Beginnings Michael Wood: The Story of India

60 years ago, India threw off the chains of the British Empire and became a free nation.

And now the world's largest democracy is rushing headlong into the future.

As the brief heyday of the West draws to a close,

one of the greatest players in history is rising again.

India has seen the ebb and flow of huge events since the beginning of history.

Its tale is one of incredible drama and the biggest ideas.

It's a place whose children will grow up in a global superpower

and yet still know what it means to belong to an ancient civilisation.

This is the story of a land where all human pasts are still alive,

a 10,000-year epic that continues today...

..the Story of India.

In the tale of life on Earth, the human story is brief.

A few hundred generations cover humanity's attempts to create order, beauty and happiness

on the face of the Earth.

The beginnings to most of us are lost in time, beyond memory.

Only India has preserved the unbroken thread of the human story that binds us all.

According to the oldest Indian myths, the first humans came from a golden egg,

laid by the king of the gods in the churning of the cosmic ocean.

Modern science, of course, works in a less poetic vein,

but no less thrilling to the imagination.

For what science tells us is that our ancestors first walked out of Africa,

only 70,000 or 80,000 years ago, round the shores of the Arabian Sea

and down into South India.

They were beachcombers,

barefoot hunter-gatherers,

driven as human beings always have been by chance and necessity.

But also surely by curiosity, that most human of qualities.

When they came here, they must have been overwhelmed by the fertility.

Here down south, you throw a mango away and a tree will grow. Life is super-abundant.

So here some of them stayed and they were the first Indians.

And all non-Africans on the planet can trace their descent from those early migrations into India.

The rest of the world was populated from here - Mother India, indeed.

And amazingly for so long ago, those first Indians have left their trail.

If you go inland from the beaches of Kerala,

into the maze of backwaters, deep in the rainforests,

you'll still find their traces, clues to what lies beneath all the later layers of Indian history,

clues that, till recently, were completely unsuspected.

For here, you can even hear their voices, sounds from the beginning of human time.

LONG VOWEL SOUND

An ancient clan of Brahmans lives here, priests, ritual specialists.

They alone can perform the religious rituals.

They're preparing an ancient ceremony for the god of fire

that will take 12 days to perform.

CHANTING

For centuries, these incantations or mantras have been passed down from father to son,

only among Brahmans, exact in every sound.

But some of the mantras are in no known language.

Only recently have outsiders been allowed to record them

and to try and make sense of the Brahmans' chants.

To their amazement, they discovered whole tracts of the ritual

were sounds that followed rules and patterns, but had no meaning.

There was no parallel for these patterns within any human activity, not even music.

The nearest analogue came from the animal kingdom. It was birdsong.

These sounds are perhaps tens of thousands of years old, passed down from before human speech.

'There are certain patterns of sounds preceding and succeeding texts.

'That is called oral tradition.'

You can't write those patterns in a book. It's unprintable.

So only orally it can be transmitted through generations.

And this oral tradition is still alive in Kerala.

For 12 days, the priests and their wives must stay inside the enclosure.

And then when the ritual is over and the world purified, the huts are burned down,

all trace obliterated, save in the memory of the Brahman reciters.

So there's a crucial clue to the story of India -

how the experience of the ancestors is faithfully handed down from generation to generation.

But it's not just sounds and rituals that have been passed on.

Over the hills in Tamil Nadu, geneticists from the University of Madurai

have been testing the DNA of tribal villagers.

First we isolate the DNA from the solution. And we look for specific ancient markers in the solution,

which can give you the clue about the migrational history of people.

It's evidence we are out of Africa and it's a brotherhood. We are all the same.

'Here among the Kallar people, Professor Ramasamy Pitchappan tested a man called Virumandi.

'In his DNA was the marker of that first human migration.'

-How are you?

-And Virumandi's wife.

-Very nice to meet you. Hello.

Since the migration of the first man 70,000 years ago,

Virumandi, he probably carries that gene M130.

