In 1984, William Dalrymple was in Maharashtra, a state in the western peninsula region of India, following the advice of his older brother Jock to visit a series of painted Buddhist cave monuments dating from the first century BCE up to the fifth century CE. Dalrymple was 18 years old. His pre-Cambridge plans to join an archaeological dig at a Babylonian site through the British School of Archaeology had just been scuppered when the Iraqis, then under president Saddam Hussein, stopped the school’s operations. So he tagged along with a friend to India.
“I was a particularly untravelled youth,” he says. “One of the reasons I’ve been ricocheting around the world in the way I have ever since is because my parents never left home. They knew quite rightly they lived in one of the most beautiful places in the world [the Firth of Forth in Scotland] and had no reason to leave it – holidays were going to a slightly wetter part of Scotland with rain drizzling down the window.”
Visiting India’s ancient Ajanta Caves “was like entering a parallel universe”. Staying at the same Maharashtra tourist bungalows was Harvard professor Walter Spink, world expert on the caves, who acted as a guide.
“It was a life-changing moment. The beauty of it and getting this completely inspirational and catalytic talk about the caves and Indian art in general.”
In his latest book, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World (shortlisted for this year’s British Academy Book Prize), Dalrymple returns to the Ajanta Caves, evoking in memorable detail the impressions of the British hunting party that, in 1819, stumbled across “some of the most beautiful and ancient paintings in Buddhist art”.
“Through the gloom, the officers could see the shadowy outlines of ancient murals. On the pillars were figures of orange-robed monks with white haloes standing on blue lotuses, while on the rock walls were painted panels filled with elaborate crowd scenes, rather as if a painted scroll had been rolled out along the wall of the apse.”
The most disconcerting thing about the people in these murals, he writes, “is that they appear so familiar”.
“That’s certainly what excites me as a historian,” he tells the Listener on the phone from Delhi ahead of a brief visit to New Zealand in conjunction with the Auckland Writers Festival spring season before dates in Australia.
“So much of history becomes boring when it’s about people who are ungraspably different from ourselves. It becomes moving and interesting when we realise how, despite the passage of time, people in the past felt like us and acted like us.
“People can go through wildly different experiences, like the incredible horrors of medieval warfare or the incredible splendour of the great Indian court, but to feel that this is experienced by people who were like us in so many ways – that’s when the hairs on the back of my neck stick up.”
Home on the farm
Dalrymple is a multi-award-winning historian, broadcaster, lecturer, critic, curator, podcaster, co-founder of the Jaipur Literary Festival and an engaging raconteur. Since 1989 he has lived for most of the year in Delhi with his wife, artist Olivia Fraser (who drew the maps in his new book), on a farm with 25 goats, bees, pigeons and a vegetable garden large enough, he says, to feed the entire neighbourhood.
He has written travel books, including the still-popular City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi (1994) and a quartet of history books on the East India Company, including White Mughals and The Anarchy.
In his latest, the startlingly vivid images in the caves of Ajunta mark the beginning of what he describes as the “Indosphere” – a coin he says was coined by British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore – when Indian influence extended over the Himalayas to Afghanistan, China, Korea and Japan, by sea to Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and up the Red Sea to Egypt stretching across the Roman Empire in the west from 250 BCE to 1200 CE.
Influence not through the sword, but through the exchange of goods, religion, art, architecture, literature, astronomy and mathematics.
Lack of government funding in the present day has left much of what does remain unprotected.
This, Dalrymple argues, is India’s “golden road”, a largely maritime passage of early east-west trade using the monsoon winds and sturdy ocean-going boats to eclipse in volume, value and speed the slow-moving caravan trails of China’s famous Silk Road.
The book begins with the spread of Buddhism, from a marginal Indian sect to a driving force in China, Japan, Korea, Tibet and elsewhere. He follows the footprints of 7th-century Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who travelled to the renowned Nalanda University library in east India, the scholarly centre of Buddhism. On his return to China, Xuanzang played a vital role in bringing Buddhism into Chinese court life, leading to the elevation of Buddhism as the state religion under Chinese empress Wu Zetian.
By this time, through the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE, Rome had extended its authority down through the Red Sea. Indian ivory, wild animals, diamonds, amethysts, sandalwood, coral, cotton, incense and spices passed through Alexandria to be exported across the Mediterranean to Rome and beyond.
Dalrymple argues it was India, not China, that was the greatest trading partner of the Roman Empire. These monks and merchants brought with them Indic teachings on astronomy, medicine, chess and mathematics, including our modern 1-9 number symbols and the concept of the number zero that changed forever “not just the ways of doing business and accounting, but ways of thinking about numbers and time, as well as physics and metaphysics”.
Across the Arab world, Sanskrit texts were translated and spread to the emerging intellectual centres on the edge of Christian Europe.
Dalrymple tracks the extent of this influence through found fragments: a papyrus document unearthed from a rubbish dump in the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus, carnelian beads in the royal tombs of Ur (modern Iraq), a 10th-century shipwreck off the coast of Java laden with precious goods from India and China.
Other evidence is hiding in plain sight. The famous Hindu-turned-Buddhist temple Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the huge Buddhist temple at Borobudur on Java, Buddhist edicts inscribed on pillars across present-day India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Afghanistan and Pakistan during the reign of Emperor Ashoka around 250 BCE, the Buddhist monument in the Isis temple at the ancient Egyptian port Berenike, rays of the sun beaming out of a Buddha like “a Roman solar deity”.
