A FORGOTTEN ROAD

William Dalrymple's new book traces ancient India's role in spreading ideas and religions across the world

- MEERA SURESH

In the late eighth century AD, a delegation from the Raja of Sindh arrived in Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate, the newly-founded Islamic empire. The delegation came with gifts to appease Caliph Abu Ja’far al-Mansur. What caught the Caliph’s eye was not the jewels, mangoes or the expensive cotton weaves, but a single manuscript. The book, which the Arabs came to call The Great Sindhind, contained complex mathematical theories and scientific ideas, compiled by ancient India’s greatest scientific mind, Brahmagupta.

This uncharted westward journey of Indian mathematics is retraced by historian William Dalrymple in his latest work The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World. With arresting details, the writer takes us back to ancient India and the Abbasid Caliphate, where the ancient manuscript was eagerly welcomed.

The Great Sindhind included not only the idea of zero but also those of crucial mathematical concepts like trigonometry and algebra. It ended up in the hands of the viziers of Baghdad, from where these ideas spread across the Islamic world. Five hundred years later, they reached Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci), who popularised them as ‘Arabic numerals’ across Europe.

Only these numerals weren’t really Arabic, but Indian.

Ancient India’s contribution to reshaping the world was not just limited to mathematics. From here came merchants, missionaries, monks and artists who took their ideas across south, central, southeast and eastern Asia. Together they paved a ‘Golden Road’ that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific.

So it is only natural that an Indophile like Dalrymple felt that this extraordinary but little-known tale of ancient India needed a retelling.