History & Ideas
The Forgotten Superpower: How Ancient India Shaped the World — and Why We Were Made to Forget
The numbers we use to do every calculation on every computer in the world were invented in India. The religion practiced by over half of Asia spread from India. The greatest university of the ancient world stood in Bihar. Historian William Dalrymple‘s new book asks a pointed question: how did we forget all of this — and who decided we should?
There is a carved ivory figurine in the collections of the Museo Nazionale in Naples, Italy. It is small, exquisitely detailed, shows a woman in a classic Indian posture, and was found in the ruins of Pompeii — buried under volcanic ash since 79 CE. It is one of the clearest physical proofs that Rome and India were not merely aware of each other but traded with each other at scale, across thousands of miles of open ocean, centuries before the Christian era.
Rome was buying Indian luxuries — cotton, spices, ivory, gems — in such quantities that the Roman historian Pliny the Elder complained that India was draining the empire’s treasury. He estimated the outflow at 50 million sesterces a year. That, he wrote, was what India cost Rome. The money flowed east. So did something far more durable: ideas.
This is the world that historian William Dalrymple recovers in his 2024 book The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World — a New York Times instant bestseller.
Dalrymple spent five years travelling through the Middle East, India, and Southeast Asia, tracing the routes along which Indian civilisation flowed outward for nearly fifteen centuries. Speaking to Fareed Zakaria, he described the book’s central argument simply: ancient India was “the cultural superpower of Asia,” and the world has largely forgotten it.
The forgetting, as it turns out, was not an accident.
I. The Golden Road — and the World It Built
Dalrymple’s central concept is what he calls the “Golden Road” — a network of maritime trade routes, cultural exchange, and intellectual transmission that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific for approximately fifteen centuries, from around 250 BCE to 1200 CE. This is not a metaphor for a single physical highway. It is a name for a phenomenon: the sustained, multidirectional flow of Indian goods, religions, philosophies, mathematics, art, architecture, and language across the known world.
The scale of India’s influence during this period is difficult to absorb. More than half of the world’s population today lives in countries that were shaped, in their foundational cultural identities, by ideas that originated in India.
Buddhism — which spread from India into Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, China, Korea, and Japan — was not carried by armies. “India spread its ideas through culture and trade, not conquest,” Dalrymple told Zakaria. He calls it “an empire of the spirit.“
India’s Reach, in Objects and Evidence
- An ivory figurine of a courtesan in the Indian style, found in Pompeii, buried since 79 CE
- Grains of Indian pepper discovered in the mummified nostrils of Pharaoh Rameses II
- Indian diamonds believed to have been used in cutting the stones of the Egyptian pyramids
- A cuneiform tablet mentioning a whole village of Indians in ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq)
- The majority of Roman gold coins found anywhere in the world — found in India and Sri Lanka
- Angkor Wat — the largest religious monument ever built — a Hindu temple in Cambodia
- Borobudur in Java — the world’s largest Buddhist monument, built in 9th-century Indonesia
- Indonesia’s national airline, Garuda, named after the mount of the Hindu god Vishnu
- Scenes from the Ramayana and Mahabharata carved on temple walls in Thailand and Sumatra
Between 200 BCE and 1200 CE, Dalrymple argues, Sanskrit played the same unifying role across Asia that Latin played in medieval Europe. A scholar or ambassador in 10th-century Java or 7th-century Afghanistan would have written and spoken in Sanskrit. The great Indian epics — the Mahabharata and the Ramayana — were retold across the continent.
The Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who in 629 CE undertook a perilous six-year journey to India to reach the great university at Nalanda, crossing the Pamirs through bandits and civil war, returned home with 657 Sanskrit texts, statues, and relics. He knew, writes Dalrymple, that Nalanda was the greatest centre of learning in the world. The Harvard, Oxbridge, and NASA of its day, all in one campus in Bihar.
