Kerala Was The Center Of The Ancient World William Dalrymple Klf2026

TITLE: Kerala Was the Center of the Ancient World | William Dalrymple | KLF2026 CHANNEL: DC Books DATE: 2026-05-02 ---TRANSCRIPT--- Well, first of all, thank you all for coming out in the heat of the day. I commiserate with you. I have just come out of a 2hour lunch at Paragon and I have to say one of the great meals of my entire life. Over the next hour, I will praise many examples of Indian genius. But the muscles and prawn fry in Paragon uh are up there with area butters discoveries in astronomy uh and uh the invention of zero as a an example of human genius. So India is in general one of the parts of the world which very early on came up with profound answers to the basic questions that humanity has always asked of itself. What are we doing here? What is the purpose of life? What is this earth we inhabit? India is not alone in that. There are obviously other places, ancient Greece, ancient China for example, which also came up with their own answers to these questions. Where I think India is different and where India has missed out is that thanks to colonialism, the western world has trumpeted the Greek answers. to these questions. Pythagoras’s theorem, the discoveries of Archimedes and Sophocles and Plato, the philosophy of ancient Greece around the world. And in recent times, China has become very good at telling its story. No. Uh, nothing has done more for the Chinese version of its history than this idea of the Silk Road, which my generation very much grew up with. the idea that there was a motorway linking the South China Sea to the Mediterranean and that ideas like gunpowder, porcelain, the printing, these things passed from east to west and that we gained not only Chinese merchandise like silk and gunpowder and paper, but also that important and profound ideas traveled on this road from east to west.

This idea of the silk road as you can see on this map omits however something very important and that thing is the contribution of India. As you can see from this map the action in the silk road story takes place thousands of miles to the north in places like Saman Tash Kent and India in this map is only the Himalayas. There’s not even a port for the maritime silk road, the dotted line at the bottom to stop underneath. It is the contention of the golden road. My argument of the golden road is that this idea is for the classical period profoundly wrong. indeed close to a lie because in the classical period by which I mean from about 200 BCE to about 1100 CE it was not China that was the center of world trade and the diffusion of ideas it was India and it was not the overland routes through sent through Persia and Central Asia which was the method of transference. It was the sears and there could be nowhere more appropriate for giving this lecture than this wonderful festival on the beach in Kerala because if you actually look at the classical records, it is the sea roads beside us and specifically Kerala which is the major one of the major east west hubs.

The best proof of this is if you actually track east west trade with archaeological evidence. And perhaps the best way of doing that is to look at where Roman coins turn up. Now obviously Roman coins were most used in the Roman Empire. So we’d expect to see a heavy concentration in Italy, Greece, and so on around the Mediterranean. But where do they travel out from there? Do they follow this road, which is what you’d expect if the Silk Road was all it was cracked up to be? Where can you do that? Luckily, Oxford University has plotted such a map two years ago. And here’s the result. As you can see, the orange dots represent where a hundred or more Roman coins been found. As expected, they’re mainly in the Roman Empire, in Western Europe, and around the Mediterranean, and around the Black Sea. Perhaps more unexpected, is there a horizontal line of yellow coins, orange coins across the center of this map where the Silk Road is? No. Where do you find Roman coins outside the Roman Empire? Look at the bottom right hand corner of the map. very clearly massive concentration in Kerala also in uh slightly less so on the east coast and Sri Lanka Sri Lanka as important as Kerala that is the reality of classical trade and the more you look at the Silk Road as an idea the more it falls apart in the classical period now I’m very happy to accept that the Silk Road was an extremely important thing during the Mongol Empire Genghaskhan smashes through Asia in the 13th century. He destroys Persia. He destroys Baghdad. He conquers as far as the Mediterranean. And indeed in 1271, Marco Polo does travel on that route that we saw before.

