Empire: World History - 179. The Golden Road: Rise of the Indosphere

Episode Date: August 21, 2024

For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilisation, creating around it a vast empire of ideas. Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics and mythology blazed a trail across the world, along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific. Listen as Anita and William discuss his new book and the rise of the Indosphere. To fill out the survey: survey.empirepoduk.com To buy William's book: https://coles-books.co.uk/the-golden-road-by-william-dalrymple-signed-edition Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producers: Anouska Lewis and Evan Green Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. Hello and welcome to a very special Empire with me, Anita Arnden. And me, William Duremberg. Rather excited, William Durember. Well, I mean, you're probably as excited as I am about our very, very, very, special guest. So let me just tell you about our very special guest. He'll be familiar to people

who like this pod and love this pod. And just as a preamble, he's a man who has no respect for time, but it makes me laugh more than anyone I've ever met. He is proudly fiercely Scottish. It's just so disgustingly prolific as a writer. He's done it again. He's finished a book. And if you're on social media at all you would have seen his shiny little happy face opening his box and books quite recently. It is William Darrym Paul. It was a very, very nice thing opening that box of books in case anyone here has not seen this video. An very anonymous looking box turned up on Monday when I just got back from holiday. Did you think it was wine?

It could be. It could be it. It was the right shape. We do get our wine delivered in boxes. bit like that. But it wasn't. We'd been tipped off that it might be coming that day. So Olive got the camera out or other got her phone out and made a wee video and this box was impossible to open. You did make quite the meal of it. I was just like, could I'm seeing a completely passionate of it. The idea was to do a very quick video lasting about five seconds, open the thing up and

hold the book up. But I couldn't get into it. It was hilarious. It was like being at a kid's birthday party and you were like one step away from, Mom, could you open it? Open my present for me. Could you just open it? But it has that feeling. It does. It does. It has that feeling when you've written a book and you've got the box and you open it. And in there is your baby that you have been working on for five years. It is just like a child at the first sort of conscious Christmas. And the excitement of opening that is just lovely. And it looks really pretty. Oh, it looks fabulous. We did. We did a, About five months ago, we did a little preamble when your book cover was just designed and we sort of wax lyrical about it.

It's gorgeous and it looks as gorgeous as I assumed it would from the pictures. What's different with the actual book is it's all sort of embossed and all the gold bits of sort of stick out. I'm just playing with it now in the light. It's all shiny. Sweet really. It's sweet really. It's sweet really. It's sweet really.

Put butter on the cover and stuff. Yeah. Or drop olive oil in pages. Anyway, whatever. Well, no, not whatever. It's wonderful. But you know that the analogy you gave about it being like a children's birthday. The main difference, and I don't know whether you think this, is that when you open a book, and you've been with this book for five years, so really you've got a toddler that comes out of the box. But the first thing the toddler does is bugger off around the world without so much as a how-to-do-do-do, and it's in the world and it will do its own thing. And that often is surprising. And already people are beginning to send me pictures of bookshop windows in odd parts of the country where they've got the book cover in the window already. It's very exciting. It's very, very exciting. This book, for some reason, had a longer tale than any other book. Frantic last minute edits on difficult Sanskrit names and things. And then various friends, I have a lovely friend who lives in Podicherry, who is the leading Sanskrit scholar of Khmer inscriptions in Southeast Asia, you know, stuff around Angkor Wat and so on.

Weird enough, this guy went to school with me for the age of seven, and he's ended up running this French academy in Pondichere where they look at these extraordinary descriptions. And I've been trying to persuade him, you know, to look at this manuscript and point out the errors for about a year. Were you not very nice to him at school? Oh, very nice to him at school? Did you not share your lunch? Oh, okay. All right, just wondering. Okay.