So Virumandi, how does it feel to be the first Indian?

I'm very happy...

-That you have this gene.

-Gene.

-Yes.

-Wonderful.

Virumandi's tribe practise South India's and the world's oldest form of marriage

with first cousins. That way, they've handed down some of mankind's earliest genes.

Some 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, these M130 gene pool came over here.

And luckily somebody stayed in this village and expanded,

then we could identify.

-And to our surprise, the whole village is M130.

-Everybody around us here?

-Yes.

Everybody around us here carries M130. So you ponder that fact, why will be that?

-You've got the early migrations in at least two waves. Language is only developing later.

-Yes.

The Kallars feel it is just 10,000 years old, this spoken language.

-Wow.

-Maybe only 10,000 to 15,000 maximum.

-Language is not the same as ethnicity. We need to make that clear, don't we?

-Yes.

It is essential. Yes, it is not. The language can easily be adopted. The same is true of religion too.

It's a kind of belief system. You believe in your system, in your education

or in your family, whatever way you feel like.

You have every liberty to feel proud of what you are.

It is because of this reason I believe that India has become such a cosmos of humanity

with a diversity, but still with a unity.

-Is that what makes you an Indian?

-Probably. A human being, all the more, I'd say, rather than Indian.

And despite all the later migrations and invasions,

India's gene pool has remained largely constant. It's one of the unchanging roots of India.

Languages and religions came only later.

And they are always subject to change.

But here in the south, they've passed down humanity's oldest religion too.

In the great temple of Madurai they still worship the female principle, the Mother goddess,

as Indian people have done for tens of thousands of years.

And alongside her are countless other deities

that link humanity with the magical power of the natural world.

Over the ages, thousands of gods will emerge, always adding to what had been before.

So the roots of Indian religion too will grow over a vast period of time

as India's expression of the multiplicity of the universe.

Why have only one god when you can have millions?

So India's famous unity and diversity goes back to customs and beliefs and habits

that lie deep in pre-history, like the worship of the goddess here.

And when you look at all the tides of Indian history that follow,

you can see that identity is never static, always in the making and never made.

SINGING

And now we must rush over tens of thousands of years in which humanity lived as hunter-gatherers.

And then in the Stone Age, in a great arc from the Mediterranean to India,

changes in technology led to the invention of agriculture.

And that would be the motor for the next turning point in the story of India,

the rise of cities.

In the year 2007, for the first time in history,

most of us will live in cities, rather than in the countryside.

Here in the Indian subcontinent, that process of civilisation began in 7000 BC,

even earlier than Ancient Egypt, with the growth of large villages in the Indus Valley.

So despite the divisions made by modern borders,

nowhere else on Earth is there such continuity of settled life.

Hello. Salaam alaikum.

Though of course, when we talk about India in history, we mean the whole of the subcontinent,

before modern politics divided up that deep continuum

and gave the people new identities and new allegiances.

-So Multan is your native place? Multan, your native place?

-Yes.

-Very nice.

-What are you doing?

-Making a historical film for BBC London.

These days, civilisation is a very problematical word with many shades of meaning.

But to historians and archaeologists, it means living in cities,

highly-organised societies, architecture, law and writing.

And to find the origins of Indian civilisation, we need to come first of all to Pakistan,

once part of India, but split to become a separate country in 1947,

because it was here in the valley of the Indus river, in a series of amazing discoveries,

revealed a hitherto, completely unknown, ancient civilisation.

Those first discoveries took place in the 1920s

at a little halt on the railway line between Multan and Lahore, Harappa.

At that time the Indian subcontinent was under British rule.

And then the idea that the people of Pakistan and India

might be heirs to a civilisation older than the Bible, Greece and Rome would have seemed incredible.

The Europeans saw India as a primitive, backward place.

They believed civilisation was the product of the classical world

for whom they were the modern standard bearers. Nobody suspected that India had a pre-history.

