“My method of writing history is to try to tell a clear narrative” | India News

Edited excerpts from the interview
Describe what 'The Golden Way' is it okay?
Even as a child, I was fascinated by archaeology and art history. When I first came to India as a teenager, the places I was keen to see and focused on were places like Ajanta, Sanchi and those ancient sites on the border between antiquity and the early Middle Ages.
I arrived on January 26, 1984, and just set off. In a way, that year abroad that I took in 1984 is still going on 40 years later.
I spent almost 20 years – from 1998 to 2019 – working on these four books about the East India Company and its relationship with India, especially Mughal India. After that, I thought it was time to go back to my childhood love, that very early period of history.
It was on a trip to Angkor Watthe germ of this book was born and got me thinking about the breadth and scope of Indian civilization. It was not confined to the borders of India. Ideas that originally came from this triangle of land have spread in all directions.
The book is divided into three parts. One is the story of Buddhism Spread from India. Then there is the whole story of how Hinduism traveled across the Bay of Bengal and the third part of the book is the story of how Indian figures Gupta left India to travel west.
If you had to define the Golden Road, how would you define it?
The title “The Golden Road” refers to the trade routes that arose from India’s natural location at the centre of the monsoon winds, one of the many natural advantages India has always had over many of its neighbours.
Throughout history, Indian traders only had to set sail on the east or west coast and they would be driven very quickly in one direction for six months of the year. The next six months of the year they would be driven back just as quickly. This means that it is very, very easy for an Indian trader to get in a boat and head for either the Persian Gulf or the Strait of Malacca.
The Golden Road is the road that Indian sailors travelled along. They became the most important trading partner of ancient Rome. We know from various Egyptian documents that a single shipment of ivory from Kerala sold in Alexandria could make the supplier rich enough to buy one of Egypt's largest estates or enter the Senate.
This early version of the flow of gold from the Roman Empire into the Indian pockets ends with the collapse of Rome. What then happens is that the Tamil merchant guildswho have become accustomed to this very easy source of gold must now look for a new source.
Where do you find it? You find it in Suvarnabhumi, so in Southeast Asia. From the fifth century onwards, this route becomes a highway and the eastern branch of the Golden Road becomes the main route for Indian traders.
In the eighth and ninth centuries, larger states developed in Java and Sumatra, and the Khmer Empire in Cambodia. Indian ideas developed on a larger scale in Southeast Asia than in India. In the 12th century, the largest Hindu temple in the world was built not in India, but in Angkor Wat.
If we exported so much of our culture, why didn't we also export our caste system?
A special feature of Cambodian Hinduism in particular is that people choose the parts they like.
They like Hindu kingship because it makes them more powerful. They attach great importance to having their kingdoms administered by Brahmins and to having a brilliant bureaucracy. But they do not want to give up pork and so they continue to eat pork even though it is strictly forbidden.
They don't like castes, that's why they never had castes. They prefer their women to be powerful, that's why they have Brahmin women.
In this, as in everything else, Southeast Asian Hinduism differs subtly from Indian Hinduism. This led to Tagore's famous remark when he visited Angkor Wat: “Everywhere I could see India, but I could not recognize it.”
There are primary texts in different languages, obviously from different periods of history. How did you access them?
My method of writing history is to tell a clear narrative, full of biographical characters. I have focused on people like Xuan Zang and Empress Wu Zetian, whose life we ​​know quite well thanks to extensive sources and translations.
I think a fifth of the book is made up of footnotes which in some way lay out the academic arguments for my decisions. If someone wants to understand what my evidence is, for example that pigs were eaten in Southeast Asian Hindu temples, I can point them to a picture at Angkor Thom of a large pig being placed in a cauldron of boiling water, etc.
All of my claims are laid out and evaluated in the footnotes, which are written in a much more academic tone than the main text, which attempts to tell this great story in a way that people can understand.
I thought it was absolutely wonderful how you made so much of our history accessible to us through these cultural references. For example, you call Kalidasa the Sanskrit Shakespeare… that will stay in the reader's mind forever. You make it so accessible…
When I arrived in India, there was this great cult of subaltern studies that seemed to find an equally obscure and jargon-laden way of making what were often really quite simple statements about history. There are some medieval dissidents in India who complain that the Brahmins make everything unnecessarily complicated.
Similarly, I think there has been a tendency to express quite simple ideas in highly complex language, which only complicates the idea rather than making it clearer. I think that in the humanities, unlike in science or mathematics, there is nothing that cannot be easily explained in plain language.
However, if you want to get into the academic details, you can consult the 100 pages of footnotes, which lay out, for example, the arguments about how different types of Tamil were received in Southeast Asia. I hope we will satisfy both the layman and the academic, but I am sure many will disagree.
How would you like to be remembered in the future for the work you have done?
I'm thrilled that I now have this audience in India. I remember some of the reviews of City of Djinns that I read at the time. It's a very popular book and it's still in print 35 years later. But when it came out, there were some pretty snarky reviews saying, “Who is this foreigner who comes here and tries to tell us about our own capital?”
I am very lucky now that I have a lot of Indian readers and India is now the main market for my books. My books are translated into 40 languages ​​and I will now market them in Australia, the US, Italy and all sorts of other places. Most of these books are read and discussed in India. Sometimes people disagree with them, especially on the now sensitive subject of the Mughals, which does not appeal to some sections of society today.
But people have remained loyal to my works and I am happy to say that this book has immediately hit number one on Amazon India.