The Golden Road gives a well-researched and masterful account of how the Buddhist religion and its culture spread throughout East Asia and then disappeared from India in the 13th century; how Hinduism spread among the elites of South East Asia during the same period; and the importance of the work of Indian mathematicians in ancient times. The book has rightly received widespread critical acclaim.
However, when discussing why India’s transformative effect on religions and civilisations around it are not more widely known, William Dalrymple attributes this to ’the legacy of colonialism, and more specifically Victorian Indology, which undermined, misrepresented and devalued Indian history, culture, science and knowledge from the period of Macaulay onwards’.
This claim led to the following headline in an article about the book in The Sunday Times, ’My love for the India the colonists scrubbed from history’ and to the statement that ‘Britons were encouraged to view India as an ignorant backwater’. He has repeated this claim in subsequent interviews and in an article in The Guardian. Given that the bulk of the book is on India’s Buddhist heritage and the work of Indian mathematicians, this paper will show that the claim is wholly unjustified.
History Reclaimed has already published papers on How the British Saved India’s Ancient History https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/how-the-british-saved-indias-classical-history/and the British Role in the Restoration of Buddhism in India https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/the-british-role-in-the-restoration-of-buddhism-in-india/. This paper gives further insights into the British role in India, covers British achievements in Sri Lanka, and also considers how the British reported the achievements of Indian mathematicians.
Contrary to William Dalrymple’s claim, early British officials were fascinated by India’s cultural heritage. Sir William Jones, Judge at the Calcutta Supreme Court, founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784. He and other scholars such as Sir Charles Wilkins, Horace Wilson and Henry Colebrooke translated a large number of Sanskrit texts. Wilkins and Colebrooke founded the Royal Asiatic Society in the Britain in 1823. Wilson was the first occupant of the Boden Chair of Sanskrit at Oxford in 1832. James Prinsep, Assay Master at the Calcutta Mint, unlocked the mysteries of both the Kharoshthi and Brahmi scripts and identified the Emperor Ashoka. With Alexander Cunningham, an army engineer, he excavated the important Buddhist site at Sarnath in 1834-5. Later in 1851, Cunningham excavated the Buddhist site at Sanchi and wrote the Bhilsa Topes which was the first detailed examination of the history of Indian Buddhism, which included substantial archaeological evidence drawn from the study of Buddhist sites.
Cunningham realised that these unofficial surveys of Indian sites were insufficient and he suggested to Viceroy Canning that more systematic investigations were needed. The Viceroy agreed to appoint him Archaeological Surveyor to the Government of India in 1861. Later, in 1871, the formal Archaeological Survey Department was established with Cunningham at its head. This department under the directorship of Cunningham in the 19th century, and of Sir John Marshall in the 20th century, rediscovered and restored all the sacred Buddhist sites in India.
One of the Buddhist sites Mr Dalrymple mentions is the Nalanda University, the greatest university in the ancient world. As with all other Buddhist sites in India the site was destroyed by Islamic invaders towards the end of the 12th century, and subsequently lay in ruins. It was identified by Cunningham on his 1861 tour. He surveyed the site and wrote that the village of Bargoan, surrounded by ancient tanks and mounds, possessed ‘finer and more numerous specimens of culture’ than any place he had visited. The major excavations were conducted during John Marshall’s period in the 1920s. A Guide to Nalanda was published by A Ghosh, Assistant Superintendent of the Archaeological Survey of India, in 1939. This contained the first detailed description of Nalanda since Xuanzang’s diaries written a thousand years earlier, and it is astonishing that Dalrymple does not mention this book and virtually ignores all the other books and papers published by both British and Indian authors during the colonial period.
The Golden Road mentions the Ajanta Caves, containing spectacular cave paintings, which were discovered by chance by some British soldiers out on patrol. They depict the life and times of the Buddha, and were created by Buddhist monks who had lived and worked there from the first to the sixth centuries AD. By the time of their discovery, the paintings were suffering from serious neglect and deterioration. However, Dalrymple does not mention the extraordinary measures the British took to enable the whole world to be impressed by their sublime beauty.
The first descriptions of the caves appeared in the Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1829 and in 1843 James Fergusson laid before the society an authoritative account of the caves. As a result of the interest shown by the members, Major Robert Gill of the Madras Army was asked to make copies and he worked on these painting till 1863. Copies were sent to museums in London though sadly, most were destroyed in the Crystal Palace fire in December 1866. In 1872 Sir James Fergusson and James Burgess urged the Indian government to make further copies and in 1875 George Griffith was given the task. With the help of students from the Bombay School of Art, he worked on the project until 1885. Some of his paintings were contained in the monumental work The Paintings of the Buddhist Paintings at Ajanta Frescoes (1896). Lady [Christiana] Herringham, the artist and copyist, went to India in 1906 and was also fascinated by the frescoes at Ajanta. The result of her work with a group of Indian artists was another sumptuous volume entitled Ajanta Frescoes (1915).
These are two of the scores of sites surveyed and restored by Cunningham and Marshall. Though they described them in detail in their reports, both men also wrote books aimed at the general reader. In addition to Bhilsa Topes, Cunningham wrote several others including The Ancient Geography of India (1871) and The Stupa at Bharut (1879). The former contains all his findings, from several decades of investigations, into India’s historical geography. He also published Mahabodhi (1892) about the temple at the Buddhist’s most holy site at Buddha Gaya where the Buddha attained enlightenment. This was the first book written about this site in the modern era. Marshall’s publications included A Guide to Sanchi (1936) and A Guide to Taxila (1936). An edition of the latter was published in Urdu to make it more accessible to the local population.
