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Hello and welcome to A Very Special Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Droomple. Rather excited, William Droomple. Well, I mean, you're probably as excited as I am about our very, very special guest. So let me just tell you about our very special guest. He'll be familiar to people who like this pod and love this pod. And just as a preamble, he's a man who has no respect for time, but makes me laugh more than anyone I've ever met.
He is proudly, fiercely Scottish. It's just so disgustingly prolific as a writer. He's done it again. He's finished a book. And if you're on social media at all, you would have seen his shiny little happy face opening his box of books quite recently. It is William Darenpool. There he is. It was a very, very nice thing, opening that box of books in case...
Anyone here has not seen this video. And a very anonymous looking box turned up on Monday when I just got back from holiday. Did you think it was wine? It could easily have been. It was the right shape. We do get our wine delivered in boxes a bit like that. But it wasn't. We'd been tipped off that it might be coming that day. So Olive got the camera out, or rather got her phone out and made a wee video and...
This box was impossible to open. You did make quite the meal of it. I was just like, I was thinking, can someone just get me doing it with a butter knife? The idea was to do a very quick video lasting about five seconds, open the thing up and hold the book up, but I couldn't get into it. It was hilarious. It was like being at a kid's birthday party and you were like one step away from...
Could you open it? Open my present for me. Could you just open it? But it has that feeling. It does, Harry, when you've written a book and you've got the box and you open it and in there is your baby that you have been working on for five years. Beautiful.
It is just like a child at their first sort of conscious Christmas. And the excitement of opening that is just lovely. And it looks really pretty. Oh, it looks fabulous. We did about five months ago, we did a little preamble when your book cover was just designed and we sort of waxed lyrical about it. It's gorgeous. And it looks as gorgeous as I assumed it would from the pictures. What's different with the actual book is it's all sort of embossed.
And all the gold bits sort of stick out. I'm just playing with it now in the light. It's all shiny. It's sweet, really. It's before I dribble on it and put butter on the cover and stuff. Yeah. Or drop olive oil in pages. Anyway, whatever. Well, no, not whatever. It's wonderful. But you know that the analogy you gave about it being like a children's birthday. The main difference, and I don't know whether you think this, is that when you open a book...
And you've been with this book for five years. So really, you've got a toddler that comes out of the box. But the first thing the toddler does is bugger off around the world without so much as a how-to-do. And it's in the world and it will do its own thing. And that often is surprising. And already people are beginning to send me pictures of bookshop windows in odd parts of the country where they've got the book cover in the window already.
It's very exciting. It's very, very exciting. This book, for some reason, had a longer tail than any other book. Frantic last minute edits on difficult Sanskrit names and things. And then various friends. I have a lovely friend who lives in Pondicherry, who is the leading Sanskrit scholar of Khmer inscriptions in Southeast Asia. You know, the stuff around Angkor Wat and so on.
Weird enough, this guy went to school with me for the age of seven, and he's ended up running this French academy in Pondicherry where they look at these extraordinary inscriptions. And I've been trying to persuade him to look at this manuscript and point out the errors for about a year. Were you not very nice to him at school? I was very nice to him at school. Did you not share your lunch? Oh, okay. All right, just wondering. But he's now very grand, very scholarly, and a very serious academic. Anyway, in the middle of...
May, he suddenly reads this book and finds, you know, 500 errors in my old Tamilian or Sanskrit transcriptions and starts sending me all his scholarly essays, which are wonderful, but quite sort of hardcore, shall we say. Daunting. Yeah.
But this sort of thing is what makes a book when suddenly you can really buttress it with really serious hardcore scholarship. And it's very nice when you've got the narrative flow ready, then you can add. So this book in the end, about a third of it is notes and bibliography. It's fantastic.
actually not that long in terms of the text the main text it's only 298 pages which i think is my shortest book gosh certainly 15 years like a bigger book so it's all the sort of end notes that are bringing up the rear the total thing is nearly 500 it's 478 79 but i'm not surprised that you care that much i mean you you always do care very very much about not just writing about a thing with great enthusiasm but moving scholarship along and certainly this book
This book is going to ruffle some feathers. It will, and it could go down in a whole variety of ways. I mean, on one hand, also, it enters a culture war, which I think people in Europe and America will not be aware of, which is the whole nature of India's ancient history and how India looks at it. And there is a whole ultra-nationalist world out there now in India that believes everything in the world came from India, from the internet and atomic bombs through helicopters and everything else.