If we can get the backward clicker working. Marco Polo does travel along that route in 1271 and in a matter of months reaches Zanodu Kublakhan’s stately pleasure tome but in the classical period it’s quite different it is the sears and it is India and when you look at the history of the silk road of the term the silk road you find that in fact it’s an idea that is only invented by a German geographer Baron von Richtoven in 1871. Marco Polo doesn’t talk about the Silk Road. No ancient Chinese source talks about the Silk Road. No ancient Roman source talks about the Silk Road. None of them. Because Rome did not know about the existence of China for nor did China know about the existence of Rome. There are vague rumors in the late Han period and in the later Roman Empire in both directions, but it was slightly here be dragons, a mythical place beyond the horizon that is very powerful. And we do not know of a single trade mission or a single diplomatic mission which traveled between Rome and China. However, the case with India is very different. Pliny, a Roman admiral of the first century, talks about India as the drain of all the precious metals in the world. As you can see on this map, why? Because the Roman aristocracy and the urban elite loved Indian luxuries, ivory, cotton, spices, special perfumes which were made in uh in India, nard, uh these were high value items which were sold at massive increase in value in the Roman Empire. And Pini attacks the rich Roman elite for spending too much money on Indian luxuries. Strao, his contemporary living in Alexandria, likewise describes fleets of 250 vessels at a time leaving the Red Sea coast of India. Oh, sorry, of Egypt. Look at the the Nile. You can see those that little orange tail running down from the North African coast and there’s a little orange tail following the Nile. People used to travel down the Nile across the desert and then it’s just a very short six-week journey from the Red Sea coast in Egypt to the coast of Kerala. And Roman ships were once bobbing off the coast of Calikat on a regular basis. It was just six weeks journey with the monsoon winds to the Roman Egyptian coast. While it was a matter of many months of dangerous travel overland through a hostile border with the Persian Empire, which was always at war with Rome and very difficult to make the overland route. But once sailors had discovered the how to use the monsoon winds, you could travel in June on the outward winds to Egypt. Then when the wi monsoon winds reverse, you travel back. You can make the whole journey there and back in a year with great ease. And thousands of your ancestors did this every year.

New excavations at Putinham at Cochin and at Bonik in Egypt have shown evidence of Roman and Indian sailors both sailing backwards and forwards with great ease. So what has happened is that in the last 40 years we have swallowed this idea of the silk road much of which has been propelled by Chinese state sponsorship and dare I say propaganda it’s a very attractive idea those two words silk road do an enormous amount of work it works at the level of the Netflix drama Marco Polo coorting with Mongol princesses it works at the level of a scholarship You now get studies, Chinese sponsored Silk Road uh professorships in universities and you now get geopolitical ideas built on this flimsy foundation. Xi pin has made the belt and road a reality based on this very dubious history and it’s my contention in the golden road that it is India’s turn now to say actually the big east west trade was from here and that the biggest port in India was Mazerus we need to recover the centrality of India and specifically Kerala in the history of east west relations.

So over the next 20 30 minutes I’m going to take you through what I think are the three big ideas that traveled on these roads. The first big idea is Buddhism. The second big idea is Hinduism and with it Sanskrit literature. The third big idea is Sanskrit mathematics and the idea of zero and Indian science and astronomy. So let’s quickly do a dash through these ideas. Number one, Buddhism. Because there are so few Buddhists in India today, India has not claimed Buddhism in the way that it perhaps should do. There’s a lot of noise made about the spread of Sanskrit and Hindu civilization. But Buddhism is in a sense orphaned because there are very few Buddhists today to be proud of it in this country. And yet arguably Buddhism is the most successful Indian philosophical idea ever. The first thing to be said is that the Buddha is a historical character. He lives in the mid-fury. He’s born in Lumbini, which today is just over the Indian border. I’m actually off there tomorrow. I’m going to Lumpini. Uh I’ll be there on Monday night. And the Buddha has his enlightenment in Boraya in Bihar. and he preaches her first sermon at Sarnat outside Veronasi in Uttar Pradesh. Now the weird thing is that Buddhism does not spread for 200 years. It’s only with the arrival of the emperor Ashoka and his conversion to Buddhism that Buddhism is suddenly projected outwards. And how once the emperor had decided to back the Buddhists, he sends out state missionaries which he calls Dharma ministers and they go right out not only through to South India and Sri Lanka but as far as Sirene in modern Libya where it says Magas on this map. We know from an inscription of Ashokas in Kandahar that his missionaries reached as far west as Libya.