But he's now very grand, very scholarly, and a very serious activity. Anyway, in the middle of May, he suddenly. reads this book and finds, you know, 500 errors in my old tamillion or Sanskrit transcriptions and starts sending me all his scholarly essays, which are wonderful, but quite sort of hardcore, shall we say. D daunting. Yeah. But this sort of thing is what makes a book when suddenly you can really buttress it with really serious hardcore scholarship. And it's very nice when you've got the narrative flow already, then you can add. So this book in the end, about a third of of it is notes and bibliography. It's actually not that long. In terms of the text, the main text,

it's only 298 pages, which I think is my shortest book for certainly 15 years. It feels like a bigger book, so it's all the sort of end notes that are bringing up the rear. The total thing is nearly 500. It's 478, 79. But I'm not surprised that you care that much. I mean, you always do care very, very much about not just writing about a thing with great enthusiasm, but moving scholarship along and certainly this book, this book is going to ruffle some feathers. It will, and it could go down in a whole variety of ways. I mean, on one hand, also, it enters a cultural watch. I think people in Europe and America will not be aware of, which is the whole nature

of India's ancient history and how India looks at it. And there is a whole ultra-nationalist world out there now in India that believes everything in the world came from India, from the internet and atomic bombs through helicopters and everything else. and however much you praise ancient India, it'll never be quite enough for that group, while people in the West are largely completely ignorant, partly because of the whole business of colonial scholarship doing down the wanderers of India from the mid-19th century, from the period of Macaulay onwards.

And so virtually no one in Europe knows that the numbers we use and call Arabic numbers actually originated in India. no one in Europe knows that half the world lives in countries, all parts of the world, where Indian religions and philosophies were once dominant. We grew up very much with the idea that what we call civilization began in ancient Greece and that not just ideas of architecture and geometry, but ideas of philosophy and political ideas, such as democracy and the republic, all began with Plato and Aristotle and so on. There is a whole cast of equivalence in India, who quite separately and sometimes linked because ideas were traveling in the early period, which is one of the themes of the book.

And so ideas from people like Euclid do make it to India. And there are things like the Yavana Sutras, which are Greek mathematical texts, which are being read in India and vice versa. A lot of the stuff that we call Greek mathematics and people like Euclid and Ptolemy are actually working in. in Egypt, in Alexandria, which is very much within sailing distance of India at this period. We are familiar with that term Anglo-Sphere, but you talk about an Indosphere. And the Indosphere has a deep, long history. We're talking about a period of history between 250 BC to 1,200 AD, a stretch of a great many years, where India was confident about exporting its culture, its science, its literature,

and people received it gratefully. So exactly this. This is the main theme of the book. And that word Indosphere, I should say, is borrowed from a friend of the show, Simon Seabag Montefuri, who came out with it, just mid-sentence in his wonderful book,

The World, his history of the world. And it's a coinage. I borrow with gratitude from him. And I think it's an important phrase because there is this whole chunk of the world, which really, there's two ways to look at it.

One, if you're looking in linguistic terms, from Afghanistan to Japan, Sanskrit was being read. And once you've got Sanskrit, there comes the whole of Sanskrit literature, which involves science, geometry, mathematics, ideas of cosmology, ideas of religion, ideas of philosophy. And that Sanskrit world with Sanskrit literature is dominant for a thousand years over, what, four or five thousand miles from Kandahar in the West, right through to Bali and Japan. And everything in between, what is written in Sanskrit, the Sanskrit plays, the Sanskrit texts on aesthetics, on love, on poetry, and so on, are read across the world.

And in the same way that colonialism made, for example, appreciation of Shakespeare in the English colonial world, you know, a mark of civilisation. So 500 AD, appreciation of Kalidasa and the Great Sanskrit plays was not just something which Indians were proud of and sometimes performed their knowledge of publicly as a mark of their civilization, the same was true in Cambodia or Las, or Vietnam, or Bali, or Indonesia. You have this great geographical spread. But beyond that central Indosphere, you've got a kind of wider ripples, rippling out. Indian numbers, Indian ideas of place value, that's tens, hundreds, thousands,

and so on, tens of thousands. And the idea of zero, which is an idea which is rooted in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, the idea of the void, Sunya, which becomes in Arabic zifal, which becomes in English, cipher. And these ideas which are rooted in deeply in Indian philosophy change mathematics completely. Well, listen, hold up a minute. You're doing the thing that you do, which is where you've galloped to the end of the book. I've got to say, we've just spoken, whoa, there, Darranpur.

