Talks
William Dalrymple’s Golden Road
If our recent exhibition, Chay Reds, Ferrous Black: The Untold Stories of Indian Trade Textiles in Sri Lanka, has taught us anything, it is the profound influence of trade routes in shaping cultural practices, materials, and traditions.
William Dalrymple, in his book The Golden Road, takes this concept further, although in a broader context. The book argues that the primary trade route connecting Eurasia from 250 BCE to 1200 CE—referred to as the “Golden Road”—was a vital corridor through India. This route facilitated the spread of an Indian sphere of influence, often called the “Indosphere.” Over 1,500 years, Indian ideas in music, dance, mathematics, architecture, and sculpture traveled across vast areas of Asia, evolving into local forms while shaping the region’s cultural and intellectual history.
Join us in a conversation with William Dalrymple as he draws from a lifetime of scholarship to shed light on India’s often-overlooked position as the heart of ancient Eurasia. Discover how India’s ideas and innovations not only spread across the continent but also played a pivotal role in shaping its history and identity.
Bookings
This event is fully booked.
William Dalrymple
William Dalrymple is one of Britain’s great historians and the bestselling author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Hemingway and Kapuscinski Prize-winning Return of a King. A frequent broadcaster, he has written and presented three television series, one of which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA. He has also won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Foreign Correspondent of the Year at the FPA Media Awards, and been awarded five honorary doctorates. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and has held visiting fellowships at Princeton, Brown and All Souls, University of Oxford.
He writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and the Guardian. In 2018 he was presented with the prestigious President’s Medal by the British Academy for his outstanding literary achievement and for co-founding the Jaipur Literature Festival. He is the co-host of chart-topping podcast Empire with Anita Anand.