And what you get quite suddenly by 150 B.CE is the spread of Buddhist monasteries like this one outside Punea. The spread of Buddhist art like the famous fresco in Ajanta. And particularly it’s Sri Lanka is the richest first conquest of Buddhist philosophy outside the Indian subcontinent. Sri Lanka, the king um of Sri of Anaradapura converts when the son of Ashoka Mahinda um brings the the new religion and he accepts it and the the kingdom converts and we have recently last year discovered Mahindra’s two years ago discovered Mint Mahinda’s very primitive stuper on the hill of Raja Gala. There’s an inscription saying this is the son of Ashoka buried here and Buddhism spreads out from this and becomes the center of the Buddhist mission. And what follows over the next 200 years is the single most powerful example of civilizational soft power in history. Without an arrow being fired, a sword being unshathed, or without a spear being thrown, Buddhism spreads not just south to Sri Lanka and through the Indian subcontinent, but up northwestwards through Pakistan, Gandara, Afghanistan, Usbekiststan, through Tibet, through Lassa to Dunwang, Mongolia, and beyond this map to Siberia, through the whole width of China, through the metropolis of Chiangan onto Korea and Japan down through Burma, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, as far as the Philippines. In 300 years, Buddhism spreads throughout the length and breadth of Asia and transforms it forever. There is no other example in world history I know of a philosophical idea spreading so fast and so irreversibly without any application of violence and without the state being involved. It is Indian Buddhist merchants who spread this and following the merchants you have these monasteries which act as caravanserise and as banks for the merchants. Indian monasteries in the early centuries lent money to merchants and they paid it back with interest and or give donations and so if you like greenwash their karma but this is something that should be every Indian should be proud of Christianity and to an extent Islam both spread with the benefit of state power and often with armies. Buddhism spreads entirely peacefully uniquely in world history.

And today when you go to Japan, you still see stupas, you still see Buddhist monks, you still see the same in Thailand, in Laos, in Cambodia. And with Buddhism comes a whole bedrock of Indian ideas. Ideas of secular time, ideas of geography, of jumbodudda, a whole world of prait literature and parley literature spreads with it and eventually Sanskrit too. And it spreads not just eastwards but also as we now know westwards. In the middle of the writing of this book, this Buddha’s head was discovered in Berinik in Egypt in a temple to the goddess Isis. It’s Gandaran in style. Its marble is from uh the Marmmorous Sea, not modern Turkey. The style is is Gandaran, but with strange look at the the sun beams coming out of the Buddha’s head. Not something we recognize. And the curls, the tortillini curls as the archaeologist called them on the Buddha’s head are made with a drill only in use in Alexandria. So we now know that Buddhism was a popular faith in ancient Egypt. There are other Buddhist remains been found in Alexandria. We have reference to Buddhist monks. So it raises the question if as we know in Kerala Christianity and Judaism spread from the Middle East to Kerala and St. Thomas and the Christian faith he brings arrives very early in Kerala then it’s equally plausible that Buddhism spreads in reverse from India to Egypt in that case can we ask a question given that Buddhist monasticism was 300 years old by this stage could it be that Buddhist monasticism is the root idea of Christian monasticism which begins Where? On the Red Sea coast in Egypt. St. Anthony of Egypt was the first Christian monk. The monastery of St. Anthony next to Bonikke where this was found is the first Christian monastery. We can’t answer that question yet, but we can ask the question.

