Was ancient India the world's forgotten superpower? | William Dalrymple | Deja Vu

0:00 Whenever you look at a phone or a computer keyboard, and you see those numerals, that is an Indian invention. In just four, five jumps, you get from Renaissance Milan with Leonardo da Vinci to Piero della Francesca in Tuscany, Fibonacci in Algeria, al-Khwarizmi in Baghdad, and then Aryabhata and Brahmagupta in early India. But we are not taught this. Our history's like a map, you know, if you if you don't understand history, you're like someone stuck on a mountain without knowing which way to go, where you've come from, where you can go.

0:36 And history allows you to understand where you are and who you are and and what your potential is. >> If you went to school in a Western country, I'm willing to bet you were taught about Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Marco Polo, Pythagoras, and Plato, titans of history who shaped the world in their image. But were you taught about Porus, king of the Punjab, who fought off Alexander the Great on the back of elephants and lost?

1:03 But Alexander was so enchanted by his bravery, he reinstated him as his deputy, depicting their historic clash on the back of ancient Greek coins. Or Ashoka the Great, who spread Buddhism across the world and grieved for those he conquered. Or the mathematician and astronomer who invented the concept of zero, paving the way for every technological advancement that followed. If you haven't, then ask yourself why not? What would happen if we understood the role India played not only in commerce, but philosophy, art, food, and mathematics? How would that change not only the way that we view the ancient world, but the way that we see our world today? My name is Muhammad Hassan, and this is Deja Vu.

1:48 >> >> My guest today is one of the greatest historians of our time, author, broadcaster, and podcaster William Dalrymple. He is the author of The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World. William, welcome to Déjà Vu. >> Very nice to be invited. Thank you. >> I'm really curious about the body of work, the incredible, prolific work that you have done over the course of your career, which has covered, almost every, it seemingly, aspect of of human, story and and human, journey so far.

2:28 >> Not true, but but thank you for that. >> That is That is the impression that certainly when I listen to your Empire podcast, which everyone should listen to, that is definitely the impression that I get. congratulations, you've you've been going for 2 years now. >> We began 2 years and we just crossed 90 million downloads in those 2 years, which is we're nearing 100, exactly. >> One of the things that you have done so well, is tell the story of India in a way that hasn't been told in the Western lens, as clearly and as colorfully as you have.

2:59 And of course, you live in India, your family live there, you have, deep roots there now. What is it about India that fascinated you as a storyteller? >> I went to India not as a storyteller. I went to India really just as a traveler, as as millions of other kids do with a backpack, aged 18. and I had led an unusually sheltered life. I hardly left Scotland before going to India. I had I had few trips to Italy, a few to France, but I was really phenomenally untraveled. And I think arriving in India through a whole series of accidents. I'd actually wanted to go and dig in in Syria and Iraq was my initial which I'm quite glad was not given the subsequent >> You know, most normal people don't have that impulse when they're 18 years old to go digging in Syria.

3:47 >> I I was thrilled from very early on by archaeology, and that was my first great love. And my first trip to London, because I was brought up in very remote rural Scotland. My first trip to London was to go and see the Tutankhamun exhibition in your from your native soil, mama. >> I'm honored. >> and that and I remember just being as dazzled by London as I was by Tutankhamun, because I I'd never seen double-decker buses before. And then this room that was completely dark but for the gold death mask. And thinking, "God, this is This is what I want to do.

4:19 I want to be an archaeologist." so I ended up going with a friend to India. So it was a real sort of one of those sliding door moments when you know you you could have done something completely different with your life. I ended up going to India, and I've lived there ever since. I had my 18th birthday in the wonderful ruined city of Hampi. I went swimming in the Tungabhadra River that morning having slept rough in a temple. And I just remember thinking, "Yeah, this is where I want to spend my life." You know, I'd never had a chance to travel on with a friend.

4:49 but without parental supervision or without teachers or you know that to be completely free for 9 months to just do your own thing. Living on an incredibly small budget of 35 rupees a day, which wouldn't even get you a packet of biscuits today. and by the time that that 9 months was up, I knew I wanted to write about and to live in India. And I had no idea whether I could write at that point, but I had an idea for a book on Delhi, which eventually became City of Djinns. Became my second book in the end.

5:21 and India's been a very generous host to me. I've had many different careers there over the course of 40 years. I've been a foreign correspondent. I've been a >> >> festival director. I've been a photographer. I've been a writer, a travel writer. but for the last 25 years I've mainly been a historian. And that has been the most fulfilling and exciting career and the one that I really love. >> So the the passion with which you speak is so evident and alive in your latest book, The Golden Road.

