John Keay at Literary Review:
After writing a string of award-winning books on India, the historian and literary phenomenon William Dalrymple has forsaken the glamour of the Mughals and the murky dealings of the English East India Company to look beyond the Indian subcontinent and make the case for the existence of a wider, pre-Islamic ‘Indosphere’. His aim in The Golden Road is, he says, ‘to highlight India’s often forgotten position as a crucial economic fulcrum, and civilisational engine, at the heart of the ancient and early medieval worlds and as one of the main motors of global trade and cultural transmission in early world history, fully on a par with and equal to China.’
This will go down well in an assertive and increasingly Sinophobic India, where Dalrymple is largely based. It will in particular be music to the ears of the nation’s ubiquitous technocrats. It also chimes with the marginalisation of Indian Muslims and the ‘saffron-washing’ of the country’s Islamic heritage by Hindu zealots of Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
more here.