Back up. Back up right away. Let's just go to the footprints that you follow because this also is interesting. You've managed to show that there are place names which derive from the Sanskrit. And places like Java, just tell us the story of the very name of Java itself is a Sanskrit word. Exactly. And this is not quickly say this is not my work. This is well known to anyone that studies Sanskrit. And there's a particularly, there's a scholar called Sheldon Pollock who came up with an academic idea called the Sanskrit. Cosmopolis, which is the area where Sanskrit was read. And yes, within that area, all the way from Balk, which is the Sanskrit word Balika, to Singapore, which is the Sanskrit word Simapura, a lot of the place names are actually derived from Sanskrit. And you mentioned Java. Java derives from the Sanskrit Yava-dwipa, meaning the island shaped like a Java or a grain of barley. So it's just a reference to the shape of the island.

in Sanskrit. And we've kind of forgotten this, the way that Sanskrit was so dominant for a thousand years that it forms the foundation for which everything else comes, is rooted. And what's fascinating, if you look at India in this way, in a sense, civilizational, there are, in a sense, three successive layers in India. You start off with the Sanskrit world, which India exports out over the region. Then in the 12th century, two things happen. And first of all, there's a great eruption of Turkish sultanates into India, followed by the Mongols, which drives thousands of Persian-speaking refugees down into Delhi in northern India. And these two things make Persian the dominant cultural language in India for the next thousand years. And by the 17th, 18th century, there are 10 times as many Persian texts being produced in India than in Iran.

It's the language of court and power. Exactly. And it sort of, what, does it elbow the Sanskrit out of the way? It doesn't elbow it out, but it's a layer on top of it, which is the richness of Indian civilisation, that you have these successive layers on top of each other and interacting with each other. So the moguls are fascinated by the Mahabharata, which they call the Razum Nama, and they translate the Upanishads and the Vedas into Persian. And that layer remains, but the dominant political layer is now in Persian.

Then, in the 18th century, as we all know, the Brits turn up in the form of the East India Company, and by the mid-19th century, they are actively replacing Persian with English as the language of government. So the same thing again happens that, you know, if you want to be the bright young man making your way in the world, you have to learn not Sanskrit, not Persian, but English. And you get this generation of what I suppose V.S. Naipo called mimic men or brown sabs, who are brought up to value not Rumi or Bedil or any of the great Persian poets, nor Kalidasa or any of the great Sanskrit writers, but instead are made to value Hardy, Shakespeare, Dickens. And in some ways, this is a crushing thing, and it's a classic case of colonialism, making people ashamed of their own civilizations. But on the other hand,

you can look at it and say it's one of the great assets of modern India that you have this rich glares of culture compost in the Sanskrit, in the Persian and in the Anglosphere. And you can see that as a positive thing. I mean, there are many nationalists who will be throwing their sauce pans at the radio or whatever they're listening to this. When the idea is anything positive. Most people are still their phones, but adorable of you to take us to them. that time portal.

They're listening to us on their wirelesses or gramophones. I think there are... Photographs. I think there are personal devices now, which most people are listening to us on. I may be wrong, of course. Listen, before we talk about the method of this proliferation of the Indusphere, and I want to get into that, the mechanics are really interesting, I want to ask a really simple question, which is why is the spread of Indian influence in the Indusphere different to the

colonialism that you've just talked about. So, you know, this influence and language, some may say, well, why are you guys always carping about sort of replacing cultures when you're just admitting that India had a massive footprint? Why is it different? It's a very, very good, an important question, and there is a big difference because the answer is that one comes at the point of a bandit. The East India Company conquers India in a military fashion at the Battle of Pless, the Battle of Buckser, and then it takes all the Marathas, and it subjects people by force of arms, and after it's done that, it offers inducements for them to study English, which of course brings with it wonderful benefits of wonderful literature and science and so on, but it is done in the aftermath

of conquest, subjugation, and the whole apparatus of colonial might. What is so interesting about the spread of Indian ideas is that it happens merely because of its sophistication and attraction. And it spreads largely with Indian merchants who are largely traveling by sea, but also overland through Central Asia. You've got a lovely part in the book, which you might as well just read, which is gorgeous, which is the summer heating of the Tibetan plateau. I would presume upon your, I think not much. reluctance to read a bit of your book, if that's all right? I don't normally do this, certainly, Trinandadden, but on this occasion.

And accustomed, as I am, to grab in a book and reading a great chunk. So this is one of the sort of central ideas of the book that India, because of its geography and climate, is at the centre of a whole network of monsoon winds that has allowed Indians to just put up sales and travel at speed around the world with some reliability and predictability. just read the passage. Thanks to the winds of the Asian monsoon, India lies at the center of a great network of navigable sea roads and maritime trade routes. Every summer, the heating of the Tibetan plateau creates an area of low pressure which sucks in moist, cool winds from the Bay of Bengal. Every winter, cold, dry winds rake out of the snows of the Himalayas to the warm seas beyond.