5:53 And not just passion, but a kind of frustration about a great I think wrong that you feel has been done to India's history. >> Correct. >> Why do you think that is? >> I should say that I came to The Golden Road after writing for 20 years a series of four books about colonialism. >> Mhm. >> which would have surprised, I think, my younger self because into ancient history. >> Mhm. >> Yeah. Tutankhamun, the Assyrians, this was the kind of stuff I was dreaming about when I was a teenager.

6:24 And I think my younger self would have been very surprised that I would spend 20 years on this later period >> Mhm. >> as as the 18th and 19th century, which these four books on the East India Company were about. But I did those with a friend called Bruce Wannell, who was my key to accessing these very arcane Persian documents. India was the official court language in India was Persian right up until the mid-19th century.

6:56 >> Mhm. >> And very few people, very few historians even in India, can really read scribal Persian from that period. It's The shorthand and so on is often Even if you can read a a Persian newspaper today, >> Mhm. >> an 18th century Persian document written in scribal shorthand is really quite serious >> >> thing to read. And I had a friend called Bruce Wannell who could read this stuff like you and I can can read The Guardian or whatever, you know. He He He had amazing facility for languages, not only Urdu and Persian, but Pashtun and and every European language. He was extraordinary.

7:31 And he died of pancreatic cancer just after the fourth and final one of of that quartet, The Anarchy, was published. And for me that was very much a the end of 20 years work. The books got published in a box set as the company quartet. And I realized I was free in a sense to write about what I'd always originally been interested in which was the ancient history. And the particularly the story of how Indian civilization which which is such an enormous force in the early history of Asia.

8:10 How that transformed the world around it. >> Because you never think about ancient India the way that you think about ancient Greece or ancient Egypt or >> Exactly that. And we should but we don't. And you know the reason we think about so much the influence of ancient Greece is because the colonial Europeans took Greece and brought it to the rest of the world that educated people were expected to know Greek and Latin and and so in America and in Australia and and in all the other colonized countries names like Pythagoras or Archimedes became familiar figures.

8:46 But Indian mathematicians who were the equal if not the greater minds such as Aryabhata or Brahmagupta completely unknown outside India today. Even now you go to when I was taking the golden road on a book tour around universities in America and and Britain, you know, guys with PhDs in mathematics would not have heard of Aryabhata or Brahmagupta because no one teaches this stuff. But the thesis of the book which I think has been largely accepted is that for the classical period talking about really the first to the 12th century. So it's end of the classical period beginning of the medieval period.

9:26 India is this astonishing generator of ideas. Most obviously and initially religious ideas. So Buddhism is born in India. The Buddha is born actually over the border in Nepal, but has his enlightenment in modern Bihar. He preaches his first sermon in Sarnath in Uttar Pradesh. And from India or from the Gangetic plain, these ideas emanate outwards as far as Japan.

9:56 >> Mhm. >> As far as Korea, Southeast Asia, or Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, Sri Lanka, but also up through China to what's now Uzbekistan, Afghanistan. And somehow that process has big sort of twisted to being the story of the spread of Buddhism along the Silk Road. and there's a brief period under one particular empress, Empress Wu Zetian, when the Taoists and the Confucians are demoted and the Buddhists are placed above them in the court hierarchy. So, Indian religion often dominated at court by Indian-trained monks from the great Indian university of Nalanda are the important people in the Chinese court.

10:45 >> You describe this as the height of Indian thought. >> Yeah, absolutely. It's from 7th century to me, which is later I think than many Indians realize cuz I think Indians when they think about their ancient civilization often imagine it's the ancient Vedic period and they go back into the kind of myths of time and they imagine rishis sitting in forests coming up with brilliant ideas. And certainly the Vedas are very early and and and there are these rishis that had these profound philosophical insights. But the period when Indian ideas are conquering the rest of the world and Sanskrit and Prakrit, these Indian languages, are spreading across Southeast Asia. That period is rather later. It's the 6th, 7th, 8th century AD.

11:26 and then there's a whole other body of work which people in the West are completely unaware of, which is Indians India's extraordinary contribution to science and mathematics. And you know, whenever you look at a phone or computer keyboard, you see those numerals. That is an Indian invention. Zero and those numbers. Now, in Europe and America, we call those those numbers Arabic numbers because we got them from the Arabs. It's not an unreasonable name for Europeans to call it, but >> Which we are >> You guys >> Shouldn't take the credit for it.