And by the first century, this is the map. The Periplus of the Arthuran Sea sounds a complicated name, but it’s the actually just the title of what is really the lonely planet or the rough guide of the first century. It’s written by a Roman sailor and it charts the sea routes from Bonikke and Mas Horus called Muscle Harbor in this map. the dotted red lines past Aiden to the west coast of India and in particular to Mazerus just down this coast from here. The reason for the monsoon winds is to be found in the sheer scale of Tibet. Look in the north. Look at that white massive uh white space that is the Tibetan plateau. It freezes in winter and cold winds rake in. It thors in spring and warm winds blow out. These massive bellows act to turn the wind system of India. In a country not known for punctuality, the wind system was incredibly punctual. Every year it would reverse. Six months one direction, six months back. So if you’re a sailor in Calikat in the first century, you simply have to sit off the coast here, put up a sail and the winds will blow you out for six months and then for the next six months they will blow you back. So let’s say you are a sailor from Calikat. You go to Egypt. In six weeks you can get to Bonyke. You then go up the Nile. You go to Alexandria. You can see a show, visit the pyramids, buy goodies, visit the Alexandrian Library. You have to be back on the Red Sea coast 6 weeks later for the reverse winds to blow you back again. And according to Strao, fleets of 250 vessels at a time were passing along this coast and landing here full of gold from Rome. What were they buying? Oh, incidentally, we also shouldn’t leave Ethiopia out of the picture. You can see Axom and Adulus on this map. These were rich Ethiopian kingdoms. And we have Buddhist sculptures from Amaravati showing Ethiopian merchants and princes and courtiers arriving in India. So as well as the Romans from Egypt, imagine black Ethiopian merchants also arriving off this coast bringing with them the goods of Africa.

So this is the ve this is the document which allows us to put figures on all this. Economic historians love this document because it gives them the raw data with which they can make the calculations they need. And the Mazerius Papyrus, which is now in Vienna, but which turned up in uh in Alexandria, is simply a shipping invoice of the sort probably made in Calikat or Cochin port every day today. It tells you the contents of one container heading from Muzeris, Kochin to Alexandria in Egypt. What was in that container? Well, we also have a picture of the contents because many Roman sailors made this trip and in a villa in Sicily in Roman times we get this picture of the export goods of Kerala depicted in a mosaic in Sicily. In the center we have a yakshi representing personifying India. Now this is actually based on a kind of Kushan image but the Kushan image is meant to show the fertility of this woman is such that when she touches the tree at the top the tree bursts into bloom. You can see the flower at the top right of this. Now the Roman artist was looking further down the image I think and concentrating too hard on that because in his image the the ash is touching a tree and nothing’s happening. He’s just holding on to a tree. He’s missed the entire point of the picture. But this is crucial because she’s holding ivory. Behind her are strings of pepper. Still a big deal in Kerala today. She’s got silk around her her legs. And the perip doesn’t talk about China because the Romans didn’t know about China. But they say you buy silk in in barbaricum which is cind and Gujarat. That was where the Romans bought their silk. If China and Rome ever met, it was not on the silk road. It was in the ports of Gujarat. That’s where they bought their silk. And what’s interesting is you can actually see this woman’s leg through the silk. Now for the Romans, silk was a highly erotic garment. We know stories, for example, of Nero’s mistress, Lolina Polina, who used to turn up at parties in Rome, dressed in a single layer of transparent silk, basically showing everything off. And according to sources, she was wearing Indian diamonds in her hair, Indian garnets in her tummy button, and Indian pearls on her shoes. And in a nice sort of Punjabi touch, she used to bring the receipts to parties to show people how much they cost. So this is like, you know, wearing an Hermes scarf or a Louis Vuitton luggage. It’s it’s deliberately uh showing off the value of the luxury goods that you’re wearing.

And so what we have is a picture where the Romans were wearing Indian goods. Not only because they were uh they were attractive but because they were showoff items. This came all the way from India. And silk had the same was was for the Romans what I suppose Victoria Secret lgery is today. It was a basically it’s an erotic gift that you give your girlfriend. Uh and Plenny is hugely disapproving. He says no respectable woman would ever wear silk. What’s wrong with good English wool? Or good Roman wool rather. I’m turning him into an Englishman in my mind. Uh, Freudian slip. So, your Malu ancestors ripped off my European ancestors something rotten. They overcharged massively for their goods. And we know from the Mazerius papyrus that these goods were super expensive. Super expensive. uh and a single container, the single container in the Mazerius Paparis, if it made it to Alexandria, would have made that merchant one of the richest merchants in Rome in a single trip. So this was a highly profitable venture. so profitable that the Roman state charges, wait for it, 30% tariffs on the Red Sea coast to stop Indian uh goods being competitive. Uh and it seems it only drove the demand higher because they became more and more uh a symbol of high status and a symbol of wealth and a showoff symbol. So Trump was coughing copying Nero. The other item is the tigers and the lions on left and right. And this same mosaic has images of Romans in the Indian countryside with nets and with boxes capturing elephants and tigers to ship back to the circuses in Rome. And this was also super expensive luxury exotica that the Romans paid top dollar for. So we have to rethink all our ideas of east west trade. Forget China at this period.