The Indian Peninsula sits in the middle of this vortex of winds which blow one way for six months of the year, then reverse themselves for the next six. The regularity and predictability of these winds generate monsoons that have allowed millennia of Indian sailors to raise their sails and propel themselves at speed across the oceans that surround them. Then, when the winds reverse, safely back home again. Indian traders used the searoids to travel in two directions. Many headed westwards on the winter winds to the east coast of Africa and the rich kingdoms of Ethiopia. Here they had a choice. One fork led through the Persian Gulf to Iran and Mesopotamia. The other to its south, Var Aden, took them to the Red Sea and Egypt. Indian traders travelling west used to arrive with the trade winds in the early summer and ride the summer monsoon home in August. With the winds behind you, the journey from

the mouth of the Red Sea to Gujarat could take as little as 40 days. Though if you missed the winds, the round trip might take as long as a year and cause you to take a prolonged holiday on the Nile. The equivalent overland route by camel caravan through Afghanistan would take at least three times as long. You read that very well. You should do an audiobook, which you have. I have just done an audio book. And the great pleasure of that was I don't know if you watched Bridgeton, but I'm in my studio at the same time, the very lovely Lady Danbury was recording. Adja Ando. Oh, I love Aja Ando's voice. Yeah, she's fantastic. Great. She was fantastic.

Well, look, so we're going to go to a break now. But join us after the break. When we talk, actually, we'll sort of knit together two things. So we left the America series looking at the Vietnam War and the American involvement in Southeast Asia. We're going to go right back to those areas after the break and find out exactly how the spill of the Indusphere, those warm winds carrying these ships from the Bay of Bengal, how it all comes together in a circle. Welcome back. So just before the break, we had that very lovely characterization of an Indosphere, spilling out on a warm sea, carried on these trade winds far and wide. And I want us to, first of all, if you don't mind, go to the places that we left the large,

series, the America series with. And that's Vietnam and Cambodia, Laos, you know, places like that. Because I'm shocked always. Thailand, for example, you know, the number of icons that I recognize from the Ramayan, there will be Ganesh that come back, or actually more important, Hanuman's, lots of Hanumans, which are there. Well, even the Indonesian airline is called Garuda. Garuda, which is the Mount of Vishnu. Vishnu, the Eagle Mount of Vishnu. So tell us a little bit about. that in particular, since it's what we last spoke about in America. So we talked just before the break about how the monsoon winds operate in both directions.

You can leave India in the right season and travel from Gujarato-Kellar right through to the Red Sea or the Gulf. It's also equally true that at the same time, the winds propel you half the year eastwards to Southeast Asia, to Laos, Cambodia, the Mekong Delta, all these places, the coast of China ultimately. And then in the next six months, pull you back again. It's very easy for India's to be great international traders as they are now and have been throughout history, because the winds just in a sense do half the work for them. We're just going to put up a sale and off you go.

And there are two important phases in this book. And we're going to be talking about the first phase, which is perhaps more surprising in the next episode, which is the whole story of India's engagement with ancient Rome and the westward path to the Red Sea. But let's talk a little bit in this episode about the eastward path. And what happens is that when the trade with Rome is at its peak, India gets a huge appetite for gold. There's very little gold in India. The kola gold fields, which were discovered in the 18th and 19th centuries, are late addition to India's mines. And in the classical period, I think there was very little gold actually naturally around coming out of the Indian soil. And the trade with Rome allowed vast quantities of Roman gold to debush down the Red Sea into India,

which is something that Roman writers write about. Pliny talks about India as the sink of all the world's precious metals. So India liked gold, didn't have it, but had precious gems, diamonds famously, we've talked about. It has precious gems, diamonds, rubies, spinels, everything, but also has spices, particularly pepper, which is a massive thing in the Roman world, and which Pliny gets very angry about. He says, I can't see why anyone wants this pungent stuff on their food. Foreign market. And he's any particularly upset that a lot of the money is being spent on silk,

which is coming from India. Right. Not from China. And so coming from India. Some of it starts in China, but it comes to the Roman world far Indian sea courts. Through Indian sailors and Indian traders. Gotcha. Because it's just 40 days.