And however much you praise ancient India, it'll never be quite enough for that group. While people in the West are largely completely ignorant, partly because of the whole business of colonial scholarship doing down the wonders of India from the mid-19th century, from the period of Macaulay onwards. And so virtually no one in Europe knows that the numbers we use and call Arabic numbers actually originated in India.
No one in Europe knows that half the world lives in countries or parts of the world where Indian religions and philosophies were once dominant.
We grew up very much with the idea that what we call civilization began in ancient Greece and that not just ideas of architecture and geometry, but ideas of philosophy and political ideas such as democracy and the republic all began with Plato and Aristotle and so on. There is a whole cast of equivalents in India who quite separately and sometimes linked because ideas were traveling in the early period, which is one of the themes of the book.
And so ideas from people like Euclid do make it to India. And there are things like the Yavana Sutras, which are Greek mathematical texts, which are being read in India and vice versa. A lot of the stuff that we call Greek mathematics and people like Euclid and Ptolemy are actually working in Egypt, in Alexandria.
which is very much within sailing distance of India at this period. We are familiar with that term, Anglosphere, but you talk about an Indosphere. And the Indosphere has a deep, long history. We're talking about a period of history between 250 AD
BC to 1200 AD, a stretch of a great many years where India was confident about exporting its culture, its science, its literature, and people received it gratefully. So exactly this, this is the main theme of the book. And that word Indosphere, I should say, is borrowed from a friend of the show, Simon Sebag Montefiore, who came up with it just mid-sentence in his wonderful book, The World, his history of the world.
It's a coinage I borrow with gratitude from him. I think it's an important phrase because there is this whole chunk of the world which really, there's two ways of looking at it. One, if you look in the linguistic terms, from Afghanistan to Japan, Sanskrit was being read. Once you've got Sanskrit, there comes the whole of Sanskrit literature, which involves science, geometry, mathematics, ideas of cosmology, ideas of religion, ideas of philosophy. That Sanskrit world with Sanskrit literature
is dominant for a thousand years over, what, four or five thousand miles from Kandahar in the west, right through to Bali and Japan. And everything in between, what is written in Sanskrit, the Sanskrit plays, the Sanskrit texts on aesthetics, on love, on poetry, and so on, are read across the world. And
In the same way that colonialism made, for example, appreciation of Shakespeare in the English colonial world, you know, a mark of civilization. So 500 AD, appreciation of Kalidasa and the great Sanskrit plays was not just something which Indians were proud of and sometimes profaned.
performed their knowledge of publicly as a mark of their civilization. The same was true in Cambodia, or Laos, or Vietnam, or Bali, or Indonesia. You have this great geographical spread. But beyond that central endosphere, you've got kind of wider ripples rippling out
Indian numbers, Indian ideas of place value, that's tens, hundreds, thousands, and so on, tens of thousands. And the idea of zero, which is an idea which is rooted in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, the idea of the void, sunya, which becomes in Arabic, zifal, which becomes in English, cipher. And these ideas...
which are rooted deeply in Indian philosophy, change mathematics completely. Well, listen, hold up a minute. You're doing the thing that you do, which is where you've galloped to the end of the book. I've galloped back out to the end of the story. Whoa there, Dalran Paul. Back up. Back up right away. Let's just go to, you know, the footprints that you follow, because this also is interesting. You've
managed to show that there are place names which derive from the Sanskrit. And places like Java, just tell us the story of the very name of Java itself is a Sanskrit word. Exactly. And this is not quickly, say, this is not my work. This is well known to anyone that studies Sanskrit. And there's a particular scholar called Sheldon Pollock,
who came up with an academic idea called the Sanskrit Cosmopolis, which is the area where Sanskrit was read. And yes, within that area, all the way from Balkh, which is the Sanskrit word Balika, to Singapore, which is the Sanskrit word Simapura,
A lot of the place names are actually derived from Sanskrit. And you mentioned Java. Java derives from the Sanskrit yavadvipa, meaning the island shaped like a yava or a grain of barley. So it's just a reference to the shape of the island in Sanskrit. And we've kind of forgotten this, the way that Sanskrit was so dominant for a thousand years that it forms the foundation for which everything else comes, is rooted here.
