China hopes to dominate Eurasia, and talks up the “Silk Route” connecting China to Europe to establish a precedent for its contemporary “Belt and Road Initiative” – a connectivity project utilising land and sea routes as well as financial and digital networks. What stories about the “Silk Route” miss, however, is India’s central role in connecting East and West during classical antiquity, for about a millennium since the days of the Roman empire.

That story is well told in traveller-historian William Dalrymple’s latest magnum opus The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World. According to Dalrymple, the creation of an Indian sphere of influence straddling Eurasia can be dated to around 250 BCE. Trade with the Roman empire reached its peak following the Battle of Alexandria in 30 BCE, which opened up Egyptian ports for maritime trade between Rome and India’s western coast. 

India exported premium textiles, spices, ivory and other desirable commodities to Rome, leading Roman naval commander Pliny to complain that India was becoming “the drain of all the precious metals of the world”. While no Roman coin hoards have been found in China, many such hoards have been discovered across the Indian coast. Urbanisation in South India was fuelled by the influx of Roman gold.

Indian traders and merchants coped with the fall of the Roman empire in the 5th century CE with a classical version of the “Look East” or “Act East” policies of contemporary Indian governments. Soon Southeast Asian rulers gave themselves Sanskritic names, and the largest Hindu and Buddhist temples were built in Indonesia or Cambodia. The Pallava script is considered the mother of Southeast Asian writing systems.

So from the 5th century CE onwards it is the eastern part of the Golden Road that grows more prominent, as Indian ideas of cosmology, architecture, sculpture, mathematics, music and dance spread across vast areas of Asia. According to historian Anirudh Kanisetti “by the 9th century the subcontinent had emerged as the central link in the exchange chain between Europe, Africa and much of Asia”. It’s only from the 13th century onwards that Mongol conquests across Eurasia create the conditions for a consolidated “Silk Route”, and the lustre of the Indosphere lessens a bit.  

Calculations by economic historian Angus Maddison show that India contributed roughly 30% of global GDP during the first millennium CE. By the late 17th century – when the Mughals were ruling India – this ratio amounted to a still substantial 25%, and India was considered to be in a state of proto-industrialisation. However, India soon came under the sway of the British Raj, and industrialisation failed to take off.

By 1947, when India gained independence, its share of global GDP had plummeted to 4%. That share went down further after 1947 then ticked back up after the 1991 reforms, so that India now is roughly back to 4%. It is time to pick up the pace. 

Much of India’s post-independence period has been marked by trade pessimism, and the prevalence of theories of import substitution over export promotion. But for anyone excited or inspired by India’s civilisational past, it has historically been a great trading realm. There is no reason why it cannot repeat that feat, and partake of a larger share of global trade than it does currently. 

It is true that a number of roadblocks are coming up to the multilateral, rules-based system of global trade, whose institutional order is eroding. But that is throwing up new opportunities as well, and India must devise a trade strategy to take advantage of them. For instance, heightened competition in trade and technology between the US and China is pushing many global firms to adopt a ‘China Plus One’ strategy, which India can leverage to somewhat close the gap with China in terms of the latter’s outsize role in global trade.

If during the 9th century India had been a key link in the exchange of goods and ideas between Africa, Europe and Asia, it can recover that role once again in the 21st century. Of course 21st century technologies permit one to project goods and ideas further out, with great facility, and India can become a key node connecting East and West. Or, to put it slightly differently, play a role in “convergence”.

That indeed is what The Convergence Foundation, along with network organisations, is assiduously working towards. May the Silk Route have its pride of place, alongside the Golden Road as well.