But all that changed in 1921 when British and Indian archaeologists arrived here in the Punjab.

-How are you? It's nice to see you. Thank you for having us.

-Here.

-That's wonderful.

'The archaeologists camped in tents here

'and they were plagued by mosquitoes too.'

That night in the dig hut, I read again the romantic account of those first discoveries,

at the same time as the finding of Tutankhamun in Egypt.

"Not often is it given to archaeologists," wrote the British excavator John Marshall,

"as it was given to Schliemann at Mycenae, to light upon the remains of a forgotten civilisation.

"It looks, however, as if we're on the threshold of such a discovery, here in the plains of the Indus."

BIRDSONG

Like the other great ancient civilisations in Iraq, Egypt and China,

India's first cities had grown up on a river.

The ruins of Harappa stood on the dried-up bed of a tributary of the River Indus.

Its huge citadel walls had been quarried away by Victorian railway contractors.

But there was still evidence of industry, of writing and high-level organisation and a huge population.

Harappa was far older than anything previously known in India.

Amazingly, at the time of the building of the pyramids of Egypt,

there had been vast cities here in India.

When does Harappa begin?

Harappa was beginning in 3500 BC.

5,000 years ago from here.

Right. 3500 BC - so this is a very, very long-lasting place.

And when was the heyday, the high period of the Indus civilisation?

The high period of the Indus civilisation

started around 2900 BC to 1900 BC.

This is the highest period. We call it the Mature Harappan period.

Right. And how many people, do you think, lived here in the height of its power?

-I think about 200,000 people.

-200,000 people?

-Yes. According to their houses and streets.

-Wow.

-It is an estimated guess.

-But it's a big city for the ancient world.

The next year, 1922,

British and Indian archaeologists targeted an untouched site to the south, Mohenjo-daro.

By ancient standards, it was an urban giant, a Bronze Age Manhattan.

Just like the modern Indians and Pakistanis, the Indus people were traders.

From here their boats sailed to the Persian Gulf and Iraq,

carrying cargoes of ivory, teak and lapis lazuli.

The city appeared to be the capital of a great empire,

which we now know extended from the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea. With over 2,000 towns and villages,

it was the largest civilisation in the ancient world.

And with up to five million people, the world's biggest population.

But their writing is still undeciphered.

Then, after several centuries of stability, the cities declined,

trade collapsed and urban life itself ended.

The people went back to the land.

But why the Indus cities died is one of the greatest mysteries in archaeology.

Back in London, I went to see Dr Sanjeev Gupta, who offered me a much bigger picture

as to why civilisations rise and fall.

180 million years ago, India was an island, floating in the ocean.

It was moving northwards for about 130 million years.

Eventually, about 50 million years ago, it collided with Asia

to produce the Himalayas.

So there's a different perspective to the historian's view.

Civilisations come and go. Environment and climate are what shape our human story

in the long term, as we're now discovering to our cost.

The Himalayas draw the warm air from the south, which is precipitated in rain, the monsoons.

And the monsoons made the first Indian civilisation.

When they failed, it did too.

The key was the shifting and drying up of rivers and one great river system in particular.

We've been looking at satellite imagery,

to try and see if you can trace river channels on the flood plains.

-So this is the area between India and Pakistan?

-Yes.

We're going to zoom in on an area over here and look at some satellite imagery in detail.

So what you can see are these light areas, which are desert areas.

But snaking through the desert, you can see the trace, this dark channel-like feature,

-which people believe is the trace of an ancient river.

-Wow.

And if we put the sites on for the main phase of the Harappan civilisation,

you can see beautifully how those sites are actually strung along the trace of this ancient channel bed.

-It absolutely matches the curve of the channel bed.

-And you can trace it from India into Pakistan,

-into the area called Cholistan.

-So this is from the height of the Indus civilisation?

-Yes. 5,000 to 4,000 years ago.

-When Mohenjo-daro and Harappa are at their height.