It's just a 40-day trip with the monsoon. from the coast of the Roman world. You were sort of dive bombing at the Silk Road theory with this thesis of yours, aren't you? I should acknowledge it. Our friend of the show and both of our personal friend, Peter Frankapan, his wonderful book, The Silk Roads, was very much the starting point of this book. And I've been having very agreeable disagreements with Peter for about five, six years, a number of different continents.

We need to turn up at festivals all over the world together. And I love that book. And when it first came out, I gave it a huge rave review in the Guardian. I didn't know Peter then at that point and just thought this was the most perfect book. But over time came to worry that there was so much about Central Asia and China and very, very little about India. India hardly appears in that book, only marginally. And when you look at those maps that you sometimes see in museums or in children's books or often in actual academic textbooks, the Silk Road is depicted as a single road, which runs from.

from the Mediterranean through Persia, through Central Asia, and ends up at Cheyenne in China. And there are, you know, it diverges sometimes when it's in China, becomes two roads, north and south of the Taklamakan and the Gobi Desert. But there's just a little arrow saying to India, as if India is a sort of marginal part of this. Now, that's fair enough for the period of the Mongols onwards, because the Mongols do punch this enormous hole through Central Asia and create genuine trade roots which stretch from Mediterranean to the China Sea, which is the reason that Marco Polo is able to make that journey so safely and in such little time right across the width of the world.

But that was not the case in the classical period. Can we just go back to Southeast Asia? I like the fact that sometimes a map screams out, you know, the story of ancient history. So Thailand, for example, there's an ancient capital of Thailand. Ayutia, which is basically Ayurthia, is it not? Ayyotho, which is Lord Rama's birthplace, supposedly. I mean, what's so fascinating is that the Bay of Bengal became by the 5th, 6th centuries AD very much the same sort of Indian lake that the Mediterranean was a Roman lake.

And both sides of the Bay of Bengal have shipping going backwards and forwards on a kind of monthly basis. And ideas are passing backwards and forwards. But there was before this no script in Southeast Asia. So the Indian Brahmi script, which sometimes called palava granti after the palava dynasty in Tamil Nad. And the literature which follows in Sanskrit using those scripts is the first literate layer that is there in Southeast Asian history. So from this period, you get the elite taking on Sanskrit as the language of the course. as well as the language of religion.

Wait, what are you talking about? They didn't have a script. They didn't write things down at all. And so you've got that cursive style, that really curly ornate way of writing that you see in Tamil, which is so different to, you know, the Hindi script. You're saying that is from that same period. I mean, it is actually, like I'm saying,

Thailand has a very similar, very curly form of writing. I mean, I just want to, sorry to make it very basic. Is that what you're talking about? I'm exactly what I'm talking about. So, first of all, that script derives in South India because people are writing on palm leaves. And if you do right angles in palm leaves, you rip the palm. No way.

That's not the reason. So they develop those round strokes which allow you to write on palm leaves without ripping it. Just a moment. My brain is just going to go, really? That's exactly it. Because Sanskrit is filled with sharp lines. It's lines on top. Downward strokes, you know, really.

So that's why it's such a different script. So the whole, all the scripts of Southeast Asia derive from this what used to be called Palavagranti or this form of Brahmi. And it is true that every single pre-Islamic script in Southeast Asia, and there are 10 or 15 of them in the different regions, are all derived from the script. So in the 4th, 5th centuries, Rome is torn asunder by invasions over the Danube, over the Rhine, Huns coming in from the east, desert nomads raiding the ports of Bernicke and Masthomas on the Red Sea coast. And then there's a Persian blockade, the Persians try to stop all shipping reaching Roman ports. And so the South Indians who've grown very used to vast fortunes pouring into their ports

in payment for ivory spices and all the other luxuries, silks that are coming through their ports, they have to find a new source. And where do they go? They go to what is called in Sanskrit, Svarnabumi, the lands of gold, which are the islands of Indonesia in Ata, and the coast of peninsula, Thailand and Malaysia. And these places, you find from the fifth, sixth century onwards, become the focus of the newly established Tamil trading guilds. Right. And these trading guilds pool their resources, build ships, and start moving exactly the same sort of trade that was happening with the Red Sea in Rome is now happening with the Mekong Delta,

right up as far as the coast of China. These lands of gold that they are now interested in. I mean, just tell us a little bit about how the gold is found. Is it sort of the gold rush of America where you pan for it in rivers? Are they in gold mines? Are they hacking it out of rock? Where is it coming from? There's a bit of everything, but there's big gold mines, particularly in Borneo.