What's fascinating, if you look at India in this way, in a sense, civilizationally, there are, in a sense, three successive layers in India. You start off with the Sanskrit world, which India exports out over the region. Then in the 12th century, two things happen. First of all, there's a great eruption of Turkish sultanates into India, followed by the Mongols, which drives thousands of Persian-speaking refugees down into Delhi in northern India.
And these two things make Persian the dominant cultural language in India for the next thousand years. And by the 17th, 18th century, there are 10 times as many Persian texts being produced in India.
It's the language of court and power. Exactly that. And it sort of, what does it elbow the Sanskrit out of the way? It doesn't elbow it out, but it's a layer on top of it, which is the richness of Indian civilization that you have these successive layers on top of each other and interacting with each other. So the moguls are fascinated by the Mahabharata, which they call the Razam Nama, and they translate the Upanishads and the Vedas into Persian. And that layer remains, but the dominant political layer is now in Persian.
Then, in the 18th century, as we all know, the Brits turn up in the form of the East India Company. And by the mid-19th century, they are actively replacing Persian with English as the language of government. So the same thing again happens. If you want to be the bright young man making your way in the world, you have to learn not Sanskrit, not Persian, but English.
And you get this generation of what I suppose V.S. Naipaul called mimic men or brown Saabs who are brought up to value not Rumi or Beddil or any of the great Persian poets, nor Kalidasa or any of the great Sanskrit writers, but instead are made to value hardy Shakespeare.
And in some ways, this is a crushing thing. And it's the classic case of colonialism, making people ashamed of their own civilizations. But on the other hand, you can look at it.
And say it's one of the great assets of modern India, that you have this rich glaze of culture compost in the Sanskrit, in the Persian, and in the Anglosphere. And you can see that as a positive thing. I mean, there are many nationalists who will be throwing their saucepans at the radio or
whatever they're listening to us do when the idea is anything positive. Most people listen on their phones, but adorable of you to take us through that time portal. They're listening to us on their wirelesses or gramophones.
Photographs.
I want to ask a really simple question, which is why is the spread of Indian influence in the Indosphere different to the colonialism that you've just talked about? So, you know, this influence and language, some may say, well, why are you guys always carping about sort of replacing cultures when you're just admitting that India had a massive footprint? Why is it different?
It's a very, very good and important question. And there is a big difference because the answer is that one comes at the point of a bayonet. The East India Company conquers India in a military fashion at the Battle of Plassey, the Battle of Buxa, and then it takes on the Marathas. And it subjects people by force of arms. And after it's done that, it offers inducements for them to study English, which of course brings with it wonderful benefits of wonderful literature and science and so on.
But it is done in the aftermath of conquest, subjugation, and the whole apparatus of colonial might. What is so interesting about the spread of Indian ideas is that it happens merely because of its sophistication and attraction. And it spreads largely with Indian merchants who
who are largely traveling by sea, but also over land through Central Asia. You've got a lovely part in the book, which you might as well just read, which is gorgeous, which is the summer heating of the Tibetan plateau. I would presume upon your, I think, not much reluctance to read a bit of your book, if that is all right. I don't normally do this, but on this occasion... Unaccustomed as I am to grabbing a book and reading a great chunk. So this is...
One of the central ideas of the book that India, because of its geography and climate, is at the center of a whole network of monsoon winds that has allowed Indians to just put up sails and travel at speed around the world.
with some reliability and predictability. I'll just read the passage. Thanks to the winds of the Asian monsoon, India lies at the center of a great network of navigable sea roads and maritime trade routes. Every summer, the heating of the Tibetan plateau creates an area of low pressure which sucks in moist, cool winds from the Bay of Bengal
Every winter, cold, dry winds rake out of the snows of the Himalayas to the warm seas beyond.
The Indian Peninsula sits in the middle of this vortex of winds which blow one way for six months of the year, then reverse themselves for the next six. The regularity and predictability of these winds generate monsoons that have allowed millennia of Indian sailors to raise their sails and propel themselves at speed across the oceans that surround them. Then, when the winds reverse, safely back home again.
