The golden road
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Welcome to the LSE events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences. Sorry, Indian Standard Time. Thank you.

An Indian standard time on an Indian summer afternoon as well. Blame the heat. I do. I think very Indian at the moment. My son has just joined the family business. He has indeed, and there have already been questions about the partition. Wrong to rumple, I'm afraid. Beyond my pay grade.

So everybody, we've established that lots of people in this room have read multiple books by you, Willie. That's good to know. And bought them, I hope. How many of you have bought the books you have read?

Look at that. Pirate Bay, every one of you, I can see. And you're not complaining about lack of sales, are you? No, I'm all right. Just a Scotsman. Indeed, I am in my timing. Um,

Lots of people have questions. I've already canvassed a sense of what the audience is expecting to hear and would like to hear. They would like very much... Do we have a slide? You do have a clicker. We've got your lectern because you like to stand up, don't you? I like to wander around. Yeah. So can we clip him on? Clip on mic, I think.

They were going to do that. OK, so while they're doing that, and you can stand, sit, whatever takes your... Fancy. Fancy. If we've got it here, just say it. OK. And there are screens, they can see the screens behind, and there are two screens on the side, and we've got one here. So, do you... Are you... Have you got your breath? I've got my breath. No, no, I'm all set. OK. So, I think, why don't we... It is, to my mind...

from Xanadu to The Golden Road seems to have a certain coherence to it. And I want... Can I just start with a question, Willie? And then just put The Golden Road in perspective. When you published your first book, you made a statement... No, in retrospect, made a statement about the 21-year-old William Dalrymple that wrote that first book. And you described your 21-year-old self...

a smugly, self-important, but charming... He was like a smugly, self-important, but charming nephew who you can't quite disown, but feeling like giving a good tight slap to, at least cutting down to size for his own good. You've come a long way, baby. LAUGHTER

Have you? And is the Golden Road a completely different... It's written, the tone, the research, the way you describe people and places is very different, isn't it? So tell us a little bit about the Golden Road. I think you are always formed by your environment. I mean, that's true of anyone in any period of history. And the environment I grew up in is very different from the environment that I have lived in all my adult life. And I think...

And travelling and particularly living in India for 40 years has changed the way I look at the world. Of course, it would be very odd if it hadn't. Yes. But, I mean, the interests remain remarkably... The stuff I'm writing about is more or less the same stuff I was writing about when I was 18. So there are definitely continuities. But, yeah, I mean, I hope I've grown up a bit since I was 18. Well, your writing certainly has changed. Yeah.

So do you want to tell us about the Golden Road and what? How long are we going to cut aside at five or have we got till 5:15? 6 really, 6 it's 5:20. Sorry, have we got until 6:15? We have maximum until 10 past 6. I don't think we can go beyond that. So about 20 minutes? Good. Okay. So I'll do a quick spiel on the book.

So this book, The Golden Road, is asking the question, why in the Western world India's achievements are not better known? Everyone in Western Europe or America or Australia is brought up, obviously, knowing the answers given by ancient Greece to the big questions that humanity asked. Why are we here? How do you live a moral life? What's the nature of this world we live in? What's the...

size of the world we live in? What's the distance between ourselves and the moon, stars and heavens? The best example of this is mathematics. Everyone in this room that went to school in this country would have been aware of Archimedes coming out of his bath and shouting Eureka by the age of six or seven. By the age of 10, you probably had studied Pythagoras's theorem.

But almost no one who wasn't brought up in South Asia would know about comparable Indian figures like Aryabhata and Brahmagupta. And these are really important figures. They're not sort of minor national icons or sort of... These people that changed the way humanity looks at the world. Aryabhata...

300 or 400 AD came up with the exact circumference of the Earth, the exact distance between the Earth and the Moon, the exact distance, the exact nature in the way that the Earth revolves around the Sun, which didn't get to Galileo until a thousand years later. What is pupil Brahmagupta who defined zero and realized that zero was a number with its own powers?

created a world where high mathematics was possible. Not only place value, tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, so on, but also algebra and algorithms. And the miracle that we take for granted every day that we look at our phones or look at the numbers on our laptops, whereby nine Indian symbols plus zero can express any number up to infinity.

