A review of William Dalrymple’s ‘The Golden Road’
While I usually enjoy reading Dalrymple, his new book left me feeling quite ambivalent. In it he tackles very different time periods and subjects to ones he has worked on in his earlier historical work, and hence he relies heavily on existing academic writings by historians and other scholars (this book has Notes and Bibliography sections spanning 150-odd pages). I happen to be familiar with some of the writings he cited in this book. I was surprised, then, to see that many of his major arguments and conclusions differed in varying degrees, sometimes substantially, from those of his cited scholars — folks whose original research and arguments power Dalrymple’s new and important book.
The excellent Indian journal-magazine The India Forum published my review in November. Here’s the link. I have copied some paragraphs below.
(To my surprise, and to his credit, William Dalrymple wrote a cordial Reply to my Twitter post about this review. He also wrote a letter to The India Forum, and below (after the paragraphs) I’ve posted his letter and my short response.)
The Marathi author P.L. Deshpande was known for writing up biographical sketches of the striking individuals he would now and then encounter. One such personality was an elderly Parsi man, Pestonji Hubliwala. Starting as a worker in a railway workshop in late colonial India, Pestonji retired as an assistant foreman after three decades of diligent service. During his conversation (probably in the 1970s), with PL –as Deshpande was better known in literary circles as — the retired foreman wistfully recollected his work with the railway department, contrasting the colonial period with the post-independence era. PL labelled this, in jest, as the yearning of a generation of older Parsis for the “good old British days,” but his reproduction of Pestonji’s thoughts are telling. “In the railway workshop my white engineer bosses never thought twice before taking off their coats and shirts and getting their hands dirty on engines that needed repairs. But the engineers nowadays, all these Subramaniams and Joshis and Kulkarnis.. I tell you … They are so scared to get their hands dirty. They have zero practical experience, these silly bespectacled fellows!”
It is unlikely that Pestonji was well-versed in radical anti-caste critique, but his observation about South Asia’s elite caste groups (“Subramaniams,” etc) religiously keeping their distance from manual labour is a historical reality. Equally true is how the elite everywhere write themselves into histories of knowledge to the exclusion of expertise produced by the non-elite. The historian Patricia Fara contrasts ancient Greece’s “wealthy philosophers who thought profoundly about the Universe,” like Archimedes, with the “far greater number of people from lower social orders” that have largely been forgotten. Many aspects of knowledge-making and science, Fara says, originated from the latter groups: these were “people who used their expertise to keep themselves alive–miners who developed ore-refining techniques, farmers familiar with weather patterns, textile workers who relied on chemical reactions.” For South Asia, Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd distinguishes the privileged caste groups from the “productive castes”: “the Dalit–Bahujan masses” who established technologies like “leather processing, pot making, house construction technology and the technologies of food production, based on trial and error in their struggle for survival.”
In The Golden Road, it is Pestonji’s “bespectacled” version of science that predominates, one where science is primarily a theoretical enterprise carried out by people poring over manuscripts and books with little need for the practical experience of getting one’s hands dirty. The knowledge-makers Dalrymple chooses to typify as unknown and forgotten stars of South Asia are not the highly skilled and consistently neglected pot-makers or farmers, but the very ubiquitous Archimedes’ of the subcontinent: the Aryabhatas and Brahmaguptas. Considering the kinds of “literature, arts and the sciences” that occupy the bulk of this book, one might well come away believing that it was only Brahmans and adjacent privileged-caste groups who had the ability to conceptualise and create anything of value in South Asia.
… There is one tantalising moment when Dalrymple acknowledges what he considers the overwhelming visibility of Brahmans among the subcontinent’s immigrants to Southeast Asia, and notes that “many other non-literate Indian caste groups were also present and may have been predominant.” However, this potentially exciting analysis of the “varied diaspora rather than just the boatloads of literate Brahmins” is only a page long, based mostly on a DNA-based study. More disappointingly, after making such a crucial revelation about the predominance of Bahujan caste groups in the diaspora, Dalrymple jumps right back into the Brahmanosphere: “Whatever their DNA contribution to the region, the Brahmins did bring with them from India three crucial gifts that proved irresistible right across the region: Sanskrit, the art of writing and the stories of the great Indian epics.” That Sanskrit was a language only of the elites with its exclusivity strictly enforced, and that the epics of Mahabharata and Ramayana prescribed violent actions in order to protect and pursue a caste-based social order, are contexts within South Asia that remain unexamined.