So what happens to these sites at the end of the Harappan civilisation?

-Actually, if we look at the later Harappan stages...

-Oh, yes.

And what you see is that there's a major shift eastward

into the central and eastern part of the Ganges plain

-away from the major Ghaggar-Hakra settlements over here.

-Wow.

In the last 10,000 years, we've seen a decline in the strength of the Indian summer monsoon.

And 3,500 years ago, there was a major decrease in the strength of the monsoon.

Climate change isn't just happening now, it's happened in the past. Settlements completely disappear

and we see this major shift eastward into the central part of the Ganges plain.

THUNDER RUMBLES

And ever since,

from sacred songs to Bollywood movies, Indian people have loved the monsoon.

The coming of the monsoon has an almost erotic charge.

It's the giver of life itself.

CHEERING

So climate change shifted the centre of gravity of Indian history.

The people moved, following the rivers eastwards to new lands in a forested world

that has been sacred from that day to this, the plain of the River Ganges.

And here, the next chapter in the story of India will take place.

How are you?

-How are you? How is the water?

-Huh?

-The water is good?

-It's good.

So the first great Indian civilisation died out.

Or did it? The mystery of the Indus cities is so tantalising

and the differences with later Indian civilisation apparently so great

that it's easy to think that there was a major break in continuity of Indian civilisation.

But history's not like that, especially Indian history.

And it's only a short time after the end of the last Indus cities, around 1500 BC,

that we get the first definite evidence of an Indian language and an Indian literature.

And language and literature are the next landmarks in the story.

Texts we can not just hear, but read.

The language is Sanskrit, the ancestor of all the modern dialects

spoken in the north of the subcontinent, across Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.

It's the root of languages spoken today by nearly a billion people.

But where did Sanskrit come from?

Is it the language of the Indus civilisation?

Did it grow up here in the Ganges plain?

Or did it come from outside India?

Like Latin, Sanskrit is no longer a spoken language.

But here in the holy city of Varanasi, young Brahman boys still learn it

to recite their earliest scriptures, the Vedas.

CHANTING

For traditional Hindus, these are the most ancient scriptures in the world,

older by far than the Bible.

CHANTING

The Vedas have been orally transmitted down the ages as accurately as a recording.

And it's because they're so perfectly preserved that linguists can date them.

The oldest is a collection of 1,000 hymns called the Rig-Veda, which starts around 1500 BC,

a time when Stonehenge was still in use.

It's quite a thought, isn't it? In this room, you've got a living link with India's deep past.

What you're listening to are the sounds and the words of the Bronze Age.

As with the mantras in Kerala,

the archaic verses of the Rig-Veda have been passed down word for word

only within families of Brahman priests.

Is it easy to understand today?

Or is the ancient Sanskrit very difficult to understand?

-Yes. Very difficult to understand.

-It's very difficult?

-Very difficult.

-Only through Brahmans?

-Only Brahmans.

-Only Brahmans learning.

-So all the boys here today, they are Brahman boys?

-Yes.

-After upanayanam.

-After...?

-Holy thread.

-Oh, after the holy thread. Yeah, yeah.

RHYTHMIC DRUMMING

Out of the poems of the Rig-Veda, a story emerges.

Over several centuries, it's the tale of tribes moving across North India, led by the god of fire,

burning forests, looking for new lands.

The leaders of these tribes spoke Sanskrit.

The Rig-Veda shows that they fought battles among themselves. And they called themselves Aryans.

HORNS BLARE

The significance of that story only began to be understood in the 18th century

when the British came here to Calcutta.

The key figure was a Welsh judge called William Jones who founded the Asiatic Society.

Unlike some of his contemporaries, Jones admired Indian civilisation.

He persuaded a Brahman scholar to teach him Sanskrit.

And what he found would rewrite the history of the world's languages, including our own.

On February the 2nd, 1786,

Jones gave a lecture here to the society.