12:01 >> know that they came from India and in many sources they're called Hindi numbers in in in in many Arab countries. and you guys certainly transformed them and took them out around the world, but you did not invent them. They came to India and there's a whole history of how they arrived initially in Baghdad. there there are these extraordinary viziers. the Barmakids, one of whom Jafar. >> I wanted to ask you about this. This is the story of Jafar. Please tell me.

12:30 >> It's a great story. It's a great story. So, everyone that's ever watched that Disney Aladdin has knows Jafar. He's the slightly dark-skinned guy who has is a snappy dresser, has the parrot on his shoulder, and is slightly the villain of Aladdin. >> More than slightly. >> Yeah, more than that. He's the villain of but he's a historical character. It's not just a Disney invention. Jafar is the companion of Harun al-Rashid in the Arabian Nights. And the two of them were the great friends, used to run They used to go in disguise. They were the from the court, but they used to dress as ordinary ordinary guys, go out in disguise into the streets of Baghdad, and drink, and get up to all sorts of mischief.

13:18 and Jafar becomes the last of the great Barmakid viziers. And his family are Buddhist abbots from originally Balkh in Afghanistan and which was in the zone of Indian influence. And he grew up in a family that were masters of Indian mathematics. His grandfather had trained in Kashmir, which was the center of Indian, higher philosophy and mathematics at this period.

13:49 And they initially come to prominence because they are the the Indian accountants. They're running the books. And they're so good at the books because they've got these this clever Indian number system, which is much better than the previous number systems. And they've got a zero, which you don't want to see at the at the bottom of your, checkbook. So, they, as soon as they come to power, they bring the books of the two great masters of early Indian mathematics, who are Aryabhata, who found the exact distance from the Earth to the Moon, the Earth to the Sun, the exact circumference of the Earth, the fact that the Earth goes around the Sun, all this a thousand years before Galileo.

14:31 And, he's an extraordinary figure and then his work gets taken on a little bit later by Brahmagupta. And Brahmagupta takes an idea that's been around in the Middle East already, which was the idea of zero. But the Babylonians and the Egyptians saw zero as an absence, as something between positive and negative, which was something that was not there. Brahmagupta realizes that zero is a number with its own powers and qualities. And he writes definitions of zero such as it's the number you have when you take a number from itself.

15:08 And from that, you get binary, you get place value, tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands. And it opens up the whole higher world of mathematics. And once these books are successfully translated a generation or two after they've arrived into Arabic they are translated by a figure a guy who comes from what's now Uzbekistan Khiva which then was known as Khwarazm and the guy who comes from Khwarazm is called Al-Khwarizmi.

15:39 Al-Khwarizmi who is probably a native Persian speaker in Baghdad operates in Arabic and he translates these various doesn't more than translate because he mixes Aryabhata and Brahmagupta's insights with a little bit of Greek and and and other important Greek thinkers and he comes up with a book which is called the book of calculation and completion by balancing and it's got this long title in Arabic and it's such a long title that people just know it by nickname which is algebra.

16:19 And algebra is our word algebra and his name Al-Khwarizmi becomes our word algorithm the the key quality of the tech bros you know it's such a contemporary such a contemporary thing but that that those two words algebra and algorithm come from the meeting of Indian thought and Islamic thought in Baghdad in the 9th century. And it spreads very rapidly through the Islamic world from Sindh and the Indus right through the Islamic heartlands right through North Africa right up into Islamic Spain by this period.

16:56 It's reached Christian monks in the monastery of Ripoll outside Barcelona just over the border of Al-Andalus into Christian Europe. but actually it doesn't really take off even then in Europe. Europe is still using Latin numbers XV1 LXV CCM all this stuff. I mean if you and I if I tried to give you my mobile phone number in Latin numbers, we'd be here until the end of this interview. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I would get lost and you would get lost.

17:26 >> and I misplace somewhere. >> Exactly. And astonishingly, Europe clings to these right up until the 12th century. And the guy who transforms the way this is suddenly gets to Europe as late as the 12th century is a young man who is brought up in what's now Algeria. He's an Italian and his dad runs the Italian trading center in in the town of Bougie. And the Italians from Pisa come here, they set up their base, and he's educated there.

18:01 And when he goes back to Pisa, he finds that all his friends are still struggling with MZV, XVL, and all this sort of stuff. And he says, "Guys, I've got a much better system." And he writes a book called the Liber Abaci, the book of numbers. And that guy is Fibonacci. >> Wow. >> So, Fibonacci takes this number system from Algeria, where it had become you know, the common way of doing numbers and mathematics across the Islamic world, but he happened to pick it up in his education in Algeria.

