The Golden Road Review: How India Shaped Western Knowledge

I haven’t been posting for many years. I did three in 2023 after moving to Australia, and one in 2025 to list the books that I read or audiobooks or podcases listened to in 2025. However, most people seem to be interested in my review of The Florios of Sicily: A Historical Fiction. Thus, I decided to review more of the material that I’m reading rather than simply listing it. What follows is a review of The Golden Road by William Dalrymple.

Willie, as he is frequently called by his fellow authors who serve as guests on the Empire Podcast (EmpirePodUK.com) which he co-hosts with Anita Anand, has extensive interests and experience writing award winning books about subjects related to Indian history. In fact each of his ten books won literary prizes! He is the perfect person to explain how knowledge and religion from India and Pakistan influenced the world economy.

It was when the Iberian Peninsula was again controlled by Christians with their triumph at Grenada, that all the eastern knowledge from Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims became available to the western scholars. This included the writings of many eastern scholars who had benefited from the centuries of eastern philosophical, mathematical, astronomical, scientific and cultural works. This meant not only the beginning of the renaissance in the 15th century with the rediscovery of Greek and Roman works lost after the fall of Rome, but also the discovery of new knowledge about mathematics, including the novel concept of zero discovered and used by eastern scholars and promoted to the west by the Christian man nicknamed Fibonacci. Fibonacci’s widely published book Liber Abaci, or the ‘Book of the Abacus’ also known as the ‘Book of Calculation’ introduced the West to Indian numbers and their understanding of mathematics.

Dalrymple tells the story in a fashion that shows the development of a web of knowledge which spread out from India, starting in pre-Roman times as Indians would use the Asian monsoon winds to sail west in the winter months to reach the shores of the Red Sea, all the way to Egypt or up the Persian Gulf to Persia and Mesopotamia. Then east in the summer months not only on return trips from the western civilizations in ancient times, but also in later years to Southeast Asia including areas we now know as Indonesia, Cambodia and Thailand, after trade became hindered by changes in the West due to the fall of Rome and Muslim conquests of much of the eastern parts of the Roman empire.

Dalrymple tells what may have been an untold story about the history of Buddhism as it spread from Northern India to China, southern India, Southeast Asia and Indonesia, as well as the eventual dominance of Hindu in India and how connections of Southeast Asia with Southern India meant that Hindu would push out Buddhism from the more southern areas of Southeast Asia, with its influence impressing Dalrymple at Angkor Wat where he was apparently inspired to write The Golden Road. This story includes a detailed history of Wu Zetian and how her reign brought Buddhism to China, among many other stories of key people who disseminated the knowledge and traditions of Buddhism.

The Golden Road through India became much less important when Mongol conquests created a land route for what has been called the Silk Road, maybe first promoted by Marco Polo’s travel book.

It’s a fascinating story, one that has not been told well, and Willie. with his Scottish heritage and historical interest in India, Hinduism, Buddhism and the Mughals, may be the best guide through this history.