Indian traders used the sea roads to travel in two directions. Many headed westwards on the winter winds to the east coast of Africa and the rich kingdoms of Ethiopia.
Here, they had a choice. One fork led through the Persian Gulf to Iran and Mesopotamia. The other, to its south, via Aden, took them to the Red Sea and Egypt. Indian traders traveling west used to arrive with the trade winds in the early summer and ride the summer monsoon home in August. With the winds behind you, the journey from the mouth of the Red Sea to Gujarat could take as little as 40 days.
Though if you missed the winds, the round trip might take as long as a year and cause you to take a prolonged holiday on the Nile. The equivalent overland route by camel caravan through Afghanistan would take at least
three times as long. You read that very well. You should do an audiobook, which you have, haven't you? I have just done an audiobook. And the great pleasure of that was, I don't know if you watched Bridgerton, but in my studio at the same time, the very lovely Lady Danbury was recording. Oh, Adjo Ando. Oh, I love Adjo Ando's voice. Yeah, she's fantastic. Great. She was fantastic. Well, look, so we're going to go to a break now, but join us after the break
When we talk, actually, we'll sort of knit together two things. So we left the America series looking at the Vietnam War and the American involvement in Southeast Asia. We're going to go right back to those areas after the break and find out exactly how the spill of the Indusphere, those warm winds carrying these ships from the Bay of Bengal, how it all comes together in a circle.
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Welcome back. So just before the break,
we had that very lovely characterization of an endosphere spilling out on a warm sea, carried on these trade winds far and wide. And I want us to, first of all, if you don't mind, go to the places that we left the last series, the America series with, and that's Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, places like that. Because I'm shocked always. Thailand, for example, the number of
icons that I recognize from the Ramayana. There will be Ganeshas that come back or actually more importantly Hanumans, lots of Hanumans which are there. Well, even the Indonesian airline is called Garuda. Garuda, which is the Mount of Vishnu. Vishnu, the Eagle Mount of Vishnu. So tell us a little bit about
that in particular, since it's what we last spoke about in America? So we talked just before the break about how the monsoon winds operate in both directions. You can leave India in the right season and travel from Gujarat or Kerala right through to the Red Sea or the Gulf. It's also equally true that at the same time, the winds propel you half the year eastwards to Southeast Asia, to Laos, Cambodia, the Mekong Delta, all these places, the coast of China ultimately.
And then in the next six months, pull you back again. It's very easy for Indias to be great international traders as they are now and have been throughout history because the winds just, in a sense, do half the work for them. You just got to put up a sail and off you go. And there are two important phases in this book. And we're going to be talking about the first phase, which is perhaps more surprising in the next episode, which is the whole story of India's engagement with ancient Rome and the westward path to the Red Sea.
But let's talk a little bit in this episode about the eastward path. And what happens is that when the trade with Rome is at its peak, India gets a huge appetite for gold. There's very little gold in India. The Kola gold fields, which were discovered in the 18th and 19th centuries, are late addition to India's mines. And in the classical period, I think there was very little gold actually naturally around coming out of the Indian soil. And
the trade with Rome a
allowed vast quantities of Roman gold to debouch down the Red Sea into India, which is something that Roman writers write about. Pliny talks about India as the sink of all the world's precious metals. So India liked gold, didn't have it, but had precious gems, diamonds famously, we've talked about. Has precious gems, diamonds, rubies, spinels, everything, but also has spices, particularly pepper, which is a massive thing in the Roman world.
And which Pliny gets very angry about. He says, I can't see why anyone wants this pungent stuff on their food. Foreign market. And he's particularly upset that a lot of the money is being spent on silk, which is coming from India. Right. Not from China. And so coming from India. Some of it starts in China, but it comes to the Roman world through Indian sailors and Indian traders. Because it's just 40 days.
It's just a 40-day trip with the monsoon from the coast of the Roman world. You're sort of dive-bombing at the Silk Road theory with this thesis of yours, aren't you? I should acknowledge that our friend of the show and both of our personal friends, Peter Frankopan, his wonderful book, The Silk Roads, was very much the starting point of this book. And...
