The Story of India

Sixty years on from Indian independence, Michael Wood sets out on a fascinating quest through Indian history to uncover the tale of the world’s oldest and most diverse civilization – and the world’s largest democracy – whose population will overtake China within 10 years, and whose economy is now predicted to overtake the US in the 2030s.

This episode covers the last centuries BC – the age of the Buddha, the coming of the Greeks and the rule of the emperor Ashoka, one of the greatest figures in world history. Beginning with incredible images of a Jain festival that takes place once every 12 years, Wood sees the Buddha as India’s first protester, follows the invasion of India by Alexander the Great and ends with the birth of the first great Indian empire.

This episode covers the early centuries AD, the time of the Roman Empire in the West, and “the happiest time in the history of the world”, as the historian Edward Gibbon put it. In this period, located at the ‘centre of world’, India became a great player in the first global economy. As the spice routes and the silk roads opened up, Indian civilization grew, enriched by contact and exchange.

Michael Wood shows us some of the amazing achievements of medieval India: in astronomy they discovered the heliocentric universe, absolute zero and the circumference of the Earth; they mastered the world’s first large-scale cast-iron technology – the Delhi iron pillar; and their courtly culture was the setting of the world’s first sex manual, the Kama Sutra.

This episode is set during the time of the Renaissance in Europe, when India was the richest, most populous civilization in the world. Wood visits the desert cities of Rajasthan and travels among the fabulous Moghul cities of Delhi, Agra and Fatepur Sikri. At the Taj Mahal (just voted one of the new Seven Wonders of the World by 100 million voters worldwide), he demolishes an old myth about the Taj and offers a startling new theory about its construction.

This is the story of how a foreign multinational (the East India Company) thousands of miles away gradually and almost by chance took power over great swathes of the Indian subcontinent; how after the horrendous shock of the 1857 ‘Mutiny’, the British State took over and turned this supremacy into the Raj, the jewel in the crown of the greatest empire the world had ever seen; and how the Freedom Movement delivered Independence to India in 1947, albeit a divided India.