Try giving your phone number to someone in Latin numerals. It takes about half an hour just to give a mobile number. MCC, XV, XV1, you know, even long multiplication or division with Roman numerals is very, very difficult. And this enormous leap is the nearest thing humanity has to universal language. Yet no one in this country, no one in America, has ever heard, frankly, of Aryabhatta or Brahmagupta. I've asked...

university audiences around this country, blank faces, unless they're from South Asia, which of course they do know. This is a name brought up in every Indian textbook. But it remains stuck in Indian textbooks. The same ignorance is not true, I think, anymore about China. China is an example of a country which, because of this idea of the Silk Road, has become very familiar to Western audiences. Last year, in London, in a city

very short distance from here, there were not one but two massive exhibitions about the Silk Road. One huge Chinese-sponsored, massive corporate lavish show at the British Museum that didn't mention India once, had these different places along the Silk Road, including odd places like Litchfield and Sutton Hoo, but did not mention India, which was, at the period it was talking about, the hub of east-west contact, as we'll see in a second. And another show at the British Library.

And yet the Silk Road is not some sort of universal idea. Marco Polo never talks about it. It's not in any Chinese or Roman or Greek source. It's actually an idea and a phrase invented in 1877 by a German geographer called Baron von Richthofen. We do not know of a single case of a Roman making it to China or a Chinese person making it to Rome. And yet this map in front of you

gives the impression, look at the names, Alexandria, Gaza, Tyre, Palmyra, Antioch, Petra. These are ancient names, and the impression is given that the Silk Road was this sort of motorway, like the M1, that ran from the Mediterranean to the South China Sea, and which allowed open contact with goods running along it. That idea in the Roman period is frankly bullshit. Because not only is it not true, at the same time that that was not happening, India and

Rome, Rome and India, were in regular annual contact to the extent that there were fleets, according to Strabo, of 250 vessels every year leaving the Red Sea coast and travelling to Barbaricum, which is where Karachi is now at the mouth of the Indus, Barigaza, which is in Gujarat, and Muziris in Kerala, near Kuching.

India and Rome were each other's principal trading partner. But that has completely slipped out. I mean, scholars know about this stuff. Go to David Wengrove or whoever teaches archaeology here. They all have read all the scholarly articles about this. But somehow it has failed to make the transition from the ivory tower, from academia, to the popular perception where this idea of the Silk Road is still completely dominant. And just to show how misplaced this idea is, if that idea were true, you would expect to find along this

During the classical period, Roman coin hoards to mark where Roman trade went. So let's map those things. This is what the Oxford Archaeological Department did this time last year. This is a brand new map. Here's what they came up with. As you'd expect, Roman coins are mainly in the Roman Empire, in Spain, Gaul, Italy, Greece, around the Black Sea and around the Mediterranean. There's a little trickle down the night. There is nothing along that horizontal line.

where the Silk Road is meant to run. Not one single Roman coin hoard has ever been found. Not one Roman coin hoard has ever been found in China. But look at India and Southeast Asia. Orange dots all over because, as we know from Pliny, India is the drain of all the precious metals in the world. So we have on one hand a myth that's fed every year by corporate-sponsored exhibitions.

And on the other hand, we have an academic truth that's completely unknown outside archaeological departments. So this seemed to be a project worth taking on. And the thesis in the book is that behind those economic journeys, behind those merchant journeys backwards and forwards, both east and west,

followed Indian ideas to a far greater extent than we've ever realised. So the first one, I haven't got time to go through it because of the traffic, I'm afraid, but Buddhism, obviously the first one. Buddha, a real living human being, 5th century BC. Nothing much happens to his message. It remains within the Gangetic Plains for 200 years until Ashoka suddenly takes it up, spreads it out. He sends what he calls Dharma ministers as far as, which are missionaries, as far as Cyrene, modern Libya.

you find in the period after shoka buddhist monasteries being dug into hillsides all over pune and through the western ghats wonderful wall paintings like ajanta spreading down to sri lanka where mahinda the son of a shoker converts the king of anuradhapura his stupor has just been discovered by archaeologists and this is the miracle which is not taught even in indian textbooks because india has forgotten about

It isn't a living faith except in the peripheries like Ladakh or Arunachal. This is the greatest moment of Indian soft power in history. Without any military conquest, and that's an important point, without any armies moving in any direction, Buddhism spreads through Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bactria. Other missionaries pass up through Nepal, through Tibet, through Lhasa, to Dunhuang, Mongolia and Siberia.