II. The Numbers That Run the World
The most consequential of all India’s exports to the world was not a religion, or a piece of art, or even a trade route. It was a mathematical idea so fundamental that it is now invisible — taken so completely for granted that its Indian origin has been forgotten even in the countries that depend on it most.
We call them Arabic numerals: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. The Arabs gave them to Europe. But the Arabs received them from India — and have always called them Hindu numerals. Dalrymple made the point pointedly to Zakaria: “We call our numbers Arabic numbers because that’s where the West got them from. But the Arabs got them from the Indians.”
The origin story is specific. In the 5th century CE, the mathematician and astronomer Aryabhata — who studied and later headed the observatory at Nalanda University in Bihar — formalised the place-value positional number system that makes it possible to express any number, however large, with just ten symbols.
His 499 CE text, the Aryabhatiya, contained breakthroughs in algebra, trigonometry, and astronomy. Aryabhata calculated the value of pi to 3.1416 — correct to four decimal places — and appears to have understood that it was irrational, a fact that would not be formally proved in Europe until 1761.
A century later, in 628 CE, Brahmagupta wrote the Brahmasphutasiddhanta — the first mathematical text to treat zero as an independent number with its own arithmetic rules. Before Brahmagupta, zero was a placeholder — a blank space.
He made it a number: something you could add, subtract, multiply, and reason about. He established that 1 + 0 = 1, that 1 − 0 = 1, that 1 × 0 = 0. These seem trivially obvious now. They were not obvious before someone wrote them down for the first time.
How Zero Travelled from Bihar to Baghdad to Brussels
The Journey of the Most Important Number in History
In 773 CE, a delegation from the Raja of Sindh arrived in Baghdad bearing gifts for the Caliph. What caught the Caliph’s attention was not the jewels or the cotton — it was a single manuscript containing the mathematical theories of Brahmagupta. The Arabs called it “The Great Sindhind.” The scholar who translated and expanded on Brahmagupta’s work was Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. His name, Latinised, became “algorithm.” His book on Indian arithmetic gave us the word “algebra” (from the Arabic al-jabr, a term in his title).
In the 12th century, al-Khwarizmi’s works were translated into Latin in Spain. Medieval European scholars encountered the Hindu-Arabic numerals for the first time and gradually adopted them, replacing the cumbersome Roman numeral system.
Every calculation done on every computer, smartphone, and calculator in the world today runs on a numbering system whose conceptual foundations were laid in Bihar in the 5th century CE.
Dalrymple puts the lineage plainly: “Thanks to Aryabhata, we have algebra, algorithms, and binary.” Even the words trace back to translations of Indian texts. And the chain runs unbroken to the present: “Islamic scholars in 12th-century Spain described Indians as masters of mathematics,” he told Zakaria, “and if you go to Silicon Valley today, people will tell you the same story.”
III. The Trade That Fed Rome
One of the more surprising arguments in Dalrymple’s book is the claim that the ancient world’s primary trade spine was not the overland Silk Road connecting China to the Mediterranean, but a maritime route running through India — one that both preceded the Silk Road by centuries and operated at a far greater scale.
The evidence is physical. Roman gold coins have been found in concentrations in India and Sri Lanka that have no parallel elsewhere in the world. Pliny was not exaggerating when he complained about Roman wealth flowing eastward. Archaeological evidence from the Egyptian Red Sea port of Berenike shows habitation by Indian merchants — inscriptions in Tamil Brahmi script, Indian pottery, Indian spices — suggesting a permanent community of Indian traders based there.
“Every year,” Dalrymple says, “fleets of hundreds of vessels were leaving the Egyptian coast, going down the Red Sea and arriving in India.” The Romans had no direct contact with China. But they knew India intimately, through the sailors, merchants, and scholars who traversed this maritime corridor.
Dalrymple challenges the “Silk Road” framing directly, arguing it is partly a product of Chinese historiographical ambition — a rebranding of trade history that places China at the centre of ancient globalisation. His counter-claim is that India was the actual hub: the point through which both western and eastern trade flowed, and whose cultural exports went with the goods in both directions.