But these contexts are indispensable to The Golden Road’s major themes, because when we account for the fact that the prejudices and oppressive laws of Sanskrit-literate elites were central to how “literature, arts, and the sciences” operated in the subcontinent, then the book’s major bold claim, that “Indian” influence across Asia was spread “not by the sword but by the sheer power of its ideas”, loses much of its sheen.
.. There is, after all, a fatal weakness in the voluminous oeuvre of one-way traffic works that extol a single civilisation and how it supposedly changed the world: they all overlook the fact that a culture, and the world around it, are not mutually exclusive but instead are constantly shaping and co-creating each other.
.. If we take a proper historical view, Sheldon Pollock writes, “civilizations reveal themselves to be processes and not things. And as processes they ultimately have no boundaries; people are constantly receiving and passing on cultural goods.” Food is a good example to help us wrap our heads around this processes not things idea: none of the cuisines of South Asia has ever been a single particular thing frozen in time, but has always been in a flux — like a process — made and remade unceasingly as people “constantly received and passed on” ingredients, recipes, and secrets, including from outside the region. “Indian civilisation” or “South Asian civilisation” also, similarly, is not some unchanging thing which from atop Mount Meru transmitted its bounties to other cultures. Instead, it has been a part of the always global “networks of begging, borrowing, and stealing, imitating and emulating” in which all cultures and civilisations have participated. What we overlook when we speak about the “Indianization” of Southeast Asia, Pollock perceptively argues, is that it was “concurrent with, and no different from, the Indianization of India itself”, with the latter taking place often via ideas and materials from, well, Southeast Asia.
Dalrymple’s letter to the magazine:
I thank Kiran Kumbhar for an interesting and thought-provoking review. It’s a well written and effective piece and I’m grateful for the balanced tone in which it’s written. But it is itself full of odd gaps.
It focusses exclusively on the two short chapters of the book that talk about the arrival of Brahminism in South-East Asia, but doe not at any point discuss, or even show any signs of having read, the six out of ten chapters where I have written about the diffusion of Buddhism. Indeed the word Buddhism does not once appear in the lengthy review, although it is the subject of two thirds of the book.
Here there is a far more varied group of characters from a far more diverse backgrounds to the Brahminical immigrants to Cambodia,and in fact that variety is one of the main themes of the book. If the reviewer had read to the end of the introduction he would, for example, have come across one of the donors to the coastal monastery of Ghantasala in Andhra who describes himself as a great sea captain, a mahanavika, and the son of a prosperous local rice farmer and landowner. This was a time when some of the children who might usually be expected to follow their fathers into agriculture instead left home to become sailors and merchants on the seas.
Here he would also have come across discussion of the ‘pizza effect’ where Hindu or Buddhist ideas from South-east Asia found their way back to India, enhanced and transformed by the work of theologians and artists of Maritime South-east Asia. There are many other examples in the book of Chinese and Persianate ideas taking root in South Asia, as ideas passed backwards and forwards. Nor does the review discuss the way that Chinese, Abbasid and later European intellectuals actively sought out Indian ideas, from yogacara texts to mathematical and astronomical ideas, of their own volition and through their own agency and initiative, the subject of four other chapters. Far from ‘docile and passive recipients’ many made difficult journeys of thousands and miles to seek knowledge that fascinated them, whether Xuanzang, the subject of chapter four, Khwarizmi in chapter eight or Fibonacci in chapter ten.
So while the review makes for startling reading, it’s criticisms are far from representative of the book as a whole. If the reviewer had read and discussed the other eight chapters beyond the two on South-East Asia, he would have come to a very different conclusion, and given a very different impression, to the chest thumping Brahminical Indocentricity presented in the review.
My response to Dalrymple’s letter:
I am truly grateful to William Dalrymple for responding to my review of his book.
In my reading of the (full) book, the impressions I came home with were indeed the primary theses of explicit Indo-centrism and implied Brahman/uppercaste-centrism. (I am afraid that the mahanavikas were most probably not from Bahujan communities.) There are certainly examples of multi-way exchanges in the book, which are also acknowledged in the review, but in my reading these did not eventually flow into the overarching arguments that undergird the book’s narrative. In the review I have attempted to convey to readers that even as they read this wonderful, important book, we must also be cognisant of the multi-causal, multi-regional, and multi-pathway trajectories of all our major cultural and scientific ideas, something different from the dominant popular understanding that a few cultures or ‘civilisations’ have been uniquely a source of genius compared to others. (“In matters of science, astronomy and mathematics, India was to be a teacher of the Arab world, and hence Mediterranean Europe too.”)
On a different note, it is extremely generous and professional of Dalrymple to respond cordially to my review.