I've been having very agreeable disagreements with Peter for about five, six years. A number of different continents. We seem to turn up at festivals all over the world together. And I loved that book. And when it first came out, I gave it a huge rave review in the Guardian. I didn't know Peter then at that point and just thought this was the most perfect book. But over time came to worry that there was so much about Central Asia and China.
and very, very little about India. India hardly appears in that book, only marginally. And when you look at those maps that you sometimes see in museums or in children's books, or often in actual academic textbooks, the Silk Road is depicted as a single road, which runs from the Mediterranean through Persia, through Central Asia, and ends up at Xi'an in China.
And there are, you know, it diverges sometimes when it's in China becomes two roads north and south of the Taklamakan and the Gobi Desert. But there's just a little arrow saying to India as if India is a sort of marginal part of this.
Now, that's fair enough for the period of the Mongols onwards, because the Mongols do punch this enormous hole through Central Asia and create genuine trade routes which stretch from Mediterranean to the China Sea, which is the reason that Marco Polo is able to make that journey so safely and in such little time right across the width of the world. But that was not the case in the classical period. Can we just go back to Southeast Asia? I like the fact that
Sometimes a map screams out the story of ancient history. So Thailand, for example, there's an ancient capital of Thailand, Ayutthaya, which is basically Ayutthaya, is it not? Ayutthaya, which is Lord Rama's birthplace, supposedly. What's so fascinating is that the Bay of Bengal became, by the 5th, 6th centuries A.D.,
very much the same sort of Indian lake that the Mediterranean was a Roman lake. And both sides of the Bay of Bengal have shipping going backwards and forwards on a kind of monthly basis. And ideas are passing backwards and forwards. But there was before this no script in Southeast Asia. So the Indian Brahmi script, which is sometimes called Pallava Granti after the Pallava dynasty in Tamil Nadu,
And the literature which follows in Sanskrit using those scripts is the first literate layer
that is there in Southeast Asian history. So from this period, you get the elite taking on Sanskrit as the language of the court, as well as the language of religion. Wait, what are you talking about? They didn't have a script. They didn't write things down at all. And so you've got that cursive style, that really curly, ornate way of writing that you see in Tamil, which is so different to the Hindi script.
You're saying that is from that same period. I mean, it is actually, Thailand has a very similar, very curly form of writing. I mean, I just want to, sorry to make it very basic, but is that what you're talking about? That's exactly what I'm talking about. So first of all, that script derives in South India because people are writing on palm leaves.
And if you do right angles in palm leaves, you rip the palm. No way. That's not the reason. So they develop those round strokes which allow you to write on palm leaves without ripping it. Just a moment. My brain is just going to go. Really? Because Sanskrit is filled with sharp lines. It's lines on top. Downward strokes, you know, really disjointed.
So that's why it's such a different script. So all the scripts of Southeast Asia derive from this, what used to be called Palavagranti, or this form of Brahmi. And it is true that every single pre-Islamic script in Southeast Asia, and there are 10 or 15 of them in the different regions, are all derived from the script.
So in the fourth, fifth centuries, Rome is torn asunder by invasions over the Danube, over the Rhine, Huns coming in from the east, desert nomads raiding the ports of Berenice and Maes Homos on the Red Sea coast. And then there's a Persian blockade. The
And so the South Indians who've grown very used to vast fortunes pouring into their ports in payment for ivory, spices, and all the other luxuries, silks that are coming through their ports, they have to find a new source. And where do they go? They go to what is called in Sanskrit, Svanabhumi, the lands of gold, which are the islands of Indonesia in our terms, and the coast of Peninsula, Thailand, and Malaysia.
And these places you find from the 5th, 6th century onwards become the focus of the newly established Tamil trading guilds. Right. And these trading guilds
pool their resources, build ships, and start moving exactly the same sort of trade that was happening with the Red Sea in Rome is now happening with the Mekong Delta, right up as far as the coast of China. These lands of gold that they are now interested in, I mean, just tell us a little bit about how the gold is found. Is it sort of the gold rush of
America, where you pan for it in rivers? Are they in gold mines? Are they hacking it out of rock? Where is it coming from? There's a bit of everything, but there's big gold mines, particularly in Borneo. And you see this actually written up in the great Indian epics in the Ramayana, for example, Sugriva, the monkey king talks about, I think it's Java, which he says is a land where gold is just found pouring out of the earth.
