The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World
Event Description
From the award-winning, bestselling author and co-host of the chart-topping Empire podcast comes a new revolutionary history of India. This autumn, we’re delighted to be welcoming author and historian William Dalrymple to present The Golden Road, a penetrating account of how Indian ideas in mathematics, philosophy, science and art helped to forge a path towards modernity. Join us for an evening with a master storyteller and superb historian!
The Golden Road
India is the forgotten heart of the ancient world.
For a millennium and a half, from about 250 BC to 1200 AD, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilisation, creating around it a vast empire of ideas, an ‘Indosphere’ where its influence was predominant. During this period, the rest of Asia was the willing recipient of a mass transfer of Indian soft power. Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics, and mythology blazed a trail across the world, along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific, connecting different places and ideas to one another.
Like ancient Greece, ancient India came up with a set of profound answers to the big questions about what the world is, how it operates, why we are here and how we should live our lives. Out of India came holy men, monks and missionaries as well as pioneering merchants and artists, astronomers and healers, scientists and mathematicians. The Golden Road highlights India’s often forgotten position as a crucial economic and civilisational hub at the heart of ancient Eurasia.
Over half the world’s population lives in areas where Indian religions and culture are, or once were, dominant. Meanwhile, India’s intellectual influence travelled far to the West, giving us not only crucial mathematical concepts such as zero, but also the very numbers we use to this day: arguably the nearest thing humanity has to a universal language. Drawing from a lifetime of scholarship, Dalrymple argues that India is the great intellectual and philosophical superpower of ancient Asia.
Speaker
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William DalrympleAuthor & HistorianWilliam Dalrymple is renowned as one of Scotland’s leading writers of the history of Asia. He was born in Scotland and brought up on the shores of the Firth of Forth, then educated at Ampleforth and Trinity College, Cambridge where he was first History Exhibitioner then Senior History Scholar.
He wrote his first book, In Xanadu: A Quest (1989), at 22 years of age, and in 1989, moved to Delhi to research City of Djinns: a year in Delhi (1993), which went on to win the 1994 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. His next book, From the Holy Mountain: a Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium (1997), charts the demise of Christianity in the Middle East, and this was followed by The Age of Kali: Indian Travels and Encounters (1998), a collection of writings about India, which won the French Prix d’Astrolabe. White Mughals (2002), the book which marked Dalrymple’s shift from travel writing to history, won the 2003 Woolfson Prize for History, and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award. In 2006, William Dalrymple published The Last Mughal: the Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857 to huge acclaim, topping the best seller lists in both the UK and India.
His latest books are Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (2008), Return of a King (2013) on the first Anglo-Afghan war, and The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company (2019).
In 2002, he won the Royal Geographical Society Mungo Park Medal for his outstanding contribution to travel literature. In 2006 he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of St. Andrews for his services to literature and international relations. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Asiatic Society, and lives between London and Delhi.