18:34 Brings it to Italy, and it comes to the the attention of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II. He's totally up for this sort of new way of doing numbers that are so much more efficient. And this becomes the basic mathematical text for the Renaissance. Mm. It's picked up in Florence. Piero della Francesca, one of the greatest of all the Renaissance painters, writes three treatises on it. On it. One about perspective, how you know, and that's the basis of the whole Renaissance painting revolution. But another one Well, actually, all three get taken on Piero Piero death. these treatises on Fibonacci's Liber Abaci. He takes it up to Milan. So, you get in just four five jumps from Renaissance Milan with Leonardo da Vinci to Piero della Francesca in Tuscany, Fibonacci in Algeria, al-Khwarizmi in Baghdad, and then Aryabhata and Brahmagupta in in early India. But, we are not taught this. We do not know this story.

19:40 The Indians don't know the story. It's been forgotten, and it's No one disputes this. None of the historians, you know, have any problem with this, but it's somehow it isn't a story which has made it out into the world which people tell. >> And what's really surprising to me reading this book is that how interconnected the ancient world is. And how I mean, there's there's there's something that really just caught me in my tracks, which is the idea that there were Indian peppers found on the the the the embalmment and the entombment of Ramses II >> Yeah.

20:15 >> in in 1200 BCE, and that Indian jewels were used in the tools that built the pyramids. This is going back so far, and that presents India as not only a cultural or religious hub for so many ideas, but an economic one. >> Correct. >> One that continues for so long from the ancient world into the modern one. What what is this role that India plays and continues to play, and why do we not know about it?

20:49 >> So, two very different questions. So, first of all, why is India play such a role? Partly because India has always been a very populous and rich country. I think in the 20th century in the post-colonial period, India came for the first time in history to be seen as a poor country. >> Mhm. >> Which it's now sort of, you know, the the new India is changing that >> now. >> Rebranding. But when I was growing up, we thought of India as a place where there were famines, where there was leprosy, and and this kind of thing. But that was never the impression in early history. India was a rich country. It had massive exports.

21:24 And one of the lucky tricks of India, not only is it very rich in resources, not only has it got these incredible trading communities which go out and do these amazing journeys, which is why we have large Indian trading communities on the East Coast of Africa, and why we have them in why we have them in Southeast Asia and Burma and so on and Singapore. and this is helped by the wind system of India. Indian winds blow The monsoon blows outwards for 6 months, and then it blows in again for 6 months. No, I mean, in Scotland or in England, winds just blow in every crazy direction.

22:01 >> >> So I have to be living on an island, yeah. >> But in India, which is a country which is not known for order or for punctuality, the winds actually behave very well. And they And for 6 months they blow out, and then when the monsoon It's all It's all related to the heating and cooling of Tibet. So when Tibet freezes over, cold winds rake in. And when it thaws, the enormous Tibetan Plateau, warm winds blow out.

22:26 So that has created a wind system which allows, once you've worked out as a sailor, how to use the monsoon in the same way that a surfer can use the the the the the the waves of Hawaii to get these amazing surf. In this period, Indian sailors master the monsoon, and then they're turbocharged. As the wind with the monsoon behind them, these guys put up a sail and whoosh across the ocean and arrive in your country, Egypt, in 6 weeks.

22:55 >> 6 weeks. >> We think of it as a, you know, a very different part of the world. But if you have the monsoon behind you, it's a six-week voyage from either Kerala or Gujarat or the mouth of the Indus in Sindh through the Red Sea to the Red Sea coast to well, you guys all go on holiday in Sharm el-Sheikh, but Berenice and Myos Hormos were the two Roman ports. And then there was a kind of four or five-day crossing of the sand to the Nile.

23:22 And then you loaded all your goods onto a boat in the Nile that would go up to Alexandria. And then many of them would then be shipped on to Italy. but this was a major hub of exports from India in the classical period. Everyone knows the story of Antony and Cleopatra and Cleopatra puts the asp to her breast and and dies. Rome absorbs Egypt and from that period the Roman Empire has a doorway back doorway to India.

23:54 And it's literally just six weeks. You can make the journey in a single season. You can sail, sell your goods, go to Alexandria, cash in your chips, do some sightseeing, go and see a show, >> >> visit the pyramids, >> support the local economy. >> And then you can be back when the monsoon changes directions and and get home in time for the end of the sailing season. So that was a very regular thing and what's interesting is that the Romans were anxious that all their gold was beginning to bucket into Indian pockets because what they were buying from India was not essentials. These were top luxury goods. They were the Hermes scarves, the fancy aftershaves, the Japanese whiskey of its day, the sort of stuff you lose all your money in a duty-free shop buying it when you were stuck on the way to Cairo wherever you were going.