Like others before him, he noticed a very close similarity between Sanskrit,

Latin and Greek.

And even to English and his native Welsh.

Take the word for "father" -

"Pater" in Greek and "Pater" in Latin,

it's "Pitar" in Sanskrit.

The word for "mother" - "mater" in Latin, "meter" in Greek.

In Sanskrit, it's "matar".

And most amazing, the key word for horse in Sanskrit, "asva",

is exactly the same thousands of miles away in Lithuania.

"No philologer could examine all three," said Jones,

"without believing them to have sprung from some common source."

We now know Jones was right and though this is hugely controversial in the subcontinent,

most linguists agree the common source lay outside India.

Thank you very much.

'So where had Sanskrit come from? In the Rig-Veda lies the key to the next phase of the story.'

So, Professor Biswas, I'm looking in the modern catalogue - 6608.

-And we're looking for bundle 14.

-Bundle 14 - this one.

-Great.

It says here, "Copied in Samvat, the year 1418, which is AD 1362.

-"Appearance very old."

-Yes. And probably this is the earliest manuscript.

The earliest manuscript. Fantastic.

When this text was written down, it had already been passed down orally for more than 2,500 years.

It's the first verse of the Rig-Veda.

RECITES VERSE

'In the Rig-Veda, there are many clues to the origin of the Sanskrit-speaking peoples.

'First, the Rig-Vedic gods are not originally Indian.'

-The most important god was Indra. Indra was the god of thunder and rain.

-The god of thunder and rain.

He brought down the water from the sky.

'Then there's the chariots and horses. Horses are not known in the Indus civilisation.

'Yet they're a key part of the Rig-Veda.'

Chariots were drawn by the horses. They used to ride the horses and it was a very familiar animal to them.

And I think that they tamed the horse at a very early period.

'And another clue is the evidence of a migration eastwards.'

So a movement eastwards can be determined?

-Some of the rivers are identified with rivers almost towards the Afghan border?

-Yes.

-The Swat and the Kabul river?

-This is the first movement of Aryans.

-Is this the name they called themselves? And what does it mean?

-It actually means "the civilised".

-The socialised, civilised person.

-Refined, yes.

-Refined person.

And so the use of the word, "Arya".

-That's what they call themselves?

-Yes.

So this is a key moment in the story.

Around 1500 BC, after the death of the Indus cities,

Aryan tribes began to enter India with new gods and a new language.

The earliest hymns in the Rig-Veda mention places in the northwest

where the Aryans are first found inside the subcontinent.

They settled in the valley of the Indus, the river that gave India its name.

They fought battles on the Kabul River, which flows down from Afghanistan.

And they herded their cattle on the River Swat, today in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier.

The heart of the early Aryan territory was the region of Peshawar in Pakistan.

Here I hope to solve another clue.

The Rig-Veda talks about the sacred drink used in the Aryans' rituals,

a speciality of the tribes around here. It was called soma.

The Rig-Veda says it was taken from a mountain plant. It didn't have leaves or berries.

It was a twig-like plant, which you crushed to create a distillation.

In the mountains of Afghanistan there's still a drink called soma.

And if we're likely to find it anywhere, it'll be here in the bazaar at Peshawar.

Just off the Street of Storytellers

is the Alley of the Apothecaries. And here I tried out the Rig-Veda's description of the soma plant.

No, that's not it.

Long stalk. No leaves. Makes very bitter taste.

Look. Look. It's like this.

CONVERSATION IN LOCAL LANGUAGE

-Soma?

-Soma? You have?

-LAUGHTER

-Fantastic!

Fantastic. He has the natural plant here.

Can be one-foot, two-foot, three-feet long.

Scented like...

Ah!

-Mahu.

-Mahu?

-Yes.

This is it.

This is it. It smells slightly like pine.

If I boil this up in water, I should be able to taste the bitter taste of it? Yes. OK.

'We don't know exactly how soma was prepared,

'but we do know that they sweetened it with honey.'