IV. How the Forgetting Happened
If ancient India’s influence was this large, this documented, and this consequential, the obvious question is: why don’t we know about it? Why do students in Europe and America learn about Greece, Rome, and China as the pillars of ancient civilisation, while India appears in the narrative largely as a destination for British colonialism?
Dalrymple’s answer is layered and honest. He points first to colonialism. The early British orientalists — Sir William Jones, who in 1786 identified the kinship between Sanskrit and the European languages; James Prinsep, who deciphered the Brahmi script and unlocked millennia of Indian inscriptions — were genuinely fascinated by Indian antiquity and treated it with respect.
But the colonial establishment that followed them was not. Thomas Macaulay, the Victorian official who shaped India’s education policy, wrote famously that “a single shelf of good English books is worth more than the whole native library of India and Arabia.” The British, Dalrymple notes drily, could hardly celebrate India’s intellectual heritage while simultaneously claiming to be civilising it. So they didn’t.
The dismissal ran deep into how Indian mathematics was taught — or rather, not taught. Aryabhata and Brahmagupta did not appear in European mathematics curricula the way Pythagoras and Archimedes did, even though their contributions were of at least comparable significance. The decimal number system that Europe adopted in the 13th century, the zero that made calculus and computing possible — these arrived labelled as Arabic rather than Indian, obscuring their true origin one step further.
Post-colonial historiography added its own complications. Southeast Asian nations, emerging from colonial rule after World War II, were in no mood to accept that their foundational cultures had been shaped by what amounted to an earlier Indian cultural expansion.
The word “colonialism,” in their recent experience, meant oppression. They did not want to situate themselves as the legacy of an earlier Indian hegemony, however different its character. So evidence of deep Indian influence was minimised or framed away.
Back in India, Dalrymple argues, textbooks written in the early independence period tended to underplay Hindu and Buddhist historical achievements in the interest of secular, pluralist nation-building — a political choice with real historiographical consequences.
The result is a historical lacuna of extraordinary size: an empire of ideas that stretched from the Red Sea to Japan, sustained for fifteen centuries, and then written out of the story that most of the world tells about where it came from.
V. The Return
Dalrymple is not a nostalgist. He does not write The Golden Road as a lament for a lost golden age or as a brief for any political position. The book has been praised by Foreign Affairs as “a riposte to both right-wing and left-wing historiography in India: right-wing historians make fantastic claims that cloak India’s real and substantial achievements, while those on the left prioritise social history in a way that displaces intellectual achievement. Dalrymple finds another India in the past: open to trade, tolerant, scientific, creative, and universalist.”
The India he recovers is not the India of any contemporary political faction. It is the India of Nalanda — an institution that at its peak housed over 10,000 students from across Asia, offered courses in every subject from mathematics and astronomy to medicine and philosophy, attracted scholars from China, Korea, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia, and was, by any measure, the greatest university in the ancient world.
It is the India of Aryabhata, who in 499 CE calculated the Earth’s circumference to within 70 miles of its actual value. It is the India of the merchants who built permanent communities in Roman Egypt and left their pottery and their scripts and their pepper in the ruins.
On the question of India’s future, Dalrymple is direct. He told Zakaria that India will overtake both Japan and Germany within five years and will rank among the top three economies in the world by the century’s end.
The continuity he sees is real: “Islamic scholars in 12th-century Spain described Indians as masters of mathematics, and if you go to Silicon Valley today, people will tell you the same story.”
The place-value number system that Aryabhata formalised in Bihar in the 5th century, the zero that Brahmagupta codified in the 7th, the algebra that Arab scholars built from Indian texts in the 9th and transmitted to Europe in the 12th — these are not footnotes to a story about someone else’s civilisation. They are the foundation of every calculation running on every device in the world today.
That foundation was built in India. Dalrymple simply went and found the evidence — and had the temerity, as he says, to give it a name.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.