24:46 And >> were those things? What What are luxury items in ancient Rome? >> Ivory, elephants and tigers for the Colosseum, cotton goods, silks, and silks came to Rome from India. They didn't buy them along the Silk Road. There was no contact at all in the Roman period as far as we know directly with China. Things got shunted first to the the the coast of India and then from there to to Egypt and from Egypt then on to Rome.

25:16 >> Because this is the major contention in your book is that is that you are taking a sledgehammer to the idea that we know today of the Silk Road being this ancient trade route that has always existed. >> Yeah, I did dispute that the Silk Road was a crucial thing at various points, but I think it's been some popular versions of that notion have got it wrong in two fronts. First of all, the idea that it was always there.

25:39 In reality, it was a big deal for example during the Mongol period when the Mongols blast a hole through the middle of Asia and you could go from Chang'an from modern Xi'an overland in as Marco Polo does in 1271. He crosses from Venice to to Jerusalem and from Asia Minor he goes right across to Mongolia. But for most of history Persia and first Rome then the Byzantines were at war. So there was a hostile land border that was very difficult to cross. Often you were This was you know the Great War of Antiquity.

26:13 And it was just easier to get in the get in the boat and and sail round it than it was to try and cross two hostile frontiers. And you can fit more in a boat than you can on a camel. You know, you can you can if you have these big Roman trading vessels could had were enormous and capacious and you could put all the clothes, all the pepper, all the cotton, all the silk, all the tigers, all the elephants.

26:37 They had special elephant transports. and I went on holiday to Sicily and there's actually a mosaic at a place called Piazza Armerina that shows Romans hunting tigers and elephants in India for transportation to Egypt and you see them being unloaded and then shipped on to to Rome. So this was a whole trade route that you know the scholars have always known about but somehow it hasn't had the the the propulsion that Silk Road has had.

27:10 And I think the Chinese have been very clever in working that. The Chinese have built a reality which is the modern Belt and Road and that does exist. And and they've used in a sense they've enhanced a story to create a modern reality. India so far has not done anything comparable with its premier place in antiquity. Most Indians aren't aware of it. Most Indians don't I mean Indians when they want to be proud about something on the world stage they talk about yoga but far more important than yoga is the is the numbers we all use every day. This is the basic scientific idea, zero. These are major contributions to the whole of humanity.

27:55 If I was in charge of India's PR I would immediately put out some advertising campaign on buses in London. We invented zero. We we are our numbers are the ones you use. This is this you know this is one of the fundamental building blocks of modern civilization. >> But this is the the really confusing part is that you know this tremendous wealth that is situated in India that spreads across the whole world and doesn't even stop at the end of antiquity continues on and on and on up until the East India Trading Company which you read about in The Anarchy share takes shows up and takes over it's still the one of the richest parts of the world.

28:31 >> So the reason that all these colonial powers first the Portuguese then the Dutch then the English the French the Danes a bunch of others like the Swedes also less successfully but they're there. The reason they're going there is this is like what the Bay Area is today just like when you go to the California and you see there's the headquarters of Hewlett Packard, there's the headquarters of Apple. >> Many of these companies are now run by Indians.

28:53 >> And many >> And very accomplished ones. Almost all of them. >> >> just like that was the case then, so there was this incredible rich tradition of trade and manufacturing in India. >> Mhm. >> We don't think of India and China as being in historically these massive producers, but they were. So much so that there's deindustrialization in Mexico in the 18th century because the the the the the Indian cotton is so competitive. Ev- everyone wants to buy this stuff.

29:32 And because the Mughals who run India at this point are ultimately nomads in Central Asia, they don't have a navy. And it's the Brits who get find their opening selling Indian goods around the world. And ultimately, they then double their money by selling another Indian product, which is opium. >> Mhm. >> They grow opium in India, and they sell it in China. They buy tea in China. They sell the tea in India, in Europe, in Britain, and in America. And it's East India Company tea that the American patriots are dropping into Boston Harbor at the Boston Tea Party.

30:13 >> Right, so the protest against the English monarchy is actually >> It's actually a protest against the East India Company. Right. And we again, we've forgotten this. So, the British, a lot of the British wealth in the 18th century, when you see one of those Jane Austen movies with the whole lot of women in bonnets and some handsome guy in a in a bree- wading through the wading through a lake to to to bring something to his girl.