Others still to Chang'an, Korea, Japan, and another route down through Southeast Asia, Burma, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and the Philippines. And those missionary journeys at that period transform Asia forever. To this day, you can walk around Burma, Ceylon, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, and see Buddhist monks everywhere. With those missionaries also, though, come ideas of mathematics, ideas of aesthetics,

Indian ideas of temple building, the great myth, Ramayana, Mahabharata, all these start spreading. The languages, Prakrit, Sanskrit. And the amplitude of Indian influence is expanding every year as archaeologists dig. This thing turned up in the middle of me writing this book. This is an extraordinary Buddha's head made in the Gandharan style, but in pro-Kinesian classical marble from the Marmara Sea.

drilled according to the archaeologists who studied what they said, they're nicely called the tortellini curls of the Buddha's head, that is used, making a drill that's used only in Alexandria. So it's drilled or sculpted in Alexandria, and it's found in the temple of the goddess Isis on the Red Sea. Now, if we have Buddhist monks wandering around the Red Sea, then you have a completely new conception of the influence of India in the West, in the Roman Empire. And you can start asking questions, though you can't answer them yet,

If Buddhist monasticism was 400 years by the time this turns up on the Red Sea coast, can we see in the Desert Fathers the first Christian monks who in the 2nd, 3rd century begin taking up residence in caves? And St. Anthony of Egypt is the first. 50 miles his monastery is from where this was found. Can we see the influence of one on the other? So the whole idea of the monastic movement may well be an Indian influence and such an important idea in late antiquity, but then obviously in the European Middle Ages.

And this map is the other clinker, the real proof, really, of what I'm trying to say. So this is based on a book called The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, which sounds sort of very Latin, but it's just the lonely planet or the rough guide for the first century AD, written by a Roman merchant for other merchants travelling the same route.

And there was obviously sufficient for there to be a need to be a guide. You know, to this day, a publisher doesn't bring out a guide to parts of the world which no one can get to visit. So he depicts a trading world where he lists every single port on the west coast of India, quite a few on the east coast. And he says, just two months sailing. You're set off from Berenike or Mayas Hormuz, which is in the top of the Red Sea.

The same place Strabo says he saw 250 vessels waiting to leave for India. Why were they waiting? Well, that's the other important thing you can see on this map. Do you see the white expanse of Tibet up above India? That freezes over in winter, then it thaws in summer, creating winds blowing in, with cold winds raking in in winter, warm winds blowing out in summer. Those are the winds that create the monsoon winds.

And in a very un-Indian manner, they're both extremely punctual and well-organised. And every year you can set off from the coast of Kerala and travel to Alexandria. You've then got four months to sell your goods, to go and see a show in Alexandria, go and see the pyramids, get back to the Red Sea coast, and then you can sail back at equal speed in just two months to the coast of Gujarat, Sindh or Kerala. So you can do the whole thing in a single year.

And we now know the amount of money people were making. Also, Ethiopians is a big part of the story, but we'll have to gloss over them. They're not glossed over in the book. So a lot of money is being made, and we have the evidence of this from this papyrus called the Mazaris papyrus, which gives figures for all this.

And to cut a long, complicated story short, this is really just a shipping invoice for one container leaving Kerala and heading to Alexandria. What does it contain? Well, we have pictures of what it contains on a Roman mosaic because someone who made their money in this trade commissioned this mosaic in Sicily. And you have a rather voluptuous girl at the centre of it based on an Indian yakshi. Now, the Indian yakshi, the point of her is she's a fertility symbol. When she touches the tree at the top...

a bloom bursts out of the... You can see it on where Anne is. Now, the Romans got the busty bit, but they didn't get the bit about the bloom. So in this picture, she's just hanging on to a tree. It's rather oddly and pointlessly. But she is holding ivory. Behind her is pepper. And Pliny is very interesting. Pliny, the same source, thinks of...

Pliny's this sort of conservative naval commander, very much speaking in the voice of naval commanders today. And he regards pepper as a sort of woke spice that, you know, the young are putting on their food today, rather than going clubbing. It's a sort of thing that only kind of young metropolitan liberals would do, and Pliny's very disapproving of it. The only thing he's more disapproving of is silk, because he regards it as a sort of Victoria's Secret sort of pornoware or something. LAUGHTER

And indeed, this girl, as you can see in this picture, is wearing silk over her limbs, and you can see through her limbs. And this is the point. Roman women in Rome in the first century turned up at parties with single layers of silk so everyone could see what was going on. And Pliny, sitting on his naval ship outside Pompeii, is furious at this, the idea of all these metropolitan liberals misbehaving in this manner, trading with foreigners for this woke spice.

And he has a point, actually, because we know, for example, that Lolina Polina, who was a mistress of Nero, used to turn up like this at parties with Indian diamonds in her hair, garnets in her tummy buttons, pearls on her shoes. Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy.

