Museum’s 'Silk Roads') which deal with the subjects covered in this book, but in such a way that India is almost excluded from the narrative; the spread of Buddhism is seen as a Chinese story, and everything is directed at Xi'an and China.

Chinese monk Xuanzang (Image via Wikimedia Commons)

It's not an ancient term. Everyone assumes that the Silk Roads are something that the Chinese sources or the Western sources referred to; they don't. Marco Polo doesn't mention it once. It's an entirely modern idea. It was invented by a German geographer, Ferdinand Freiherr von Richthofen, in 1877 or certainly popularized by him. He called it die Seidenstrasse - the Silk Roads. It only enters the English language in 1936 with Sven Hedin, who's a Nazi sympathizer and Swedish explorer, and it's only in the 1980s it becomes a popular idea. And yet it's now assumed to be a matter of fact. And it's a narrative which is set on China, which sees Xi'an as the terminus of the Silk Road. And that is an entirely false impression.

The main East-West conduit of trade was India. India was the principal trading partner of the Roman Empire. Roman trade was happening along the Mediterranean, up through mainly, obviously, the Roman Empire, in northern Europe, a little bit in Anatolia and the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, tiny bit in Yemen, tiny bit in Afghanistan, but nothing in China. So that's the true pattern of ancient trade. And yet this myth of the Silk Roads lingers on.

This has become a very popular idea that the Silk Road is how Indian ideas and Indian goods travelled to the world.

India is completely left out of the map. If you look at maps of the Silk Road, they bypass India. It's always to the north. There's a Maritime Silk Road, which is a recent addition, which also bypasses India. It goes around India, but it doesn't stop!

You mentioned the recent discoveries without which this book would not have been possible, but there also traces of this history that are getting erased in some senses. The destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas comes to mind.

There's an awful lot left in Bamiyan. I've been to Bamiyan, and the main Buddha, the famous image of the Buddha obviously was destroyed by the Taliban. And above it, there were wall paintings that were destroyed. But there's a mile of cliff face there with, like Ajanta-Ellora, all the caves intact. And then there are two or three other outposts in the valleys around. The more obvious large-scale stuff has been destroyed, but there are still fragments of wall painting. It's still an incredible complex.

Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan. (1946 image by Maynard Owen Williams for National Geographic Magazine, via Wikimedia Commons)

How do you respond to this sort of destruction of histories?

I think the destruction in this period (ancient history) certainly is massively outweighed by the new discoveries. There's an awful lot of new work being done. And even when something is destroyed like the Bamiyan Buddhas or the murals there, they're well recorded. So we know we have the materials to hand to be able to study them. There are very, very detailed studies of Bamiyan before it was destroyed. There are other things which have been destroyed which are lost forever. But in general, the picture is one of the lights are coming on rather than going out.

You did a fair bit of travel for this book as well?

Yes. I knew eastern China very well from my first journey following Marco Polo in the in the '80s. So I didn't go back to Dunhuang [Suchow/Shazhou], but I went to more or less everywhere else and had wonderful trips. It was immediately after COVID and people haven't begun travelling, and I was more or less in the third plane into Cambodia into Cambodia after COVID. Ditto in Java and I had some good contacts there; I'd done some work in Indonesia before, so I knew people in the government in Java from the work I've done earlier in Indonesia.

And I was able to get into Borobudur before it was officially opened with the director and spent three days on my own in Borobudur going round with the director looking at each panel, studying it, while it was still not officially open to the public. So I got a lot seen. The great pleasure of a project like this is the travel; the grind is is the writing.

(I was) more or less alone in Angkor Wat. I'd been to Angkor Wat 20 years ago and there were far fewer tourists then. But to see it when there were only really local Buddhist pilgrims coming for religious reasons and no tour groups was extraordinary.

Borobudur in Java, Indonesia. (Photo by Heri Nugroho via Wikimedia Commons 4.0)

Tell us a bit about your Borobudur trip. What did you find there?

Borobudur is extraordinary. What is understood now, and wasn't even 10 years ago is that Borobudur is the final climax of an Indian building tradition which has not just stupas, but mandala-shaped step pyramids. And there's one which has been studied now: Kazaria in Bihar. And then there's another one in Bangladesh, Sampur Mahavihara, which is an amazing site. And these are the two precursors to Borobudur in the Indian subcontinent. So it doesn't come out of nowhere; it's the culmination of a building tradition of a stupa pyramid set in a mandala.

There's been a lot of work on that in the last 10 years. To this day, no one is entirely sure what Borobudur is all about because it's without inscriptions. But we know that there's the life of the Buddha on the lower floor. And then there's various other esoteric tantric Vajrayana Buddhist texts on the higher stories, and it's an utterly magical sight. You go up to the top, and suddenly you come out of the sculptures which you're immersed in - they surround you on either side when you're going up - and then you get on to the top platform and you can see out over the mountains and the volcanoes and the jungles and the rivers and the sea beyond. And it's one of the great sites of the world. It's like your first sight of Ajanta or your first sight of Sanchi - it's an astonishing thing. Those were probably the travel highlights, but also Egypt, also sites in South Italy associated with Fibonacci and so on.

I've been travelling hard for five years and had some wonderful trips. The hard work is grinding through the epigraphy and so on, which could be very dry. As far as difficulty of writing is concerned, there's far less biographical detail in the South-East Asian end of the story. The Khmers are the most exciting to visit of all this story, but the hardest to write about because all we have is very dry formal inscriptions. And there's no Xuanzang who turns up and gives a description of all the amazing things that are going on. There are one or two Chinese ambassadors accounts, but even they are late and partial.

When you're writing about the Barmakids, you also mention the character of Jaffar, the evil sorcerer in Disney film Aladdin, was inspired by one of the Barmakids who were central to taking Indian scientific learning to the Middle East from where it travelled on to Europe.

Yes, that was a surprise, to find this Disney character and then very nice for me at the end to find that there's a Scotsman who plays a major role in the story, Michael Scott, who is from very close to where I grew up, who ended up being fluent in Arabic and encouraging Fibonacci to include interest rates, weights and measures, currency conversion and double accounting in his Lieber Abaci. So all that plays in.

You've been working on this book for five years.

2019, I finished on 'The Anarchy' and began on this.

Given that you unearthed a lot of material during your research for this book, is there going to be a sequel? Will this turn out like The Company Quartet?

It may well. I don't want to leave this. I have various other ideas floating around, like the Opium War, but this is where my interest and focus are at the moment. And it's very difficult to just let it go now. I haven't yet found a whole new book. So, we'll see. I've got time. It's normally during a book tour that you have the time to read and begin to think what your next topics could be. There are all sorts of ideas I've got there. But I'd be very sad to leave this, certainly.

Is the book launch in 2024, the centenary year of the rediscovery of the Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, a coincidence?

Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa interest me less. They're frustratingly dry when you get into them. It's not that they're not interesting, because we don't understand the pictograms. Because the sites themselves are brick sitting there. Of all of India's moments of civilisation, they're some of the hardest to vivify, to bring to life. If someone decodes the pictograms, then yeah. And there's this whole debate going on which I carefully avoided over the Aryan invasion and Indus Valley and Sindhu-Saraswati; that's a whole different box of tricks, as they say.