We know from excavations in Pompei that Indian furniture full of again the slightly erotic figures uh was all over the Roman Empire. We also know of course that that like all trade it goes in two directions. These are luxury Alexandrian Greek glassear. On the left, we’ve got sort of Russell Crow as Gladiator. We’ve got the Ferros Lighthouse in the middle. And we’ve got some nice grape harvest taking place on the right. These luxury beakers were found under the American Air Force base in Bugram in Afghanistan. They arrived at the base of the Indis, pumped up the Indis through the Carbell River, and near Carbull is where they’re discovered. And this Roman trade coming in in the first and second century after Rome has conquered uh Egypt leads to huge influence in both directions. Below we have a Christian Coptic papyrus of Jesus and his disciples which is exactly the same iconography as above a Gandaran fresco of the Buddha and his disciples. Most importantly, early Buddhist art was an iconic. The Buddha was never shown as a human being. He was shown as the wheel of law on the right or a flaming pillar on the left or a stuper. But after Roman trade gets going in the first century, bingo, the Buddha turns up as a human figure dressed in a toga modeled on the god Apollo. And in the centuries to come, we get the whole richness of Gandaran art. Um, these very Roman looking faces that could be um, senators from the capital line museum in Rome are on the heads of statues found in Pashawa and Afghanistan in Gandara. Here we have on the left Augustus at the forum. Look how similar the drapery is to the Gandaran matria Buddhist. You can see how the uh one has influenced the other when you see them closely side by side.

And it is this ind roman influenced north Indian sculpture that goes up in the centuries to come into Afghanistan through sites like meak through Bameyan uh where the Buddhas were blown up by the Taliban. So into China this goes and by the third and fourth century the um Buddhism has become a massive thing in western China. We find increasingly that the Chinese are copying Gupta period Buddhas with these uh lines uh of the drapery which you get in in Gupta sculpture copied more crudely in China. And you get frescos and murals based on those of Ajanta Indian Gandavas and absuras flying over the domes of Chinese Buddhist temples. And the big boost comes in the fifth and sixth century when Buddhism begins to become an important thing in the Chinese capital in Changan and the courtiers begin to convert as well as the peasants. And the figure who is most important in this transmission is the Schwanzang on the right, the Chinese monk who walks over the Gobi, over the Tackle Mountain desert, through the Himalayas and goes all the way to Nanda, the great Buddhist university, which should be as famous worldwide as the library of Alexandria because the University of Nanda was the main center of education and learning and the biggest repository of books in all of Asia. Not only Schwanzang from China but monks from Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Somatra, Java, Thailand, Laos all came across the sea making many weeks and months of voyages to get to the site of Nanda in Bihar. And it seems that Nanda is the origin of what is still the basic plan of universities around the world which is a courtyard. Think of the the quads or courts of Oxford and Cambridge or Harvard or Yale. This plan started in Bihar, a courtyard with scholars rooms on four sides. And if you go to Nanda, only 10% of it has been educated. But you get a line of these courtyards along a street just like Oxford High Street today. In Oxford it’s All Souls, UNIV uh uh uh Mlin Christ Church and all the Bale all these other colleges in a row. In the London exactly the same plan but 1,500 years earlier this is incredibly important.