And you find it also in the early Buddhist Jataka tales, where merchants are often going across the sea and risking everything to make their fortune. So at this time, you find Indian Brahmins and Buddhist missionaries going to Southeast Asia, bringing their scripts and bringing with them ideas of politics and religion and philosophy. And so very quickly, you're finding large numbers of Indian Brahmins turning up in these ports and
telling local chieftains that they can become divinely appointed Hindu kings. Right. If they embrace this new religion. And not only will they have the power they used to have because of their force of arms and their armies and their war canoes and so on, they can also have the great gods, Shiva, Vishnu, fighting with them and augmenting their power. And the Brahmins who were already literate and got a whole sort of civil service background
operating in India, move into Southeast Asia and bring that whole package of administration, philosophy and kingship with them. Two questions. One, what was the religion before the Brahmins came in those areas? And number two, it sort of flies in the face of what I've always understood to be sort of
pure Vaishnavite Hinduism, for example, which is you don't convert. You're either born a Hindu and then, you know, you supposedly won life's lottery or you don't, in which case you'll come back maybe another time as a Hindu. So, I mean, explain both of those things to me.
First of all, these texts are only applicable really to Brahmins. So many of the Indians who are traveling to Southeast Asia are actually not Brahmins. And we have this from DNA evidence that they are Irula and all sorts of lower caste Tamil groups are appearing in large numbers, suddenly the DNA of these countries from that period and forth a century onwards. But as far as the Brahmins are concerned, what happens is that they just extend the boundaries of Holy India to what's now Southeast Asia.
partly by renaming the landscape with new Ayodhyas, Ayodhya being the capital of Lord Ram in the Ramayana, new Kurukshetras, Kurukshetra being the great apocalyptic battle of the Mahabharata, all over Southeast Asia. So you find the same names reappearing in these countries, in Cambodia, in Laos, in Thailand. Plus they begin to
sacralized landscape, partly with temples, building a Brahminical temples to Lord Vishnu and Lord Shiva in sites that had previously been sacred to the peoples of Southeast Asia, often hot springs with sulfur bubbling out of the ground or islands appearing out of the Mekong Delta. Hindu temples from the fifth, sixth century start being built on these places. And in some extraordinary sites that I've seen in Cambodia,
you get an attempt to turn the rivers and the springs into the Ganges by sculpting on the river floor images of lingams and yonis, this sort of male-female principle, on the riverbed. Sculpting onto the floor. Oh, wow. So that the river flows over this as a sacralized form of the Ganges. So it becomes a holy river just because it's going over a lingam. Right. Amazing.
And then the daddy of all Hindu temples, which is still to this day, you know, the place that everybody wants to see at least once in their life is Angkor Wat. Now tell us a little bit more about the story of that particular temple. So Angkor Wat is 600 years after these first contacts that we're talking about. We've been talking about how the Roman Empire falls in the 4th century AD.
Indians begin to refocus their trade in the 4th, 5th, and 6th century. By the 6th century, you have the first images of Vishnu appearing in the Mekong Delta, small images of the Buddha. By the 7th century, you've got temples in the Dieng Plateau in Java. And by the 7th century, really massive things turning up in Prambanan.
And these Southeast Asian kingdoms are often richer and larger than the fractured political landscape in India. So by the 9th, 10th, and 11th century, you have buildings like Borobudur, which is the largest Buddhist monument in the world.
being erected very much on Indian ideas, using Indian theology, but constructed locally, using local craftsmen with ideas coming locally from the pre-existing architecture of that part of the world, fusing into this sort of convergent architecture where both ideas in Southeast Asia and India are present.
And Borobudur is quite simply built in the 9th century, the most sophisticated Buddhist monument in the world. Which is where exactly? Tell us, put it on a map for us. It's in Indonesia on the island of Java on the west of Java near modern Yogyakarta. And this extraordinary monument, which I was lucky enough to, I got to Java just after COVID, was one of the very first in India.
