Telling the world about the Indian millennium

Written engagingly and often drawing from new finds in archaeology, The Golden Road by William Dalrymple is rich in historical detail

- Renuka Narayanan

History as taught in India is a 19th-century colonial construct. It is heavily Delhi-centric, ignoring other important histories such as that of the eastern seaboard and its audacious seafarers. The Cholas in their heyday, a millennium ago, are called a thalassocracy or maritime empire. But by cultural influence, not military conquest, for culture sailed like a bird perched on the shoulder of commerce. South-East Asia and China know this, as do Indians on the eastern coast. But modern India has not told her ancient tale well, either to herself or the world, a task newly accomplished by William Dalrymple's book, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World.

Nobody has done this since A.L. Basham in The Wonder That Was India, in 1954, a book widely read in South-East Asian universities. And Sanjeev Sanyal's account of our maritime history, The Ocean of Churn (2016). So, let's first review a few things that we Asians do know about ourselves.