Kannan Srinivasan in New York

  As to what’s wrong with William Dalrymple this becomes to me evident in his latest book ( The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World, Bloomsbury, 482 pp., £30, September ) which ends thus: “ Today.. many believe that India’s moment has come again, and that it is now returning to its traditional place at the centre of world affairs, bridging east and west and acting as a crossroads of civilisations…...  The only questions are whether it is India, China or the United States which will dominate. …………For a thousand years, India’s ideas spread with its traders along the Golden Road and transformed the world, creating around itself an Indosphere, a cultural zone that spread over political borders–comparable to the Hellenised world fashioned by Alexander the Great…Within this area Indian culture and civilisation transformed everything they touched. This poses a question, unthinkable in 1947 at independence from Britain: could they do so again?”  Yet note that Fer...