She used to bring the receipts to parties to show people as if it was some sort of Punjabi wedding in Delhi in December. LAUGHTER

But I've raced forward. So anyway, everyone's making tons of money and the Muziris Papyrus, if that container did make it to Alexandria, the importer from the sheer amount that the Indians were charging for pepper, ivory, cotton, silks, would have been like the Elon Musk of Alexandria because it was hugely expensive. So winding forward, this all goes on, it all goes on up to China and

You have the Chinese coming to Nalanda, let's get on with this, to learn about the Buddhism that they've converted to. And Xuanzang turns up in Nalanda in the 6th century. Look at the plan of Nalanda. You have a courtyard, a cloister walk, a scholar's room is on two stories. Where do you see that?

at your college Oxford where your daughter is, Trinity College, Cambridge. It's the standard plan for universities in the West. Now, if you look carefully, that plan travels first through the madrasas of Islam, through Persia and North Africa and Cairo, through Islamic Spain, and the first places in Europe to have that plan are Bologna, Salerno,

Paris, and then in the 12th century, Oxford and Cambridge. So you can make a case, certainly, for that courtyard plan in the university coming all the way from Nalanda.

But the Nalanda University is the big deal why Xuanzang has gone all the way from China to Nalanda and why he regards it as the Ivy League, the Oxbridge, the NASA of its day, the LSE of its day. The word I was looking for. And he talks about the library, nine stories tall, where you can study the Vedas, logic, grammar, philosophy, philosophy,

He says that the young and the old mutually help each other without wasting a moment. The atmosphere in the monastery was solemn and dignified. And we have even this plaque in Delhi, which marks the dedication, endowment. It's like some rich Mahinda or someone giving LSE a new building, the Maharshal building or something. Yeah, here we are.

And this is the plaque commemorating that, that would have been originally placed on the building, and commemorating the 100 villages which are supplying all that, which is bought and dedicated to the monastery, which is supplying all the goods that provide all the food for all the students. That's the king of Srivijaya in Indonesia that's done that. So you've got a king from Indonesia dedicating a plaque to a university monastery in Bihar.

And when Xuanzang has spent 20 years studying the manuscripts in the London, this is probably what the library looked like. This is a pilgrim's plaque that is thought to be the shape of the London Library. He goes back to China, and there the Emperor Taizong on the left builds a replica, which is still standing, the Wild Goose Pagoda in Xi'an, before all these libraries go. But what's most important is that Taizong is taken into his bed

a young concubine called Wu Zetian, who eventually rises up and manages somehow to move from the bed of the former emperor Taizong to his son Gaizong. She doesn't look like much in the woodcut, but if you see the Chinese soap opera, you see there's slightly more explanation of what's going on here. And the important point about her is she converts the Chinese court to Buddhism.

Confucians and the Taoists get demoted, and you get an Indian religion at the heart of Chinese civilization for one reign. It's the high watermark.

Confucians and Taoists are backed by the following way. But during this reign, Nalanda monks and Nalanda-trained monks are running the kingdom through a sort of... Rather like the sinister Tory think tanks that brought about Brexit, like Tufton Street and Smith Square and these sort of terrible institutions. The one in the Chinese court is called the Scholars of the Northern Gate, and they're all Nalanda-trained alumni who are bringing Indian influence into the heart of China.

Meanwhile, the same sort of thing is going on in Southeast Asia. When Rome collapses in the 5th century, suddenly India has to get out of bed and do a day's work. Up to now, they've been flogging their pepper and their ivory for extortionate amounts of money.

and their diamonds and their garnets. So India's been incredibly wealthy. India's been the Saudi Arabia, if you like, rather than having oil wells. But just as if everyone suddenly went over to EVs and suddenly no one needed crude oil and Saudis had to do a day's work. That's what happens in 5th century India. And so what they have to do is they pivot eastwards to find new sources of gold to replace the gold that was arriving every year in great quantities from Rome.

So you have these incredible Tamil trading guilds. Tamil and Karnataka has these wonderful guilds, particularly one called the 500 that's a bit like the Iron Bank in Game of Thrones. They've got their own corps of assassins, as well as their own army. And these guys mean business, and they pivot eastwards. And in Suvarna Bumi, the lands of gold, they find new sources of gold, particularly in Kutai, Palembang, Keling.

And you find, at this period, thousands of Indian boats now sailing eastwards. Previously it had been west to Rome, now it's east to Southeast Asia. And from the 5th century you begin to see signs of Buddhism in Thailand. This is the Dvaravati Wheels of Law from the British Museum, or the V&A, I can't remember which. V&A, in fact, I think. This is...

Lingams and yonis and images of Shiva and a Buddhist monk from Malaysia, 5th century. Again, you get the impression of small settlements at river estuaries, Indian traders arriving, setting up temples, gradually converting the locals, becoming richer. But the biggest one of all is in the Mekong Delta.