What we want is a pot of boiling water, but a lot of it, so it's strong.

'Soma is still used as a medicine in Central Asia.'

The active element in the plant is ephedrine.

And the effect that it has, according to the Rig-Veda, if you take too much, it can cause nausea.

It can be frightening. It can give you vertigo, sickness, vomiting.

If you take it in the right measure, it enlivens the senses, sharpens you up, keeps you awake.

The poets in the Rig-Veda composed their songs, often at night, having drunk soma.

And Indra, king of the gods, drinks vast quantities as it's thought to be an aphrodisiac as well.

My God, look at the colour of it!

'But soma's not an Indian plant. It doesn't grow in the humid plains.

'It's no longer part of Hindu religion. It came from outside.'

Now I'm getting a kind of tingling feeling all over.

It just sharpens the senses up. Makes you slightly...

Oh, go on then. In for a penny, in for a pound! Thank you.

Slight feeling all over now of slightly tingling. Heart beating slightly faster.

Um, senses just slightly sharpened up.

This is a really important aspect of the Rig-Veda.

There are many, many poems devoted to the merits of drinking soma,

an elixir of the gods and chiefly of the king of the gods himself.

'It also makes you talk too much.'

So the Northwest Frontier and the rivers of the Punjab were the first home of Aryans inside India.

But the Rig-Veda suggests they'd come from much further afield, beyond the Khyber Pass,

even beyond the mountains of the Hindu Kush.

The clues now point us northwards into Central Asia.

And our search for the Aryans led us into Turkmenistan,

to Ashgabat...

..a closed world in the last days of its strange and secretive ruler, Turkmenbashi.

And here we gathered supplies for our journey onwards

to the site of a sensational new archaeological discovery.

We'd arranged a rendezvous out in the Karakum, the Black Desert,

on the migration route by which the ancestors of the Aryans must have come

out of Central Asia in the Bronze Age.

4,000 years ago, this desert was a fertile oasis,

home to thousands of settlements,

all of them destroyed by climate change at the same time as Harappa and Mohenjo-daro.

And out here we made our rendezvous with Victor Sarianidi.

Professor Sarianidi is, to say the least, a living legend.

One of the great Russian archaeologists. He's been excavating out here for many years,

and found what few archaeologists are ever lucky enough to find,

a lost civilisation.

Sarianidi's excavating a vast, fortified mud-brick enclosure

and a huge sacred precinct with tombs and fire altars.

The material culture here is the mirror image of the Aryans of the Rig-Veda

and their ancient Iranian cousins who followed the Zoroastrian religion.

SPEAKING IN BROKEN ENGLISH:

What date does it stop being used?

So change of river and climate change moves the population?

This is where the soma, haoma, was prepared?

-The sacred drink?

-Yes.

-In this kind of bowl?

-Yes.

What were the ingredients of the sacred drink?

Have you tasted?

-No!

-Have you made today?

-No!

-Too early in the morning!

Well, it certainly is for me!

When you look at the connections, you've got the sacred drink here, the soma.

You've got the fire altars. You've got close similarities with what we heard in the Rig-Veda.

What about horses then, Victor?

Have you found evidence of horses?

The horse was first domesticated out here in Central Asia.

-So this is a foal for a king's mausoleum?

-Yes.

-Yeah.

The horse sacrifice was the greatest ritual an Aryan king could do.

-All of these?

-Yes.

-The royal tombs.

And in these tombs you found wheeled vehicles like carts?

-With four wheels?

-Yes.

-With four wheels. It's really interesting.

The Rig-Veda, when they talk about the wheeled vehicles, they use this word "ratha" in Sanskrit.

It's not a chariot, it is actually a cart. And here they've found a cart.

The origin of the Aryans must lie much further into Central Asia.

This was perhaps a staging post for one group out of many on the way to Iran and India.

I would like to toast you. It's great to finally get here.

-If we can help you, we will.