30:39 that's a lot of those houses are built with the profits of trade and also ultimately looting of India. Also, if it's on the West Coast, the profits of slavery in the Caribbean slave trade. Those are the two original sources of Britain's wealth. We then have the Industrial Revolution because the cotton that's grown in the in in the in the West Indies is brought to Liverpool and Manchester and and milled and the the Industrial Revolution doubles, triples, quadruples Britain's wealth. But it all begins the capital for the Industrial Revolution begins with slavery and the looting of India.

31:17 >> I mean, the Koh-i-Noor diamond of course is a very metaphorical symbol of that. >> jewel in the crown in every sense and and it's it's I I wrote a a short book. This is my first collaboration with Anita Anand with whom I do the podcast. And it's this extraordinary story cuz the Koh-i-Noor diamond, which is the symbol of all the pain of colonialism, the reason that Indians and Pakistanis and Bangladeshis and Afghans and Persians all feel this is it's become a symbol of everything that Europeans did bad to them.

31:49 >> Mhm. >> And why is it still sitting in the Tower of London, they say? And it brings bad luck wherever it goes. Each one of its owners has met a a crappy end and and the most recent example of that was in King Charles's triumphant visit to Trump when he managed to lecture Trump about foreign policy without Trump seeming to realize. The one thing that tripped him up was the Koh-i-Noor diamond which Mam Danni brought up in New York. Again, always the Koh-i-Noor, always bringing bad luck to everyone.

32:18 >> So, then that comes to the obvious question and which which you pose in the book and and I I want your your your honest answer. Why is it that India is overlooked? Why do we not know that India was at the heart of the global trade system for such a long time that's given us all of this wealth and these are great ideas. How is it that this entire chapter could be overlooked? >> Colonialism is the short answer.

32:46 In the mid-19th century, we had this guy Macaulay who wrote this famous minute on education. And he in that he says, "And this becomes the kind of government doctrine. A single shelf of a good English library is worth the entire native literature of India and Arabia." >> Wow. >> So, Britain, which initially, you know, Europe absorbs these Indian ideas at the Renaissance, but then forgets that they've come from India. And Macaulay talks about Indian learning being about seas of treacle and and mountains of butter, and he says it's all nonsense. We need to read the Greek classics and learn good European science.

33:26 and India sort of believes that in a sense. India becomes partly colonized in its own in its own sensibility. It it it comes to believe the superiority of Europe, which Europe tells it is there, and forgets all the extraordinary things it's given to the world. And to an extraordinary extent, I think India has failed in a way that China has succeeded in telling its story. The Chinese have built the Belt and Road on a confidence in their past.

33:57 And the Chinese will tell you that they invented porcelain and the book and printing and gunpowder and all these amazing inventions, the water wheel, the long list of Chinese inventions, and they came down the Silk Road to Europe. First to the Islamic world, then to Europe. But India, for some reason, has not had the same message, in a sense. It hasn't told its story as one of the great originators of both philosophical and scientific thought.

34:29 So, Buddhism, this incredible literature of Sanskrit, the whole world of Hinduism and Hindu myth. These are all stories which are about India or Sri Lanka, but they're told all over Southeast Asia. The Mahabharata is all over Angkor Wat. The largest Hindu temple in the world is not in India, it's in Cambodia. >> Mhm. >> but Indians are not taught this in their own textbooks yet. I think it'll happen. and there's an extraordinary I think there's an extraordinary failure on the part of India to celebrate its own civilization in sense that they don't invest or they're only just beginning now to invest in new museum. Most of the major sites of ancient India have had no recent archaeology.

35:23 and only fitful colonial and a little bit of post-colonial archaeology. There's so much out there. And you go to countries like Turkey. Erdogan, for all his faults, has invested heavily in promoting the civilization of Anatolia. You go to small cities like Gaziantep or to Urfa. And they have brand new spanking museums with modern television screens and beautifully lit cases. Go to India, they have brand new airports everywhere, but the museums are crappy 1950s things that are falling apart and badly lit and the strip lights haven't been changed for 30 years and it all looks a mess.

36:03 And I think India has such an opportunity to tell its story to the world in a way that it hasn't yet really done. And I I I don't know why that is, but it's a India's been independent for 75 years now. Maybe the shadow of colonialism lingered on. And and it cuz you can't throw off your oppressor, but maybe his hold on your mind lingers for a while and and and you know, there was that generation of Indians that were more English than the the English and would go to their clubs like the Jimkhana Club and and and so on and and that took a hold for a while, but I think it's changing now. There is more self-confidence.

