William Dalrymple – How Ancient India Transformed the World

William Dalrymple – How Ancient India Transformed the World

The historian and co-host of the chart-topping podcast Empire, William Dalrymple, shares the rarely told story of India’s role as a cultural and scientific superpower of the ancient world.

One of Britain’s greatest living historians, William Dalrymple is known across the globe for his ability to bring the extraordinary history of the Indian subcontinent to life, whether through award-winning, bestselling books like Return of a King and The Anarchy, or his chart-topping podcast, Empire.

Now he joins us to tell the story of how, from 250BC to 1200AD, India transformed the world: exporting religion, art, science, medicine, and language along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific, creating a vast and profoundly important empire of ideas.

Like ancient Greece, ancient India came up with a set of profound answers to the big questions about what the world is, how it operates, why we are here and how we should live our lives. Out of India came holy men, monks and missionaries as well as pioneering merchants and artists, astronomers, healers, and scientists. Indian ideas crossed political borders and influenced everything they touched, from the statues in Roman seaports to the Buddhism of Japan, the poetry of China to the mathematics of Baghdad.

Don’t miss this chance to hear the story of how India became the great intellectual and philosophical superpower of ancient Asia.

Bestselling Historian and Broadcaster

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