Now for Schwan Zang the library at Nanda was the wonder. He says there are 10,000 monks here studying Buddhism, Vadas, logic, grammar, philosophy, medicine, metaphysics, divination, mathematics, Sanskrit, astronomy, literature and magic. A ninestory library. And we know from the copper plate on the left that you have foreign rulers as far away as Indonesia sending donations of a 100 villages in order to found an expatriate college for Southeast Asian monks at Nanda. Just like in Harvard you have the Mahinda Humanities Center or in Oxford you have the Sed Business School. So in ancient Nanda you had an Indonesian college set up with money from Shri Vajaya modern Java and Somatra uh to for for monks to for monks to study in the greatest university of the period. Now when Schwanzang makes it back to China he is greatly helped by an unexpected ally who is the young concubine of the emperor Taong. Her name is Wu Zetian. And Woud’s important because she was a Buddhist and at the time she was clearly quite a woman. She doesn’t look much in this mudkut admittedly, but she managed to swing out of the bed of Taong in the left into the bed of the crown prince Gaizong on the right and became rose from being a humble concubine to being the chief uh the chief uh consort wife empress. And then when Gaizong dies, she becomes the only woman emperor in 3,000 years of Chinese history. You get a slightly better idea how she did it in the Chinese soap opera where she’s rather more attractive than she is in the woodcut. This woman converted the Chinese state to Buddhism. For one generation, the Confucians are banished, the Dowists are banished and Buddhism becomes the state religion of China. This is the high point of Indian soft power. Never again in history will India have so much influence on the court in China as it did during the reign of Wuetan. and she brings in monks from Nanda to run the institutions of state because the Confucians will not accept a woman as emperor. So she has to import Indian Buddhist monks and Indian trained sorry Chinese monks trained at Landa to run the state. So you get names like Gatama Sadata running the astronomy bureau during her reign and so on. Now what’s extraordinary is that during her reign which is at reaches its peak in the 660s which is arguably the decade when India was at its most influential in all of history.

At this same period you have something similar going on in Southeast Asia. This is what’s going on now after the fall of Rome. We discussed how the Roman Empire poured its gold into Kerala and South India and Sri Lanka during the Roman period. But what happens when Rome falls? 410 the uh the Goths and the Ostrogoths all Alaric surrounds Rome. Rome collapses. Gold stops arriving here in Calikat. What happens to the economy here which has been used to vast quantities of Roman gold arriving with every monsoon wind? What happens is that the Indian trading guilds based particularly in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka pivot eastwards and begin to focus on the new source of gold. The place they call the lands of gold, Sarnabumi, still the name of the airport in Bangkok. So what had been a big west coast game facing Egypt and the Gulf now becomes an east coast game. Nagapatnam uh Pondicherryi Tamalipti in the Gan on the base of the Ganges and near Kolkata pivoting eastwards to look for gold in Java, Sumatra, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Indian merchants are using the winds but this time they are sailing from east coast India not here in the west coast and sailing to Sarabumi, the lands of gold using the monsoon winds. And in the fifth century, exactly the same century as the fall of Rome, significantly you begin to see Buddhist sculptures appearing in Thailand, images of lingams, yonis, images of Lord Shiva turning up in Malaysia and particularly in the Mikong Delta in Cambodia, you begin to find the very first Hindu temples. This is Ankor Beret uh south of Ponumpen in Cambodia and inside Ashram Maha Rosé are found the first largecale Hindu sculptures in Southeast Asia. They are carved in a particularly cimeare way but the iconography and the ideas are Indian.

But after a while Southeast Asian Hinduism begins to develop on its own trajectory. Up top we have an image of Jiovan II, the Camair Emperor. That’s his face, but he’s got four arms and they’re holding a discus and a con shell. He is depicted as Lord Vishnu. Now you never see this in India. You see Raja Raja Chola with Lord Shiva but you never see Raja Raja Chola depicted as Lord Shiva. An important distinction. So the Cambodians deify their kings in a way that is not allowed theologically in India. And in the weeks to come, the months to come, the years to come, we see more and more Southeast Asian rajas at ports along the coast converting to Hinduism. Here we have an abisha ceremony with Indian brahinss with their brahman cords very clearly shown in the picture with their top knots like sadus from the kla pouring water over a local king and the man whose name had been kodonga he suddenly Mahendra vamman he sanskritizes his name the brahinss begin to perform religious ceremonies for him but also to administer the kingdom and they do that with the imported letters from Kchipuram. This is southern Brahmy also known as Paliva Granta. This is the script which is the mother of modern Mallayalam that you use today. It’s also the origin of Tamil. It’s also the origin of Thai, Camar, Pew, all the scripts of Southeast Asia. So that when Mallayalam speakers go to Thailand, they can recognize some of the letters today. And this is because this is a script designed for the south, North Indian scripts with the straight line that you get in Hindi or Sanskrit with the washing line with the letters dropping off them are designed for inscribing in stone. But these letters that you all use today are designed for palm leaf and those palm leaves rip if you draw straight lines. So you have to have the curval linear curving letters that you all use today. That is designed for palm leaf and it spreads to Southeast Asia and it’s the origin of every single script in Southeast Asia.

