The wonder that was the Indosphere

The Wonder That Was India would have been the most appropriate name for William Dalrymple's rich and enriching book had it not been the title of A L Basham's classic work. All serious students growing up in the 1960s and 1970s and wanting to learn about ancient India read Basham's book. Dalrymple takes up some of the themes covered by Basham and adds to them greater depth, more themes and new evidence. He complements all this by an analysis of how the cultures of ancient India were transmitted across a wide geographical space that Dalrymple calls the Indosphere. This is a book that should not be missed by anyone interested in the world of ancient Indian cultures.

- RUDRANGSHU MUKHERJEE

At one level, Dalrymple's book is a comprehensive rebuttal of the contempt that colonial administrators and intellectuals displayed towards India's past. Thomas Babington Macaulay, that great panjandrum of the British Empire, (in)famously wrote: “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia”. Others of Macaulay's ilk expressed similar prejudices and ignorance. Dalrymple has put such opinions where they belong - in imperialism's ever-growing dustbin.

Dalrymple's project has been made possible by a radical shift in the focus of Indian historical scholarship. Even the nationalist riposte to the Macaulay trope leaned too much towards dynastic and political history. Dalrymple writes briefly about the nationalist response but in the process writes of Kailas Nag. I think this should be Kalidas Nag. Only very recently has the spotlight shifted towards culture, its fashioning and its transmission. To take one example, a historian like Richard Eaton, when he writes of the history of India from roughly the 12th century to the early 18th century, he does so not with reference to the kings who ruled (although they are not altogether omitted) but in terms of the overarching cultural and political discursive space that spanned these centuries. He calls it the Persianate age whose geographical coordinates stretched from West Asia to India. Similarly, Dalrymple is looking at - both through a telescope and a magnifying glass - a geographical space that radiated from India to east Africa to the Arab world (and thence to Europe) to Central Asia to China and down southwards to south-east Asia. India was the centre of this world and its fountainhead of knowledge and culture.