On the Mekong Delta, you get these incredible canals built by the Khmer across the delta. You go down them today and you arrive at Ashram Maharajah at Angkor Barre. And inside that is the first...

surviving Hindu temples. And in that are these incredible early images of Vishnu, but already they're beginning to do things that aren't done in India. This is not just copying Indian ideas, provincial understanding. They've got whole new ideas. So the king, Jayavarman, who founds the Angkor dynasty, depicts himself as Lord Vishnu. That's his face, but he's holding a discus and a conch.

And this is the kind of thing that's going on. You've got a guy sitting under a canopy, a whole load of Brahmins with top knots, looking like the Kumbh Mela, with Brahmins' cords pouring water over him in the Abhisheka ceremony. He's been converted into a Hindu king, and he changes his name from something like Kudunga to Suryavama. Suddenly Sanskrit is the language, all the way from Kandahar to Bali. And you have the Pallava Grantha or Southern Brahmi script. North Indian scripts have the straight line,

from Hindi right back to Sanskrit, the Devanagri, with the letters coming down like a washing line. You can't do those straight lines on palm leaf because you rip the palm with the old stylus. So you have to have rounded scripts. And this is the basis for not only Tamil and Malayalam, but also Khmer, Mon, Thai, Pune, Burmese. All the Southeast Asian scripts derived from Pallava Granthur developed in Kanchipuram.

Every pre-Islamic script in Southeast Asia has its origins in this script. But it also affects the landscape. You have a new Kurukshetra turning up in Laos, a new Ayodhya turning up outside Bangkok, and the rivers have even their beds carved so that yonis and lingams fill them. They are sick rivers. And most dramatically...

The central river of Southeast Asia is renamed Marganga, or in the Khmer pronunciation, Mekong. So you have a re-visioning of the landscape. It becomes part of a wider India. And before long, temples are popping up, very much based on the Indian model. This, on the left, is the Shaw Temple at Mahabalipuram. On the right is an almost identical temple built five years later in Java, Gdong Songo.

You have, by the 9th century, larger temples being built in Southeast Asia because you have two mega-kingdoms developing. Srivijaya, which is like a thalassocracy, a great sort of naval confederacy all over the islands of Indonesia. And then facing that, that's largely Buddhist, and then facing that on land, you have the Khmer all over Cambodia and Laos and Thailand and Vietnam as they spread out.

And because they have greater resources, they can do things that the smaller Indian kingdoms cannot do. So we get temples at Prambanan larger than any in 9th century India. We get a 240-part sort of strip cartoon of the Ramayana 400 years before you have anything like that in India. You have the largest Buddhist temple in the world built at Borobudur in Java, and eventually the largest Hindu temple in the world built in Angkor.

absolutely vast the area within the outer moat is four times the size of the Vatican City 1.2 million people in Greater Angkor at a time when London's about 20 000 and don't tell Mr Modi but it's the greatest Hindu Empire ever just as Angkor Wat is the greatest Hindu temple ever built it's the largest medieval building of any sort ever

But again, it's slightly different. When Tagore goes to see it in 1920, he says brilliantly, everywhere I could see India, yet I could not recognize it. Because the Indian forms have blossomed in new ways. The seeds from India and different soils have grown differently. And for example, in the center of the quincunx, these five towers, you have the central tower containing the ashes of Suryavarman II who builds it. Something you do not find in any Hindu temples.

There you have it in the guts, or a chat tree outside or something. But this is at the heart of it, like a Buddhist stupa. So they're doing things in Southeast Asia that is not being done. You also have female Brahmins. Everyone eats pork and drinks beer, and there's no caste. It's quite an attractive version. Finally, numbers. Here in front of you, the number 270. You can all read that. How can you read a 9th century Indian inscription? The answer is that

Early India brings into itself, and this is an important point, it isn't just that, as the nationalists sometimes imagine early India as a sort of Tupperware full of concentrated pure essence of Indianness. Like any expansive, thriving civilisation, it's pulling in learning from all around, just like in modern America, until Trump was pulling in brilliant minds from all over. So at this period, you have...

The Yavana Sutras, which we don't know what they were, but they were obviously Greek texts of some sort. They could have been Euclid, they could have been Archimedes, who knows what they were, but they're lost. But we have references to them being studied.

works of Persian, ancient Egyptian, Babylonian scholars, and it's Ari Bhatta who pulls it all together in the fourth century. When you go to Ajanta, you see the incredibly multicultural early India was. Those frescoes have people that look Egyptian, Ethiopian, Greeks, Romans. They're all there gathering in. It's like London or New York.

It's not this sort of pure essence of Hindutva, which is like how it's sometimes imagined. It's an incredibly cosmopolitan society, and that's why they've got all these cutting-edge ideas, because they're taking these ideas, cross-fertilizing it with Vedic mathematics, and you're getting suddenly Aryabhata capable of measuring from the moon to the earth, from the sun to the earth.