36:41 >> Tremendous success. and tremendous pressure. I would I would hate to be a young Indian now with that to aspire to. But as you said, you know, there does seem to be something changing and that could be with the economic resurgence of India as one of the great emerging economies in the world. There is a sense that India's history is being reconsidered specifically it's colonial history. >> is a more complicated process and there's a lot of rewriting of history that I would not always agree with. For example, the whole Mughal period of history is is now edited out of the textbook.

37:18 >> Right, because that to some people in India is also considered an invasion that that stunted India's growth. >> You don't You know, history is full of good and bad stuff, but you don't just not teach it. there's all sorts of horrors in in the past, but you've got to teach what happened. And and the reality was that India was a global power under the Mughals. The Mughals controlled not just modern India, but modern Pakistan, Bangladesh, most of Afghanistan, a sliver of Iran.

37:47 and they were the largest economy in the world and I think when Indians today think of the Mughals, they think of a Bollywood movie with Aishwarya Rai lying on some silken bed with Hrithik Roshan dropping mangoes into her mouth. What they forget is that all that wealth came from a the most successful economy in the region. You know, wealth comes from somewhere. In the case of the Mughals, a lot of it was from textiles and exports.

38:15 and there's a lot for Indians to be proud of in the in the in the in the Mughal period as well as in ancient history. India was a major world power right through until the colonial period in the 18th century. So, I think, you know, history has to be taught with nuance. And not everyone you don't have to like the regimes. You don't have to fall in love with the people who are ruling, but you do need to teach history as it happened.

38:40 >> Mhm. So, now we are by all accounts emerging from a period where European powers had dominated for centuries. Not only in terms of power, but in terms of trade, in terms of how the world communicates with each other. And now we're at a moment where we're seeing the emergence, the re-emergence of powers like China and India and Brazil and Nigeria and all of these very old civilizations are are coming back to the fore. And there's a question of what does a multipolar world look like if we are coming out of the hegemony of the US and and when you are looking at this, when you are looking at what the ancient world looked like, what does that world look like to you?

39:29 >> So, I think the thing to focus on is that for most of history India and China between them have manufactured about 70% of world goods. The one exception to that, the the freak is just the 150 year or 200 years between 1750 and the British leaving India in 1947. For those 200 years, because of a military revolution in Europe, European arms were able to defeat cavalry armies in Egypt, in India, in China.

40:02 And there was this freak moment when Europe, which is largely, I mean, northern Europe is pretty peripheral to world manufacture for most of history, but suddenly becomes through freakish circumstances the center of things for 200 years. What we're seeing now is just the reversion to the old equilibrium. >> Mhm. >> with with China's already there. China is the second power in the world already. That's that's an established fact. India is slower. It's the elephant stumbling on, but it's got its momentum up and it's overtaken Britain.

40:40 And it will overtake Japan this decade. So, by the end of this century, it's a three-horse game. >> Mhm. >> There's America, China, and India. Which of those three it's hard to tell. >> Mhm. >> China is the one I would have put my money on 10 years ago, but they've slowed down now. And they're getting an aging population. India's currently going through some economic trouble, but I think has a real momentum now.

41:14 America, people have been predicting the end of American power for a long time now. And the economy is still surprisingly robust. India's growing at 7% this year. Europe is not getting poor, but Europe is not growing. Britain in particular is definitely not growing. and so we're reverting to that older world where it Asia is the future.

41:44 The big question is America. How far are Trump's antics going to be produce a long-term decline? >> Mhm. >> So, it's an open I think it's an open open game who's going to be the dominant power by the end of this century. Could be India. Could be China. Could be America. >> And I wonder you spoke about India needing to almost rebrand itself, rebrand its its history, and and and figure out how to present itself to the world again.

42:14 and I read your work, when I read about India's history, it tells of so much It's not a single story. It's not a single moment in time. >> and that's its strength. That I I don't think that's always realized in India itself. In India, there's now a very strong Hindu nationalist government that that brands India as as Hindu land. I My personal view, which people may disagree with, is that the richness of Indian civilization has been its openness to outsiders.

