New Delhi, May 12 -- The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World is the new book by celebrated historian William Dalrymple. He is the best-selling author of nine books, co-founder of the Jaipur Literature Festival as well as co-host of the wildly popular podcast, Empire, with Anita Anand. Dalrymple's new book highlights India's often forgotten role as a crucial economic fulcrum and civilisational engine at the heart of the ancient and early medieval worlds. He spoke about his new work on a recent episode of Grand Tamasha, a weekly podcast on Indian politics and policy co-produced by HT and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Dalrymple spoke with host Milan Vaishnav about the reasons the Indosphere has been obscured from history, the alluring narrative of the Sino-centric "Silk Road", and Buddhism's extraordinary journey around the world. The two also discussed the deep penetration of the Hindu epics into Asia, India's scientific and mathematical discoveries, and whether an Indian mindset of cultural absorption and synthesis can be recovered. During the show, Dalrymple elaborated on the forgotten Indosphere and its multiple legacies. He described how he began to bring together reams of disparate studies when he was hunkered down in his Delhi-area library during the pandemic. "What suddenly came to me is a very startling revelation of quite how wide, in so many spheres of life, the influence of India was," he recounted. "And a lot if it comes in the early period between the time of Ashoka, around 250 BC, until the foundations of the different Turkish sultanates in India in the 12th century." The author noted that between those two dates, "you've got about 1400 years when India is exporting not just religions like Hinduism and Buddhism, not just intellectual ideas like mathematics, zero, and place value in numerals, but a whole range of art, architecture, mythology, theology, stories of a million different Sanskrit classics". As he researched for the book, Dalrymple was continuously surprised by India's reach over wide swathes of the world - from Siberia to Sumatra. "These ideas spread out over a wide area, so much so that you find Sanskrit being used as the language of diplomacy, of courtly language, and of poetry, all the way from Kandahar in Afghanistan to Bali or the shores of Japan." He stated that while is something which Indians are "sometimes vaguely aware of", he lamented that "the rest of the human race is not". According to Dalrymple's narrative, the influence of the Indosphere began to slowly wane in the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries. The timing is somewhat ironic because it was during this period that Indian scientific and mathematical ideas were quickly catching hold from Europe to the Middle East. According to the author, two factors destroyed the self-confidence of Indian civilisation. The first is a series of Turkish-Islamic sultanates across India that reach as far as south as Madurai by the 14th century and the equally important, but less well known, is what the Mongols did. "The Mongols come and are fended off by the Khaljis. But, you get a hostile border in Punjab separating the Mongol world from the Indic word, cutting India off from the old trade routes going north," he explained....