Zero first turns out. This is, you're looking at the very first firmly dated zero in the world. K127 from Siem Reap in Cambodia. Middle line, the dot between the two tadpoles is the world's first dated zero. By the 8th century in Gwalior, bottom right, middle line, that 270, that is, how do they get from Gwalior to London? So this is a math that should be taught in every textbook in anywhere in the world.

Because everyone now uses these numbers, but no one seems to know where they're from. In this country, we're told they're Arabic numbers, which incidentally only happens in the 19th century. Up to that point, it's remembered. It's the high point of colonialism that India gets downgraded. And I think it's obviously connected to Macaulay. How can you claim to be colonizing, civilizing a people if they've been civilized for 4,000 years already before you turned up? So it starts with Brahmi, first century. That Gwalior inscription is the ninth century. And then it goes in three directions. This is what's so interesting.

Devanagri carries on in India with those numbers. A cousin of them, the East Arabic numbers, take over in Syria, Iraq, Egypt. But look what happens in Morocco and Islamic Spain on the left column. West Arabic numbers by the 16th century are clearly our numbers that we all use today. How do they get to the Middle East? Well, most improbably, through a Disney character. LAUGHTER

through Jafar in Aladdin. Remember Jafar, the guy with the parrot? So Jafar is one of the Barmakids. Barmakids are an extraordinary family of formerly Buddhist abbots from Balkan Afghanistan. The granddad, great-granddad of Jafar, studied higher mathematics in Srinagar and Kashmir before being called in to rearrange the accounts of the Abbasid revolution. And in the course of the Abbasid revolution...

These guys are so good with their numbers that they're made prime ministers, the viziers of Baghdad. And they designed Baghdad in a mandala Indian shape. The first thing they do is to send to Sindh for a copy of Brahmagupta Narayabhatta's book. And they get an edition in which they're rolled together, which the Arabs called the Great Sindh Hind. At first, there's some difficulty translating it. There's a first translation by somebody called Fazari, which is quite opaque.

But two generations later, a guy turns up from what's now Uzbekistan, from Kiva, then called Khwarazm. And that is al-Khwarizmi. And al-Khwarizmi comes to Baghdad and he brings together Aryabhatta and Brahmagupta. It's not really a translation. It's a new book, but using their ideas, mixing in some Euclid. And he calls it

The snappy title he gives it is the compendious book of calculation and completion by balancing and calculation. Sorry, start again. The compendious book of calculation by completion and balancing according to Hindu calculation. It sounds even worse in Arabic. So it's just known by a nickname, algebra. While his own name, al-kharizmi, becomes our word, algorithm. So algorithms and algebra.

begin at the point of impact of Indian ideas into the Islamic world. How does it get to Europe from there? Well, along with chess, another Indian game that's moving along the same path westwards, when you say checkmate in chess, you're speaking Farsi. Shahmat, the king is dead. And the rook is the same rook as Shah Rukh Khan. It's a chariot. Same word. So,

Here is the map. Sindh on the right. Any Sindhis in the audience? Not a single Sindhi in this great institution of learning. Shame on LSE. One Sindhi. You should be very proud, sir, of this moment. So the copies of Arribat and Brahmagoptha come from Sindh. They go to Baghdad, which is in Iraq, in the middle of the map. It's very small writing, but it's under the word buyuds, buyuds, who are the rulers of Tensatri.

Khwarazm is up above the Aral Sea, top right. Al-Khwarizmi comes from Khwarazm to Baghdad. He translates, writes the Al-Jabr, and that passes through Palestine, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Islamic Spain, Al-Andalus, and Christian monks by the 10th century are using the Indian number system in a monastery outside Barcelona. But for 200 years more, everyone is still

using MCV, CCX, MCV, all that sort of stuff, in northern Europe. And it's only an incredible chance, a probable chance, that results in it moving northward. Look at the map of Italy. Can you see where Pisa is, as in the Leaning Tower? So Pisa, in 1126, I think, decides to found a trading colony in Algeria. So they send a sort of senior merchant,

And he brings his kids. Just like my kids went to school in Delhi and learned good Hindi, he learns Arabic. And he learns Arabic, plus he studies Al-Khwarizmi, which has just been used as a textbook for any teenager across the Islamic world by this phase. He then goes back to Pisa when he's 18 and discovers all his mates are still doing MCC, VC, X1, XC. And so he writes a book called the Libra Abaki, the Book of Numbers. And that guy, luckily for us, is Sabanachi.

