The Golden Road

How Ancient India Transformed the World

By: William Dalrymple

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Paperback | 29 July 2025

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Paperback

Dimensions(cm)
19.8 x 12.9 x 3.6

Paperback

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THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

A revolutionary new history of the diffusion of Indian ideas, from the award-winning, bestselling author and co-host of the chart-topping Empire podcast

India is the forgotten heart of the ancient world

In the millennium and a half from c. 250 BC to 1200 AD, Indian art, religion, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics and mythology blazed a trail across the world - a 'Golden Road' that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific.

Here, William Dalrymple draws from a lifetime of scholarship to highlight India's oft-forgotten position as the heart of ancient Eurasia. For the first time, he gives a name to this spread of Indian ideas that transformed the culture and technology of not only its ancient world, but our world as we know it today.

A 2024 BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR THE TIMES, SPECTATOR and HISTORY TODAY

About the Author

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. William lives with his wife and three children on a goat farm outside Delhi.

Industry Reviews

'Richly woven, highly readable ... Written with passion and verve' - Spectator

'Dazzling ... Not just a historical study but also a love letter' - Guardian

'An outstanding new account ... The most compelling retelling we have had for generations' - Financial Times

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