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?

“We have an “inferiority complex” and we seek validation from west in everything we do, that is precisely because we have been taught the wrong history for so long. These were politically correct history – but they are anything but history.”

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.“

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.

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.