The Early Years

The idea that globalisation is a purely modern phenomenon is misleading. India’s history shows that connections with distant parts of the world are not new. Two thousand years ago, India was already part of a network of civilisations.

The most famous example is the Silk Route, which linked India to the great civilisations of China, Persia, Egypt and Rome. Through this route, goods, ideas and people moved across continents. But trade was not the only reason for movement. Throughout India’s long past, people arrived from different regions — as traders, as conquerors, or as migrants searching for new land — and settled here permanently. Even today, in remote Indian villages, people often recall a time when their ancestors lived elsewhere before coming to their current home.

The depth of these ancient interactions is visible in language and scholarship. The greatest grammarian of Sanskrit, Panini, who systematised Sanskrit grammar and phonetics around the fourth century BCE, was of Afghan origin. In the seventh century CE, the Chinese scholar Yi Jing learned Sanskrit not in India but in Java, in the city of Shri Vijaya, on his way from China to India. This shows that knowledge travelled through multiple centres, not just in a straight line from one country to another. The influence of these interactions is clearly reflected in the languages and vocabularies of many Asian countries — from Thailand to Malaya, Indo-China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Korea and Japan. …