Dalrymple quotes Said al-Andalusi, chief justice of Toledo in 1068: “Over many centuries, all the kings of the past have recognised the ability of the Indians in all the branches of knowledge,” he wrote. As well as in astronomy, astrology and mathematics, “they have surpassed all the other peoples in their knowledge of medical science.”
So why has so much of this rich legacy been forgotten? Why is China often seen as the spiritual home of Buddhism? Why is our numbering system, so integral to the commercial and banking systems that financed the Renaissance, so often attributed to Arab scholars? Why has the decimal system so vital for accounting been subsumed into the legacy of Italian mathematician Luca Pacioli?
“The contribution of India has not got the attention it deserves,” says Dalrymple. “We know the names of Archimedes and Pythagoras but no one in the world studies the great Indian mathematicians Aryabhata and Brahmagupta, who redesigned the system now used by virtually every country in the world, the nearest thing humanity has to a universal language.”
Much of the evidence of India’s rich history has gone – the invasions of Persianised Turks from the 11th century saw the destruction of Hindu, Jain and Buddhist sites, including the Nalanda University library.
Lack of government funding in the present day, says Dalrymple, has left much of what does remain unprotected and less explored than comparable countries. He points to Nalanda: “You’d have thought every Indian government that’s interested in national pride would be rushing to make an enormous museum there, and to trumpet this as the greatest university of the world, a library comparable to the Library of Alexandria.”
Left unsaid
As seen in the aftermath of any war, witness accounts of real-life carnage tend to remain unsaid. Dalrymple’s late father, Sir Hew Hamilton-Dalrymple, was a 19-year-old aide-de-camp to the first commander in chief of the Pakistan Army when the British handed back the keys to the Indians and Pakistanis. He saw the horrors of partition, he served in Palestine and Suez, “but he never really talked about any of them. It is one of the great regrets of my life.”
But there is, too, a more wilful forgetting. Certainly the intellectual and cultural richness of India, he says, did not support Britain’s colonisation of India as a “civilising mission”.
“We can hardly claim the right to ‘civilise’ people if they’ve been civilised for 4000 years, but the attitudes of [19th-century historian Thomas] Macaulay, the idea that, ‘a single shelf of a good European Library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’, as he famously put it – those sorts of bigoted ideas do oddly linger still in our school curriculum.”
Such ideas are perpetuated in the historic fiction and films romanticising the age of the British Raj.
“I think there is a widespread feeling in Britain that World War II was the peak of our heroism,” Dalrymple says. “The British are obsessed with that derring-do under the time of Churchill. Everything since then has been a bit of an anticlimax. That’s why the British are so keen to embrace that part which has some very good aspects, like the number of people going around National Trust houses or watching 18th-century dramas with handsome chaps in breeches striding towards ladies in bonnets. But at its worst it could just lead to a sort of hopeless nostalgia for a golden age that never existed, that was in fact extremely violent.”
That nostalgia is already making its way into politics, with some Conservative politicians keen to endorse the greatness of the British Empire.
A 2025 YouGov poll showed a third of the British public think the British Empire is something to be proud of. This is down from 59% in 2014, but still one in five Britons wish Britain still had an empire, rising to two in five Reform UK voters.
“It’s now become a sort of established thing in Tory political language to decry those who are going down our great imperial path,” says Dalrymple.
When his earlier empire books first came out, “they all got very good reviews in the right-wing press. But I wonder if I produced the same books now whether they might be not slated as some sort of woke lament, doing down Great Britain by a typical liberal lefty.”
Genius deserves a name
Dalrymple is cheerfully undaunted, revealing India’s rich history of learning, art and culture not only through books but through articles, art and podcasts.
In London in 2020, he co-curated Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company, showcasing works commissioned by East India Company officials from Indian artists traditionally grouped under the anonymous term “Company Painting”.
As art critic Jonathan Jones wrote in The Guardian, “The results are sensational … genius deserves a name.”
Since 2022, he has co-hosted the excellent Empire podcast with journalist Anita Anand, beginning with an examination of the British East India Company. More than 300 episodes on, it has just completed the story of Gaza.
As he said at the beginning of the series, “It is absolutely crucial to understand current events to know what preceded it in detail, going really into the minutiae so people can understand it.”
As we mourn incalculable human losses, he wrote in a recent Guardian piece, “learning about its past can help us better understand the present”.
Instead, there is a wilful forgetting, implicit in the claim by US politician Mike Huckabee, now the US ambassador to Israel, during his unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign, that, “There’s no such thing as a Palestinian. There’s not. You have Arabs and Persians.”
“Palestine is one of the oldest place names still in use anywhere in the world,” says Dalrymple. “I think it certainly predates Britannia and probably predates Rome. We have Egyptian inscriptions talking about the Peleset from 1400 BCE, Assyrian inscriptions to the Palashtu in 800 BCE, and Herodotus, the father of history, talking about Syria Palaistinē in the fifth-century BCE.
“It’s very important, now that the Gaza conflict is hopefully winding down, to try to excavate this history, to look at the history of the Palestinians. This is not to diminish or erode the incredible history of the Jewish people, who were also there for the very earliest periods of history, but to make the point that there were others.
“Like everywhere else in the Mediterranean, the Levant is a fantastically ethnically and religiously mixed part of the world and always has been.”
Now 60, Dalrymple is already lining up his books and card indexes to dive into a new book on Gaza. “It just seems criminally negligent to remain ignorant of this history.”
An Evening with William Dalrymple: An Auckland Writers Festival event, Auckland Girls’ Grammar School, Wednesday, November 5, 7pm. See Ticketmaster for details.