Museums were also established at some of the Buddhist sites. The Sanchi Museum, built in 1919, owes its inception to Sir John Marshall and contains antiquities discovered by him there. The Nalanda Museum, opened in 1917, contained all the antiquities that could not be preserved in situ. The erection of the Sarnath Museum in 1904 was also at the initiative of Marshall. It was designed by James Ransome and based on the plan of an ancient Buddhist monastery. Sir John Marshall and Viceroy Chelmsford were responsible for the Taxila Museum which was opened in 1928.
The British authorities also made it easier for pilgrims to visit the sites. In 1907 Indian Railways compiled a ‘Traveller’s Companion’ which contained brief descriptions of places of pilgrimage including the Buddhist sites. By the 1930s, Indian State Railways were advertising rail tours of the sacred Buddhist sites in the country.
The British even surveyed the spread of India’s Buddhist heritage to Central Asia and China. These were undertaken by Sir Aurel Stein in four expeditions undertaken between 1900 and 1930 funded by the British and Indian governments. In the first expedition (1900 – 1901) Stein retraced the trail of the Chinese pilgrim, XuanZang, to Khotan in Chinese Turkestan. He found many Buddhist shrines including the great ruined Buddhist sanctuary at Rawak. In his second expedition he went past Khotan to Dunghuang to the sacred Buddhist grottoes known as the ‘Halls of a Thousand Buddhas’. Here, in a recently discovered side cave, he came across thousands of manuscripts and paintings which he purchased from the temple guardian and brought back to be distributed between the British Museum and the Asian Antiquities Museum in Delhi. In his third expedition (1913-16) he discovered Buddhist murals in Persia.
It is apparent that, contrary to Dalrymple’s claims, far from scrubbing it out, the British rediscovered and restored India’s Buddhist heritage and made it accessible to pilgrims and tourists alike. Moreover, over the decades, Britain’s cultural engagement with India changed and also deepened. During the period of the East India Company, they founded learned societies, translated texts, published some books, gave lectures, collected some artefacts, opened six museums (none at the Buddhist sites), and conducted some surveys and excavation work. During the Raj, in addition to the above, they established a government department (The Archaeological Survey of India), undertook extensive programmes of rediscovery and restoration, published official reports, published far more books, made the sites accessible to visitors and opened far more museums, 96 in total, including four at the Buddhist sites.
In The Golden Road, Dalrymple mentions that during the reign of Emperor Ashoka, Buddhism spread to Sri Lanka. The capital of Sri Lanka for many centuries was the great Buddhist city of Anuradhapura. After it was destroyed in 993, the second capital was Polonnaruwa. He does not mention that for several centuries both these cities were in ruins, covered in jungle and unvisited by anyone. He also does not mention that the British rediscovered and restored these sites. In Sri Lanka, as in India, The British formed the Ceylon branch of the Royal Asiatic Society to study the local culture and heritage, founded museums, and established a government department, the Archaeological Survey of Ceylon, to rediscover and restore its ancient sites. This department during the tenure of its first Archaeological Commissioner, H C P Bell, undertook the restorations mentioned above as well as at many other sites. British achievements in Sri Lanka relating to the rediscovery of ancient sites were as impressive as those in India.
The final section of The Golden Road is on the extraordinary role mathematicians in ancient India, especially Brahmagupta and Aryabhata, have played in our understanding of mathematics, especially in deriving our number system. Dalrymple contends that Victorian Indology has made us forget the work of Indian mathematicians and only value the work of the Greeks. He does not seem to realise that Britons in colonial India were as impressed by these Indian mathematicians as he is.
The great Sanskrit scholar Henry Colebrooke translated the 478 page tome Algebra and Arithmetic and Mensuration from the Sanscrit of Brahmegupta and Bhascara in 1817. Other papers on Indian mathematicians and scientists include: Historical View of Hindu Astronomy from the Earliest Dawn of that Science in India to the Present Time by John Bentley in 1825; On Some Fragments of Aryabhata by H Kern in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1863; and Brief notes on the age and authenticity of the works of Aryabhata by Bhu Daji, also published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1865. G R Kaye published a paper on The Source of Hindu Mathematics in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1910 in which he wrote:
Many writers have enlarged upon the subject of our indebtedness to India in matters intellectual, and in particular have drawn attention to ancient Hindu mathematics, which they consider exhibit in a marked degree the intellectual superiority of the Hindus in ancient times. They not only inform us that a system of mathematics was developed in India in early times, but imply that in this direction the Hindus were benefactors of the rest of mankind…They attained a greatest eminence in algebra, which they developed to a degree beyond anything ever achieved by the Greeks.
In short, it is evident that the British played a monumental role in rediscovering and restoring India’s Buddhist heritage. Far from scrubbing it from history, they actually revealed it to India and the world. The first five chapters of Dalrymple’s new book could not have been written in the five centuries preceding the British control of India because, quite simply, before the British came no one in India appreciated that the country had a Buddhist past. Colonial Britons also valued the work of Indian mathematicians and scientists.
Though Dalrymple has written an exemplary book on how ancient India transformed the world, his criticisms of the British are wholly unjustified. This paper thus concludes with the words of the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, addressing the Indian Central Legislature on 23rd Sept 1937: ‘The monuments of antiquity, eloquent witnesses of the historical and cultural achievements of this country, constitute a heritage of incalculable value and significance which it must be our privilege to guard and hand down to posterity’.
References:
Upinder Singh, The Discovery of Ancient India. Early Archaeologists and the Discovery of Archaeology (2006)
Charles Allen, The Buddha and the Sahibs (2002)
Sir John Cummings, Revealing India’s Past (1939)
G Sengupta and A N Lambah, Custodians of the Past. 150 Years of the Archaeological Survey of India (2011)
R P Fernando, Buddhist Heritage in India and Sri Lanka, Rediscovery and Restoration (2017)