So what we see happening very quickly is a re-imagination of the whole landscape of Southeast Asia. A new Iodia is founded outside Bangkok. A new Kurukshhatra appears in uh in Laos. The main river running down the length of Southeast Asia is renamed the Ganges or Maranga or as pronounced in Kam Meong. Maranga Mechong the Mikong is the Ganges. We forget this but it’s a measure of the astonishing Indian influence on Southeast Asia. And as well as the main river, you find every major shite sanctuary in Southeast Asia converted uh bringing the names of the main shaver shrines in India. Temples appear on the south on this left we have uh Mahabalipuram. Two years later an almost identical temple is built at Gdongo in Java. But they’re big temples. This is Bora Bador in the 8th century. Sorry, this is Prammanan. This is Boraor, the largest Buddhist monument in the world. An extraordinary monument built in the shape of a Mandela, a a step pyramid in Java based on Bihari ideas. There’s a place called Khazaria outside Patna which is the model of this, but this is bigger and in stone. And then finally and most dramatically the largest Hindu temple in the world is built not in India but at anchor watt in Cambodia in the 12th century. Every element in the architecture of Ankorwatt has its origins in India and yet it’s transformed in the process not least in scale. There is no temple in India as big as Ankor. Watt originally a temple to Vishnu. And when Tagore sees this, he says very brilliantly, everywhere I could see India, yet I could not recognize her because you don’t get the Quinc’s plan. You don’t get a central tower filled with relics and ashes. You don’t get anything that looks like Ankorwatt anywhere in India. And yet every single individual element is Indian.

So for the final 10 minutes, I’m just going to talk about mathematics and science. And this is arguably India’s greatest gift to the world. And all of you can read that inscription in the middle line. That is the number 270. How come you can all read Sanskrit’s inscriptions from the 8th century? So we’re now going back from 12th century Cambodia to 6th century Udeiri in Madia Pradesh. This is the major astronomical center. What Greenwich would be to the British Empire in the 16th century. Udeiri is to the Guptas in the fourth, fifth and sixth century. This is where the mathematics of Aryaba who comes up with the circumference of the earth his own version of pi the distance from the earth to the sun and the moon. This is where this maths is developed. Later his ideas are taken forward by Brahma Gupta who defines the idea of zero. Arguably the most important practical idea ever invented in India. Once you’ve got zero, everything else follows. Binary, algorithms, algebra, all these ideas begin. And here in the second line in the middle between the kind of two tadpoles is the world’s first dated zero. The first zero of our form is that zero in the bottom right, the circular zero that we use today. How come early Indian numbers can be read so easily by us today? Well, this is the answer. This should be taught in every in every school in the world. At the top, we have Brahmy letters, first century. Second line is that Gualor inscription I just showed you with the zero. Then it goes into three different directions. India continues to use the Devonagri version of these letters. In the eastern Arabic world, they use a different version. In the West Arabic numbers, you see the origins of our numbers today. It is the what’s used in Morocco and in Islamic Spain that becomes the numbers that are the nearest thing the human race has to universal language anywhere in the world. India’s biggest contribution, I would argue, to the human race. India comes up with the numbers which everyone uses but no one knows they come from India because in the west we call them Arabic numbers because we got them from the Arabs but in the Arabic world they still call them Hindi numbers uh and they remember that they got them from India.