And you see this actually written up in the Great Indian epics, in the Ramayana, for example, Suggra, the monkey. King talks about, I think it's Java, which he says is a land where gold is just found pouring out of the earth. And you find it also in the early Buddhist jattaca tales, where merchants are often going across the sea and risking everything to make their fortune. So at this time, you find Indian Brahmins and Buddhist missionaries going to Southeast Asia, bringing their scripts and bringing with them ideas of politics and religion and philosophy. And so very quickly, you're finding large numbers of Indian Brahmins turning up in these ports,

telling local chieftains that they can become divinely appointed Hindu kings. Right. If they embrace this new religion. And not only will they have the power they used to have because of their force of arms and their armies and their war canoes and so on, they can also have the great gods, Shiva, Vishnu, fighting with them and augmenting their power. and the Brahmins who already, you know, literate and got a whole sort of civil service operating in India, move into Southeast Asia and bring that whole package of administration, philosophy and kingship with them.

Two questions. One, what was the religion before the Brahmins came in those areas? And number two, it sort of flies in the face of what I've always understood to be sort of pure Veshnavite Hinduism, for example, which is you don't convert. You're either born a Hindu. and then, you know, supposedly won lives lottery, or you don't, in which case you'll come back maybe another time as a Hindu. So, I mean, explain both of those things to me. First of all, these texts are only applicable really to Brahmins.

So many of the Indians who are travelling to Southeast Asia are actually not Brahmins. And we have this from DNA evidence that they are Irrullah and all sorts of lower caste Tamil groups that are appearing in large numbers, suddenly the DNA of these countries from that period, and forth the century onwards. But as far as the Brahmins are concerned, what happens is that they just extend the boundaries of Holy India to what's now Southeast Asia, partly by renaming the landscape with new Ayodiyas, Ayodiyah being the capital of Lord Ram in the Ramayana, new Kurokshetra's, Kurokshetra being the great apocalyptic battle of the Mahabarata, all over Southeast Asia, who find the same names reappearing in these countries, in Cambodia, in Laos, in Thailand. Plus, they begin to sacralize the landscape, partly with temples, building a braminical temples

to Lord Vishnu and Lord Shiva in sites that have previously been sacred to the peoples of Southeast Asia, often hot springs with sulfur bubbling out of the ground or islands appearing out of the Mekong Delta. Hindu temples from the 5th, 6th century start being built on these places. And in some extraordinary sites that I've seen in Cambodia, you get an attempt to turn the rivers in the springs into the Ganges by sculpting on the river floor images of lingams and yonis, this sort of male-female principle on the river bed. Scalting onto the floor? Oh, wow. Gosh.

So that the kind of the river flows over this as a sacralised form of the gangus. So it becomes a holy river just because it's going over a lingam. Right. Amazing. And then the daddy of all Hindu temples, which is still to this day, you know, the place that everybody wants to see at least once in their life is Angkor Wat. Now tell us a little bit more about the story of that particular temple. So Ankawat is 600 years after these first contacts that we're talking about. We've been talking about how the Roman Empire falls in the 4th century. Indians begin to refocus their trade in the 4th, 5th and 6th century. By the 6th century, you have the first images of Vishnu appearing in the Mekong Delta, small images of the Buddha.

By the 7th century, you've got temples in the Dieng plateau in Java. And by the 7th century, really massive things turning up in Pramban. These Southeast Asian kingdoms are often richer and larger than the fractured political landscape in India. So by the 9th, 10th and 11th century, you have buildings like Borobador, which is the largest Buddhist monument in the world, being erected very much on Indian ideas, using Indian theology, but constructed locally, using local craftsmen with ideas coming, locally from the pre-existing architecture of that part of the world, fusing into this sort of convergent architecture where both ideas in Southeast Asia and India are present. And Borobador is quite simply built in the 9th century, the most sophisticated Buddhist monument of the world.

