India will be a key player in the global economy by century’s end, says Scottish historian William Dalrymple

Award winning Scottish historian William Dalrymple has authored a book on India’s ancient trade route – The Golden Road. The book explains how India is the forgotten heart of the ancient world.

India was the seat of Buddhism and knowledge centre for mathematics, astronomy, technology and literature. Attracting scholars from all over the world. Dalrymple tracks India’s influence from 250 BC to 1200 AD along the Golden Road stretching from the Red Sea to the Pacific.

He argues that it was India and not China that was the greatest trading partner of the Roman Empire. The strength of Buddhist teachings brought India and Chinese thought to the closest alignment in history. But today China has leveraged history and weaponised the Golden Road. At the end Dalrymple leaves his readers with a question – Can India do it again?

Below are the excerpts of the interview.

Q: Everyone says over the past few years that India’s time has come. India’s moment is now. We find ourselves in a very interesting position. We are between two adversaries, Pakistan and China. We are in the middle of geopolitical tensions. There are two wars going on. Everyone says that India can play a very big role in what’s happening globally. We can be a mediator in Ukraine. We can be an important player in the Middle East and we can grow in global value chains. Perhaps this book has some answers to where we can move on in future. You wrote that India has always been at its most creative and influential best, where it has been most connected, plural, hybrid, open and receptive to ideas from neighbours, when it represents cohabitation and not a clash of civilisations. Keeping this in mind, do you really feel that India’s time has come? And why do you think we’ve not leveraged such a rich heritage, which you’ve spoken about?

Dalrymple: First of all, has India’s time come? I think there’s no futurologist or no economist who would dispute that by the end of this century, unless there’s some dramatic change, and that’s always possible. But it seems impossible to imagine that by the end of this century, any outcome other than India, America, and China, being the three big economies of the world. Which of those three is the biggest, is an open question.

If I’d been putting my money on it 10 years ago, I’d have gone and put my money on China, probably. The speed at which the Chinese economy was growing, but it’s faltered and it’s not growing.

I was in Hong Kong over the summer and there was a great deal of discussion about the immigration of capital from China, not just to India to other places like Vietnam, but India was receiving a great deal. Singapore too was getting a lot of the business that was going to China. So I am a big optimist for the economic power of India already, but I can’t see any realistic scenario where India is not one of the three biggest economies by the end of the decade.

As for the second question, will India use its heritage and develop? What I think is very clear is that India was far more globalised than many people realised in the early period. If you look at the Ajanta cave paintings you see deliberately exotic depictions of Scythians, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, various other nationalities shown with different skin colours, different clothes. The idea that India was a hermetically sealed self-generating stage for genius is not supported by the evidence. India achieved what it did by taking ideas from elsewhere, mixing it with its own ideas and taking them forward, which is what happens anywhere in the world. You don’t advance miraculously with a light bulb going on, you take the current state of knowledge and you take it several stages further.

So Aryabhata and Brahmagupta are reading the works of Persians, Greeks, as well as Vedic mathematics. And it is, in my view, and others may interpret it differently, but in my view, then as now, it’s when you are most open, most humble, receptive and open to other ideas, rather than sitting on your laurels that you develop fastest. And if India can do that, there is no reason, in my view, that we can’t see India taking a stronger role culturally as it has done already economically.

Q: You spoke a great deal about Buddhism. I think three or four chapters of your book are focused on that. And you spoke something very interesting. You said that Buddha was open to the idea of accumulation of wealth, which he recognised as a necessary evil, until such time as nirvana could be achieved. And you also said that Buddhism was a practical religion. Gautam Buddha felt that you’ll not be able to sustain being religious if you try and punish yourself too much. Not everyone can do that. You have to do something which is a middle path. And Buddhism had a great deal of impact on our trade routes. Would you agree that the golden road that you speak about was majorly influenced by Buddhist monks and traders who connected with the rest of the world?

Dalrymple: So first of all, this is not a book about the history of India. It’s a history of the diffusion of Indian ideas. And obviously Buddhism is an idea which travels furthest probably of all Indian ideas. You see Buddhist monasteries in Siberia, in Mongolia, as well as all the parts before that. And in contrast, for example, to Jainism, which doesn’t seem to travel as much. And it’s an interesting question why you see Buddhist monasteries everywhere and not Jain monasteries. But as far as the Buddha’s view on merchants, it’s very clear that the early patrons of Buddhism are the merchant class. And when you go to a site like Sanchi, the inscriptions there very clearly record what we today would call crowdfunding. And so, the ivory merchants of Odisha sponsor one gate. The Greek merchants of Karla, put up several pillars within the cave temple of Karla outside Pune.

Watch accompanying video for entire conversation.

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