Vijaya Subramanian’s Post

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Consultant & Executive Coach

The highlight of the week was an evening listening at the Union Chapel in Islington to William Dalrymple, historian weaving a rich narrative of the connection of the West to the East as “The Golden Road” – navigable sea roads and maritime trade routes” that linked Ancient India’s wealth and intellectual hegemony – from mathematics to linguistics, metallurgy, astronomy and iconography and from Rome to Indonesia and China in the Far East. This is more believable he said (than the Silk Road), as it can be traced by the map of Roman coins and as none were found in China, Chinese were agnostic about the presence of Romans. He talked about the import of ginger, indigo, spices and ivory that led to India being called the “sinkhole of metals” particularly gold from the Roman times. Indian museums are said to hold more Roman coins than any other country outside the former empire. More importantly he shows the important contribution of the Indian mathematicians primarily Brahmagupta (who invented zero in the 7th Century) which is rarely acknowledged by the West. The Arabs in the Middle East with the help of Barmakids, Buddhist scholars trained in Sanskrit, converted the complex Sanskrit texts that were in "Sutras" – cryptic and in poetry form to prose for further development, which was then brought to the western world that revolutionised them. The book also talks about the spread of Indian mythology Ramayana and Buddhism to the Far East where rulers adopted Indian modes of thought and life. They went to construct the greatest Buddhist and Hindu temples in Borobudur on Java, and at Angkor Wat in Cambodia which shows the soft power India held between 250BC and 1200AD. There are still two more talks scheduled in London at the V&A and British Library which are not to be missed for history lovers.

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