Which is where exactly? Tell us, put it on a map. It's in Indonesia, on the island of Java, on the west of Java near modern Joggykata. and this extraordinary monument, which I was lucky enough to, I got to Java just after COVID, was one of the very first in. And the monument was still officially closed, and I applied to the Ministry of Culture, saying I was writing this book. And I ended up being the only person in this monument, alone taken around panel after panel

by the director of the, one of the luckiest breaks for my entire life. I spent two days going panel by panel along this, learning the stories of, of the Buddha and the different Hindu and Buddhist tales that were included and the tantra stories, this wonderful rich literature put into a sort of sculptural graphic novel all the way up this monument. And you emerge through all this sculpture at the top platforms of Borobador and suddenly you're out. And you can see not sculptures on either side of view, but the whole landscape stretching out forever. And at the top you have this very simple image of the stupor, and below that, these hollow stupas, latticed with a single figure of the Buddha

inside them representing the void in the hollowness of it, in the emptiness of it. And so it's a sort of profound monument built within a yantra shape, a sort of sacred symbol. What is a yantra shape? A yantra shape is a sacred Buddhist. It's like a sort of geometrical spell, if you like, that means that if you build the atra in this exact way, that you can create a place of spiritual power. So this is both sort of vertically and horizontally, both a teaching aid with the sculpture and an extraordinary place for, in a sense, a spiritual power generator, if you like, using very, very arcane tantric Buddhist texts. And there's a whole tradition of these, There's one in Bihar, Khazaria, there's one in modern Bangladesh at Sompore, which are these vast stupas within the antras. But the biggest of all is Borobador itself, which is the kind of the crowning glory. And then what you asked about, Ankhawat, is the largest Hindu temple in the world. In fact, the largest religious monument of any religion, anywhere even today.

So just to give people some sense of this, if you, I haven't seen, I haven't been. there. I've got family. My brother's been there. But I will go. It's on bucket lists all over. It really should be. But this is a temple that covers some 500 acres. There are, you know, there's the great edifice itself. There are pleasure lakes around it. I mean, just, I mean, you've been there. Just describe what one sees when one approaches, Uncle Watt. Again, I got in there just the week it was open. I was waiting for the whole COVID thing to die back. And the day that visas came on stream, got one, flew out there, and got to see it not quite alone in Ankhawar, but with probably fewer crowds that have been there for 50 years. And it's this astonishing Hindu temple. It's a Vishnu

temple. And what's extraordinary is someone who lives in Delhi for most of the years I do, is to see sculpted on the walls of this temple 5,000 miles east of where I live, stories which originated around the city I now live in my home city, Delhi. So there are images of the Battle of Curukshetra, which is a place on the railway line, just half an hour to the north of Delhi. And for those who don't know, I mean, the Kurukshetra fields are legendary because it is the entire backdrop and the stage, if you like, for the Mahabara, the huge fight between good and evil. It's the Ragnarok, the sort of final apocalyptic battle of the gods. Yes, exactly that. In the next corridor next to that, you have images.

of Krishna, Krishna and the Gopis, Krishna and the butter, Krishna and all the other stuff, stories which are set in Matra, which is just sort of, you know, 50, 60 miles south of Delhi. And yet here it is transported 5,000 miles to the east in Ankhawad. Just again, Mathura, just for those who are cognizant of why these are things are absolutely central. They are the bedrock to Hinduism. Mathara, the place where Krishna grew up and, you know, from naughty boy where he would steal the butter and dance with the goopies, the gorpies, the gulfies. girls, the pretty girls in the village to when he becomes sort of, you know, the godhead

and expression of Vishnu later on. And the charioteer in the Mahabharata. These are all really very, I mean, they are the stories that make up Hinduism. There you are in a foreign country seeing, you know, the echoes of what you, you know, I live with all every day when you're in Delhi. And in a sense, it's no more surprising than seeing images of the Gospels, which are things that took place in Palestine in a church in Sweden or Scotland. But it's the same process. It's a set of ideas. It's a religion which is so attractive that people adopt it for a variety of motives very, very far away from the world where it was born. And we know about the spread of Christianity. I think people outside India and even those in India are surprised when they hear that there are images of these stories of Krishna, of the Mahabharata, of the Ramayana depicted on the walls of Ankhawat.

Well, let's leave it there. In the next episode of Empire, we are going to talk about the connections between India and ancient Rome. So we are going to sort of go straight into that difference, that schism, if you like, of Silk Road versus Golden Road. Join us then. Until then, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnand. And goodbye from me, William Duremberg.