So how does it get to the Middle East? Well in probably through a Disney character. I’m not making this up. Jafar from Aladdin is a historical character. He was from a family called the Balmer kids. The Balmer kids were vizers of the Abbasid caiffs in Baghdad. They convert to Islam and they bring Indian mathematics to the Islamic world in the 8th century. And when they are promoted to be the vizers of Baghdad, they send an embassy to send to bring the books of Aryabata and Brahma Gupta to Baghdad along with the medical works of Charaka, the basis of Ayurvedic medicine. That embassy arrives in 886 and we have pictures and we have detailed descriptions of this embassy arriving. Now it takes two generations for a decent translation of Aryabata and Brahmagupta’s work to appear in Arabic. And the man who does it is a man from modern Kea and Usbekistan which in those days was called Quarazzam. And he is known as Alqurismi. Alquirismi translates brilliantly Aryabata and Brahmagupta into Arabic. And he calls his book the snappy title is the compendious book of calculation by completion and balancing according to Hindu calculation not the makings of a bestseller you’d have thought. So everyone knows it by its nickname which is algebra the origins of our word algebra while his name alquarismi becomes the basis of which modern word anyone algorithm. So in the meeting of Indic and Islamic thought in 9th century Baghdad comes these crucial concepts algebra and algorithm which define our life today. When you look at your mobile phone, what Alarismi came up with will depend on the social media feed you get today. Astonishing.

Now how does that get to Europe? So with the Islamic world spreading into Europe with Islamic Spain, ideas are passing across North Africa. Among them, chess, an Indian game which goes first to China. In China, we get the nomenclature we use today. A rook is of course the Persian word for castle. And when you say checkmate, you don’t realize it, but you’re speaking medieval fast. Checkmate is shamat. So these ideas move from India to Persia through the Arab world into Europe through Spain. How does it get from Africa and Islamic Spain to Europe? In 1120, Pisa, as in the leaning tower, the Italian port opens a trading lodge in Algeria. And the leading merchant who opens the lodge brings his son. His son goes to the local school. He learns Arabic. He learns alquarism’s mathematics. And when he goes back to Pisa and finds all his friends are still using the old Latin numbers, MCVXV11X. He writes a book called the uh Liba Abaci or the book of numbers in order to teach his friends this system. And that man is luckily for us Fibonacci. It’s Fibonacci who brings Indo-Arabic numbers to Europe. He’s immediately summoned to the house of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. and Frederick II uh introduces him to the court and to a Scotsman called Michael Scott the wizard. And Michael Scott at this house reads the at this wonderful castle Castello uh Castell del Monte near Bulia um reads Fibonacci’s Libra Abbecki and he says it’s very good. It’s a work of genius, but it’s too theoretical. And he begs Fibonacci to include money lending, weights and measures, currency conversion, all the things that merchants will actually need. So, Fibonacci writes a second edition and that book becomes the basis of Italian mathematics in the re in the uh renaissance. It is the basis of the Medici bank who adopt this system and make a fortune as a result. Another version of this book goes out to Pierro de la Franchesco the painter in Tuscanyany. He writes three treatises on mathematics. One of which is the basis for uh renaissance perspective the whole uh science of painting. These three mathematical treaties based on Fibonacci including the entire system of Brahmagupta Naribata are carried from Tuskanyany to Milan by Pierro de la Franchesco’s friend Fraaluca Pacholi and Fra Pachi shows these three manuscripts to his flatmate. That flatmate is a jobbing painter painting a picture of the last supper in Milan. Leonardo da Vinci.

So you get from Leonardo da Vinci in five steps back to Ariabata. Leonardo to Pierro, Pierro to Fibonacci, Fibonacci to Alurismi, Alcurismi to Brahagupta, Brahmagupta to Arabata. That is how Indian numbers conquer the world. Unfortunately, the next thing that happens is that the numbers go to England and we get the East India Company and the whole thing goes to Helen Hankart. But that’s another story for another day and another four books. Thank you very much.

Thank you so much for an informative session. Unfortunately, we don’t have time for an audience interaction. And we now move to one of the most awaited moments. The launch of the very new book by William Dol Rumple. May I now kindly invite him to formally launch malam translation of the book Golden Road. Everyone please give him a huge round of applause. Here is the Malalam translation of the book The Golden Road. I haven’t seen this before. It’s so beautiful. Well done DC books. A big round of applause please. Ravi DC Goend and DC books the greatest publisher in South India. Thank you.