So Fibonacci takes these ideas from the Islamic world, but he knows that they're Indian ideas. He calls them the modus indorum. Even today in the Arabic world, the Arabs call these numbers Hindu numbers, just like we call them Arabic numbers. So Fibonacci takes them back to Pisa, and astonishingly, the word of his book causes such a sensation that it reaches the year of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II.

who comes up from Palermo all the way to Pisa to quiz him with a bunch of Byzantine mathematicians in the court. And, of course, Fibonacci wipes the floor with all of them. Imagine Trump going to Detroit to talk to someone that's one countdown or something. It's hugely improbable. Anyway, this is what happens. And then, having been impressed by Fibonacci, he brings him to Castel del Monte in Puglia, which is his perfectly geometrical castle.

And there, importantly, he introduces him to a Scotsman called Michael Scott, who's another great hero of this story. The Scots can feel as proud as the Sindys in this story. Because Michael Scott of Melrose...

had studied in Toledo, also knew about Arabic mathematics and so on, reads Fibonacci's version of it, realises it's a work of genius, but also realises it's way too theoretical, Paul, he says. It's got to add some money lending, we've got to have some usury, we've got to have currency conversion, double accounting, all the things that merchants actually use in the real world. Nearly done.

And so he does that. And that is the book which creates the Italian banking revolution. Leads to the Medici, the rise of Florence, the rise of Siena. Go to the National Gallery show. That's all paid for by the banking revolution. It reaches Tuscany where Piero della Francesco uses it to calculate perspective. You get the whole beginning of Renaissance painting.

But Piero della Francesco, who we think of as the great painter, at the time is really primarily a mathematician, and he writes three treatises based on Fibonacci. When he dies, his friend Luca Caroli takes... Friar Luca Caroli... Sorry, Friar Luca Pacioli takes those three treatises with him to Milan, where he shares it with his flatmate, who's painting a fresco of the Last Supper in Milan...

And it's Leonardo da Vinci. So we get from five leaps, we get from Leonardo and the Renaissance to Fibonacci, to Al-Khwarizmi, to Brahmagupta, to Aryabhata, and Pataliputra, 4th century. Unfortunately, the next thing that happens is we get the East India Company and it all goes to Helena Hancock, but that's another story for another day. APPLAUSE

We have a few minutes. Having read the book, Willie, I think that was just such a masterful story about what has happened and what I really appreciate is

Not only that, you know, as an Indian, this is not about chauvinism, but it's about reorienting how we imagine how the world developed. And it develops with a certain generosity of spirit and curiosity. And as you, I think, say right at the end of the book,

that one thing is for sure, that civilizations only grow and prosper when they're open and they invite influences and allow exchange of ideas, which in the current global moment is particularly important to remember. I think I'm very grateful to the chauvinists, though, because I think it's because this subject has been monopolized by the extreme right and by mad WhatsApp uncles,

That is why no one's written a proper book about it. Because in India, it's considered slightly embarrassing. You know, the Indian uncle saying, you know, invented nuclear power, invented the internet. The Rishis had, you know, laptops, all that sort of stuff.

So those of you who haven't bought the book will buy the book, will sign it. The signing will be upstairs. But let me... I canvassed some questions before you arrived. And I think there is some curiosity about your travel process. How do you plan your travel? Because...

Part of the reason why this story comes to life is because you are able to describe buildings, use a language. I mean, you're the few authors I have to repeatedly actually look up words for because they're quite technical architectural terms that you use to describe places. How do you keep notes? How do you remember which photograph corresponds to which? Can you talk about that a bit? So things slightly changed.

Obviously, with the growth of... I mean, now we all take pictures on our phones. We even take notes on our phones. In the old days, I used to travel with tons of notebooks, some of which I'd photocopy and send home before I went into places like Iran or Afghanistan. You're always afraid you're going to have your notebook stolen. Now you can just send stuff instantly. But I think you can't write confidently about a place until you've been there and really seen it. And obviously the great pleasure of doing this book was...

having an excuse to go and spend six months in Angkor Wat and Borobudur and amazing places like that. But also Toledo in Spain and, you know, everywhere in between. And

I think it's very important to be able to describe from first-hand observation as much as you can of the landscape, whether it's in the Landa or... Of all places, Brahmagupta lived in Mount Abu in Rajasthan, most improbable place for a mathematician to hang out. And, yeah, so I take detailed notes. Oh, you have to take detailed notes. But this book, I mean, is very different in form from my...

colonial books, the full company quartet books,

all of which are basically library books sitting in both the National Archives in Delhi and sitting in... British Library. ..in British Library. Lily Taksang here, put up your hand somewhere if you're in the audience. She is here somewhere, I believe, who very kindly spent a lot of time in the National Archives copying out manuscripts. She's not putting her hand up, but I think she is here somewhere. LAUGHTER Where are you? LAUGHTER

Lily did a lot of work over the years in the National Archives, but also in the British Library, and that's obviously a different process. I use old-fashioned card indexes. For the history books, I have a dateline which starts off as a few pages, and by the time I come to write, it's often 600 or 700, with all the quotes already cut up and diced and ready to go.