And the monument was still officially closed. And I applied to the Ministry of Culture saying I was writing this book. And I ended up being the only person in this monument.
alone, taken around panel after panel by the director of one of the luckiest breaks of my entire life. I spent two days going panel by panel along this, learning the stories of the Buddha and the different Hindu and Buddhist tales that were included and the Tantra stories. This wonderful, rich literature put into a sort of sculptural graphic novel all the way up this monument.
And you emerge through all this sculpture at the top platforms of Borobudur, and suddenly you're out. And you can see not sculptures on either side of you, but the whole landscape stretching out forever. And at the top, you have this very simple image of the stupa. And below that, these hollow stupas, latticed with a single figure of the Buddha inside them representing the void,
in the hollowness of it, in the emptiness of it. And so it's a sort of profound monument built within a yantra shape, a sort of sacred symbol. What is a yantra shape? A yantra shape is a sacred Buddhist. It's like a sort of geometrical spell, if you like, that means that if you build the yantra in this exact way, that you can create a place of spiritual power. So this is both sort of vertically and horizontally shaped.
both a teaching aid with the sculpture and an extraordinary place for, in a sense, a spiritual power generator, if you like.
using very, very arcane tantric Buddhist texts. And there's a whole tradition of these. There's one in Bihar, Khazaria. There's one in modern Bangladesh at Sompur, which are these vast stupas within the antras. But the biggest of all is Borobudur itself, which is the kind of the crowning glory. And then what you asked about Anjali,
Angkor Wat is the largest Hindu temple in the world. In fact, the largest religious monument of any religion anywhere, even today. So just to give people some sense of this, I haven't been there. I've got family. My brother's been there, but I will go. It's on bucket lists all over the place. It really should be. But this is a temple that covers some 580
There are, you know, there's the great edifice itself. There are pleasure lakes around it. I mean, just, I mean, you've been there. Just describe what one sees when one approaches Uncle Watt. Again, I got in there just the week it was open. I was waiting for the whole COVID thing to die back. And the day that visas came on stream, I got one, flew out there.
And got to see it, not quite alone in Angkor Wat, but with probably fewer crowds that have been there for 50 years. And it's this astonishing Hindu temple. It's a Vishnu temple. And what's extraordinary is someone who lives in Delhi for most of the years I do,
is to see sculpted on the walls of this temple, 5,000 miles east of where I live, stories which originated around the city I now live in, my home city, Delhi.
So there are images of the Battle of Kurukshetra, which is a place on the railway line, just, you know, half an hour to the north of Delhi. And for those who don't know, I mean, the Kurukshetra fields are legendary because it is the entire backdrop and the stage, if you like, for the Mahabharata, the Mahabharata.
huge fight between good and evil. It's the Ragnarok, the sort of final apocalyptic battle of the gods. Yes, exactly that. In the next corridor next to that, you have images of Krishna, Krishna and the gopis, Krishna and the butter, Krishna and all the other stuff, stories which are set in Mathura, which is just sort of, you know, 50, 60 miles south of Delhi.
And yet here it is transported 5,000 miles to the east in Angkor Wat. Just again, Mathura, just for those who aren't cognizant of why these things are absolutely central, they are the bedrock to Hinduism. Mathura, the place where Krishna grew up from naughty boy where he would steal the butter and dance with the gopis, the girls.
pretty girls in the village to when he becomes the godhead and expression of Vishnu later on. And the charioteer in the Mahabharata. These are all the stories that make up Hinduism. There you are in a foreign country
seeing the echoes of what you live with every day when you're in Delhi. In a sense, it's no more surprising than seeing images of the Gospels, which are things that took place in Palestine in a church in Sweden or Scotland. But it's the same process. It's a set of ideas. It's a religion which is so attractive that people adopt it for a variety of motives, very, very far away from the world where it was born.
We know about the spread of Christianity. I think people outside India and even those in India are surprised when they hear that there are images of these stories, of Krishna, of the Mahabharata, of the Ramayana depicted on the walls of Angkor Wat. Well, let's leave it there. In the next episode of Empire, we are going to talk about the connections between India and ancient Rome. So we are going to sort of go straight into that
That difference, that schism, if you like, of Silk Road versus Golden Road. Join us then. Until then, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnon. And goodbye from me, William Durham-Poole.
