For most of its modern history, India was fated to be on the receiving end of cultural influence from other civilisations. But this isn’t the complete story. A full millennium earlier, India’s major cultural exports – religion, art, technology, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, language and literature – were shaping civilisations, travelling as far as Afghanistan in the West and Japan in the East. Out of India came pioneering merchants, astronomers and astrologers, scientists and mathematicians, surgeons and sculptors, as well as holy men, monks and missionaries. In The Golden Road, legendary historian William Dalrymple highlights India’s oft-forgotten position as a crucial economic and civilisational hub at the heart of the ancient and early medieval history of Eurasia. From Angkor to Ayutthaya, The Golden Road traces the cultural flow of Indian religions, languages, artistic and architectural forms and mathematics throughout the world. In this groundbreaking tome, Dalrymple draws from a lifetime of scholarship to reinstate India as the great intellectual and philosophical superpower of ancient Asia.

About the author

William Dalrymple FRSL, FRGS, FRAS (born William Hamilton-Dalrymple on 20 March 1965) is a Scottish historian and writer, art historian and curator, as well as a prominent broadcaster and critic.

His books have won numerous awards and prizes, including the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Hemingway, the Kapuściński and the Wolfson Prizes. He has been four times longlisted and once shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. He is also one of the co-founders and co-directors of the annual Jaipur Literature Festival.