42:43 The great mathematics of Aryabhata and Brahmagupta didn't come out of thin air. They were building on Babylonian ideas, Greek ideas, ideas from Persia and Egypt, which were brought in and then improved and taken forward. Just like in Harvard today, you know, you're bringing in the best of the world, the greatest talent, and creating new scientific advances which find their way to Silicon Valley. Ancient India is like that. >> Mhm. >> So, I think when Indian nationalists sometimes view ancient India, they imagine it as this sort of area this sort of Tupperware filled with a pure ancient India, but it's Actually, it's its openness to outside ideas and willingness to discuss them and improve on them that leads to the great achievements of Indian civilization.

43:31 And I think it would be a great mistake for India to sort of proudly turn its back on everything else. For example, an example of that is English, I think, has been a great of great use to India. And used not not in preference to Hindi or to Bengali or Malayalam, but many Indians are multilingual. even, you know, quite uneducated people will have four or five languages, which they will speak perfectly. That is a great asset. And so, to build on that openness, to build on this complicated inheritance that has a a thick layer of Persian and Islamic culture, another layer of of British colonialism. Now, you may not like this, but it's it's provided the richness of much of Indian civilization.

44:21 It has it's the you know, the the Indian the the Islamic Indian era produces, for example, the sitar, which are the tabla, the the the great music that we immediately associate with India. The encounter with English has led to a whole generation of Indians who now take over English companies and American companies, as we were talking earlier. Also, it leads to generation of Indian writers who win the Booker Prize and the Pulitzer every year.

44:51 >> Mhm. >> Regularly. so, these are things which pragmatically used are of great use to India. And I I'm a great optimist for India. There are there there are, you know, minor economic problems at the moment. There's also, you know, potential problems with the the way that it's minorities in in India are treated and and whether they can be will be driven against the wall. But, I think all this the pluralism of Indian tradition is such a rich tradition, the way that it can take all these influences that have come into the country and use them. If used wisely and led well, India could easily be the most powerful country in the world by the end of the century.

45:40 >> And this is a lesson that I take for all of us and how we see the world today is that you look back at this ancient period of extraordinary trade and exchange of ideas, and it makes one realize that we've always lived in a globalized world. >> That's certainly true. I think the more you study ancient history, the more you realize how much the world is passing through great swaths of of territory. I mean, the place I'm writing about at the moment, for example, is Gaza.

46:12 >> Mhm. >> and today we think of Gaza as this catastrophe, this this place which has been leveled flat. But by Byzantine Gaza was the place where ancient Gaza was the place where all the perfumes of Arabia, the incense, the frankincense, the myrrh, and also some of the Indian trade and spices were coming through from the Red Sea through Petra. It would reach the sea at Gaza. And Gaza became second only to Alexandria as the center of learning. It was the big place you sent your kids if you were a posh Roman in the in the fourth, fifth, sixth century. You'd send your kids to Gaza to be educated.

46:49 And there were these extraordinary figures like Procopius of Gaza and John of Gaza. there was a school of rhetoric which was the world leader. that's my new That's my new area of study. I'm I'm doing a history of the Palestinians which is such contentious territory, but I think >> And this is interesting because it's not a history of Palestine as a land, it's a history of the Palestinians themselves. >> a history of who these people are because obviously it's a highly contentious and disputed matter. Golda Meir famously said that there is no such thing as the Palestinians. But modern DNA proves that to be nonsense. The history of the Palestinians is this rich, rich history. People I don't think realize that the first references to the Peleset, which is the root behind the word that that that became Palestine.

47:31 The is in Egypt in the the temples of Medinet Habu in Luxor. Ramses the III. >> Mhm. >> He talks about defeating the Peleset. Now, the earliest reference to the Israelites is just a little before that, the Merneptah Stele. the Merneptah Stele. >> Mhm. >> Which is about 30 years earlier and out of the same moment of civilizational catastrophe which is called the Bronze Age Collapse. So, Israel and Palestine Palestine appears almost as twins conjoined at birth. They're within 20 in the great expanse of Middle Eastern history, those two names appear within about 20 years of each other.

48:10 >> Mhm. >> and have been locked often in conflict, but often have lived together very well. And that's what I'm writing about now. >> This is why we need to know our history. >> >> We need to know our history. We do. >> And this is why we're grateful to have great storytellers such as yourself. >> Thank you. >> you are one of the great storytellers of our time. And you are telling us a lot about what we need to understand about ourselves, so that not only do we know where we're coming from, but we know how to deal with each other in the present.

48:36 >> I think history's like a map. You know, if you if you don't understand history, you're like someone stuck on a mountain without knowing which way to go, where you've come from, where you can go. And history allows you to understand where you are and who you are and and what your potential is. >> William Dalrymple, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for being with us today.