100 Books like The Golden Road

Tim Severin was a British explorer who postulated that the ancient Omanis of northwest Africa used to sail their “sewn plank boats” (known as Dhows) far across the Indian Ocean.

He challenged the Eurocentric view that both he and I had grown up with—namely that the Indian Ocean was a void and was only discovered when Europeans like the Portuguese, Dutch, and British arrived in their large sailing ships.

Severin believed that the Omanis (the people of the Sindbad stories) were building and sailing dhows as far back as the beginning of the Common Era—and to prove his theory, he built such a ship using the ancient boat-building techniques and sailed it from Sohar in Oman to Guandong in China.

I read the book with a sense of wonderment—he did not simply challenge the accepted view, he put his money (and his life) where his mouth was—and undertook the hazardous… show more.

I came across Ameena Hussein’s book when I was looking for information about early travellers to Sri Lanka. 

I was engrossed while reading the story of how she herself journeyed through Sri Lanka, following the footsteps of this Moroccan traveller as described in his own book Al Rihla (The Journey). Ibn Battuta arrived on the island in the 14th century, visited many places (including the famous "Mountain of Adam"), and recorded his travels for posterity.

I loved her descriptions of the places that she visited, painting an evocative picture of these places and describing her own travels in the 21st century, looking for traces of Ibn Battuta.

I loved this book because Brohier’s descriptions of the foods and festivals of her people—the Dutch Burghers (descendants of the Dutch who ruled Sri Lanka for about 150 years from 1656 to 1796) brought back memories of my own childhood in Sri Lanka.

She describes in detail how the various flavours and recipes were brought to Sri lanka by the many traders, travellers, and colonial trespassers who made their way here—resulting in a delicious melting pot of foods.

I remembered the dishes made by our Burgher neighbours and friends, and I was pleased to find recipes for many of the tasty dishes we used to enjoy in the “good old days" of my childhood.

I am recommending this book because it provided me with information that few people in the Indian subcontinent (and indeed in the world) today are aware of. 

In days long gone, there were Jewish traders who lived and traded with the people of the western Indian sub-continent—trading in spices like cinnamon, rugs, arsenic, etc. 

Shlomo Goitein used the documents that were serendipitously discovered in the geniza of the Cairo synagogue to piece together, from the letters written by the Jewish traders who lived in the lands around the western Indian Ocean (present-day Yemen, Oman, India, and Sri Lanka) during medieval times, the story of their lives and times.

I was fascinated by the stories in Goitein’s book—it was almost as if these ancient merchants were talking to me from beyond the grave!

As the great Asian renaissance gathers momentum in the 21st century, many young Asians will begin to rediscover their own cultures and civilizations, just as the West did in its first cultural renaissance in the 15th century. Few understand classical Indian civilization as well as Amartya Sen does.

Since Asian cultures are associated with despotism and Western cultures with individual liberties, Sen says, “The claim that the basic ideas underlying freedom and tolerance have been central to Western culture over the millennia and are somehow alien to Asia is, I believe, entirely rejectable.” Living up to the spirit of the title of his book, Sen demonstrates in this book that he’s an argumentative Indian and Asian. Argumentative Asians will eventually win the argument with the West. 

Those who know the field of religious violence may find my choice of Ashis Nandy’s book of essays to be a peculiar one since it deals with a variety of issues besides religious violence. But one of his essays, “The Discrete Charms of Indian Terrorists,” is worth the price of the book. In it, Nandy describes the remarkably civil behavior of young Sikh activists who hijacked an Indian plane in the 1980s. He then goes on to disagree with Gandhi that terrorism necessarily absolutizes a conflict, and he rejects the common perspective, especially in the West, that terrorism is always evil. Though Nandy’s analysis does not fit all, or perhaps most, instances of religion-related terrorism it makes us reconsider our assumptions about the use of violence in certain situations.

Readers are spoiled for choice when it comes to investigative journalism and narrative non-fiction about contemporary India, but Siddhartha Deb’s collection of essays (titled after F. Scott Fitzgerald) stands out in a crowded field. Though a decade old, it has not lost any of its relevance or punch. Deb profiles a series of unforgettable figures, from a controversial upstart businessman to emigrant engineers, peasant revolutionaries, informal industrial workers, and a waitress who serves the rich and powerful. The book moves seamlessly from the city to the countryside, exposing both the aspirations and the frustrations of capitalism as it is really lived and felt by a wide cross-section of people across India. 

This book really brought it home to me how classics (that is, the study of ancient Greece and Rome) was implicated in the politics of the past, and specifically in the ideology of the British Empire. It has been quite influential within the discipline of classics, and there is now a whole subfield that considers the political uses of classics. 

This beautifully illustrated book explores Austen’s life and her interactions with the world as a novelist.

Jane’s teenage writings, her music books, and the story of her surviving pelisse (a type of coat) are all discussed, along with the magic of her remaining correspondence. (Sadly, after Jane died, her sister Cassandra burnt many of her letters to protect her emotional life from strangers’ prying eyes).

Austen’s fiction manuscripts, several of which survive, offer clues to how she worked. Jane’s status as a novelist at the time of her death in 1817 is also discussed, and compared with her competitors. 

The book shows some of the remarkable ways that Eastern and Western thought differs. I read the book 10 years before a brilliant Chinese student named Kaiping Peng came to work with me and told me right off the bat that I thought linearly and logically and he thought non-linearly and dialectically. That sounded like an exaggeration, but Nakamura’s book encouraged me to take Peng seriously. Our research together showed he was absolutely right. East Asian thought was shown by our experiments to be radically different in many ways from Western thought.