In the card indexes, I have all the characters. So for a book like this, there'll be cards for Aryabhata, Brahmagupta, Frederick II, Fibonacci, Al-Khwarizmi, all these sort of characters. And they grow as you research more. But when you plan your travels, how do you know where to go? Because often you find places, don't you? So you obviously set off with a list of places you want to go and see, but then...

the thing expands and rolls of its own variety. So I'm quite sort of, as you may have noticed today, quite flexible with my travel plans, which often take their own forms, not necessarily ending up where I was meant to be at the right time. And...

Yeah, so one thing leads to another. And there's a lovely process that I'm sure many of you will recognise of reading and then wanting to see somewhere, going somewhere and wanting to read some more. And that sort of rolls with its own momentum and then suddenly you have to go to Toledo or whatever it is. Okay, I'm going to... Literally, we have just a few minutes and we'll allow some questions from the floor. There is a very young member of the audience. Why don't you go first?

I just ended up back there by accident when I was 18 and never got away, really. I've been living there all my adult life. And for a writer, it's just like being a child in a sweet shop. It's just, you never run out of stuff, weird shit to write about. You had a question? Because time is short and precious, we draw a question, because it's not in the context of the Golden Rule. Okay.

I'll happily answer it afterwards, sir. Please. Any others? Yeah. Just here in the third row. How does the changing political milieu, say, in New Delhi affect the way you record history? So, I mean, I'm not a member of an institution. So, you know, I think people in JNU and recently there was an arrest in one of the other Ashoka University. I'm not part of that world and so far have managed to continue my work without any...

I mean, occasionally things have been moments when things have looked a bit tricky, but so far I still have a visa and can operate perfectly well. It's not, you know, it's not the most open atmosphere at the moment. And things can be very difficult if you're writing Mughal history, for example. And obviously things are dropping out of the curriculum such as Mughal history.

It's difficult if you're managing museum. The National Museum has sort of, you know, the Mogul galleries have disappeared and the National Museum in Delhi, although they've reappeared recently in the Humayun's Tomb Museum, which is some compensation. But I'm independent enough to not really have much difficulty so far. If anything, this book in particular shows how much more work requires to be done.

so much more archaeological excavation. Nalanda, for instance. Well, yes and no. This book, much more than my colonial books, which are new research and archives, this book was a lockdown book based on other people's work. Everything I've said today is based on papers produced, usually by Indian scholars. And so I'm in the debt of... Which is why the book has 100 pages of footnotes and stuff. There's a lot of...

But I think being an independent scholar gives you a freedom to break out of silence. So in this particular world, the Buddhist scholars all talk to each other and go to conferences together. All the Buddhist remains are put into one section of the museum. The Hindu and the Sanskrit and all that stuff is a different group of scholars in different departments, in different museums. And then the history of mathematics and history of science stuff is a third world.

And very rarely do those silos get broken open and the dots join between them. And it's something that an independent scholar is able to do more freely than someone stuck in a particular discipline with their colleagues looking over their shoulders. So that's one advantage I have over someone with a proper job. Amongst many. But it's...

Yes, it's odd, though, that the last book really like this was, I suppose, A. L. Basham's The Wonder That Was India, which was written in 1954, which is now, whatever it is, 70 years ago. It's a long time since that book was written. And it's odd that there aren't hundreds of books like this, to be honest. There should be more. There are very specific reasons for what's happening within Indian history writing, which is a separate conversation. I'm afraid...

I am going to have to draw this to a close. I'm very happy to sign books, answer questions, have a drink, anything for the next... Upstairs. Okay, great. Before we end, though, can I just say that the final, final event of this week-long festival, LSE's Research Festival, is called Positive Futures. It's at 6.30 in this...

venue and you're all welcome to stay since you've made the journey to LSE you may as well stay a little bit longer for that event after you've bought Willie's book have a drink on us on LSE but allow me to thank Willie not just for this book for all your writing and on a personal note I think this event is being held in the Marshall Building this space that we are currently occupying is where the student occupation takes place

was held exactly a year ago against the genocide in Gaza. And your sterling, untiring campaigning on that issue is deeply appreciated by many. Thank you. APPLAUSE

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