The Golden Road : How Ancient India Transformed the World

Author: William Dalrymple

ISBN: 9781408864418

Price: Rs. 850.00 • ✓ 100% Genuine Publisher Edition

Book Overview

India wasFROM THE AWARD-WINNING, BESTSELLING AUTHOR AND CO-HOST OF THE CHARTTOPPING EMPIRE PODCAST œ A REVOLUTIONARY NEW HISTORY OF THE DIFFUSION OF INDIAN IDEAS A master storyteller Sunday Times India is the forgotten heart of the ancient world For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilisation, creating around it a vast empire of ideas. 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. William Dalrymple draws from a lifetime of scholarship to highlight Indias oft­forgotten position as the heart of ancient Eurasia. For the first time, he gives a name to this spread of Indian ideas that transformed the world. From the largest Hindu temple in the world at Angkor Wat to the Buddhism of China, from the trade that helped fund the Roman Empire to the creation of the numerals we use today (including zero), India transformed the culture and technology of its ancient world œ and our world today as we know it. 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 Indias oft­forgotten position as a crucial economic and civilisational hub at the heart of ancient Eurasia. Multiple award-winning historian William Dalrymple gives a name to this spread of Indian ideas that transformed the world; crossing political borders and influencing everything they touched, from statues of Indian ascetics erected in Roman seaports to Cambodian friezes of the Mahabharata, from the Buddhism of Japan to the Hindu rituals of Bali, from the echoes of Sanskrit poems found in Chinese poetry to the discovery of the algorithm and the observatories of Baghdad. Over half the worlds population lives in areas where Indian religions and culture are, or once were, dominant. Meanwhile Indias 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.

Browse this title within our Non Fiction Books collection. Edition details: Hardcover, English, 608 pages pages. Reference ISBN: 9781408864418.

About the Author

William Dalrymple is one of Britain's great historians and the bestselling author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Hemingway and Kapuscinski Prize-winning Return of a King. A frequent broadcaster, he has written and presented three television series, one of which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA. He has also won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Foreign Correspondent of the Year at the FPA Media Awards, and been awarded five honorary doctorates. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and has held visiting fellowships at Princeton, Brown and All Souls, University of Oxford. He writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and the Guardian. In 2018 he was presented with the prestigious President's Medal by the British Academy for his outstanding literary achievement and for co-founding the Jaipur Literature Festival. He is the co-host of chart-topping podcast Empire with Anita Anand. William lives with his wife and three children on a goat farm outside Delhi.

Why Readers Pick This Edition

• You’ll love this book for how boldly it reshapes the way you see world history. With rich storytelling and deep scholarship, William Dalrymple reveals India as a powerful engine of ideas that shaped art, religion, science, trade, and culture across continents. It’s eye-opening without being heavy, expansive yet deeply human—perfect if you enjoy history that connects dots, challenges assumptions, and leaves you seeing the modern world with fresh curiosity.
• Published by Bloomsbury Publishing.
• Language: English.
• Page count: 608 pages.

Catalog Description

India wasFROM THE AWARD-WINNING, BESTSELLING AUTHOR AND CO-HOST OF THE CHARTTOPPING EMPIRE PODCAST œ A REVOLUTIONARY NEW HISTORY OF THE DIFFUSION OF INDIAN IDEAS A master storyteller Sunday Times India is the forgotten heart of the ancient world For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilisation, creating around it a vast empire of ideas. 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. William Dalrymple draws from a lifetime of scholarship to highlight Indias oft­forgotten position as the heart of ancient...

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