-Thank you.

SPEAKING IN RUSSIAN

And that night under the stars, another thought came to me about the Rig-Veda.

The communal drinking, the convivial feast,

was that how some of this ancient poetry was composed by the bards in front of the Aryan kings?

Mighty Indra

Let your regal mounts bring you here

to drink soma,

the juice which is swifter than thought!

Indra, wield your thunderbolt.

Indra, bring rain!

Grant all our desires.

Part the sky and make all things visible!

Part the sky and drink soma

that opens our mind

to the vastness of your skies.

'Indra!'

It's a wonderful, tantalising mystery, isn't it?

The Aryans, or to be more precise, the languages that would become modern English, German, French,

Latin and Greek, Persian and Sanskrit, where did they come from?

How did they spread? Well, it may just be that here in the deserts of Turkmenistan,

for the first time we can pin these people down on their migration.

They arrived in this place well before 2000 BC.

They defended themselves in these great mud-brick citadels.

They were cattle herders. They had a class of priests who performed fire rituals at special altars

and made the sacred intoxicating drink.

And they had horses and wheeled wagons.

Around 1700 BC and 1800 BC, they moved on again,

perhaps this time because of overpopulation, climate change, the shifting of rivers.

But this time, they moved south towards the passes of the Hindu Kush and the Indian subcontinent.

The history of India was about to enter its defining phase.

Now again we need to jump the centuries.

By around 1000 BC, Aryan tribes were settled across North India

and fighting each other for supremacy.

And that period of heroic warfare was eventually crystallised in a great myth, the Mahabharata.

Composed in Sanskrit, it's the longest poem in the world,

and for all Indians, the greatest story ever told.

Like Homer's tale of Troy, the Mahabharata is a story of war and tragedy, a doomsday epic.

It harks back to the time when the Aryan tribes had settled in India,

an archetypal tale of family feud that ends in an apocalyptic battle here at Kurukshetra.

It's dawn on the festival of Siva and the pilgrims are gathering here

by the enormous sacred pool at Kurukshetra, to celebrate a battle,

which, in Indian tradition, took place in 3100 BC.

For Indian people, the battle has always marked the divide between the time of myth

and the beginning of real history. It's the last time when men and gods walked the Earth together.

The story of the rival families, the Kurus and the Pandavas, would permeate Indian culture,

in all Indian languages, a fundamental guide to how to live your life and do your duty.

It's a battlefield for Kuru and Pandava, at the time of Dvapara. Dvapara is the Krishna time.

Lord Krishna's time.

All the warriors, they belong to his own family. All family are relatives.

-They don't want to do war with his own.

-He doesn't want to fight against his own people?

-Yes.

And what did Krishna say to him?

Then Krishna...advised him how to perform his duty.

The importance of performing duty for the king.

-Your duty is to fight?

-A performance of duty is a must.

It's really an epic that speaks to every age.

That is an epic full of stories of human beings with feet of clay

with lust and lechery,

ambitions and fears.

People who have committed betrayals

and sold each other down the river.

To read the Mahabharata today

is to recognise how thrilling it must have been to hear it the first time,

somewhere between 400 BC and 400 AD, which is roughly the 800-year span during which it was composed.

During that period, the tale was told and retold to a point where it became a national library of India

where every tale that had to be told was incorporated into a re-telling of the Mahabharata.

All sorts of things got tossed into this.

Every single thing that people wanted to talk about, their times, went into a re-telling of the epic.

So for 800 years, the Mahabharata became THE story of India.

And stories too become part of a nation's identity

for they help create a shared past that binds us all, irrespective of language or religion,

making an allegiance to the idea of India itself. But was the war more than just myth?

So these are all places that were famous in the legend?

The names have not changed. Till today, they bear the same name. The reason is that they have been...

In 1949, two years after independence, a young archaeologist, BB Lal,

went to the citadel of the warring clans at Hastinapur to see if real history lay behind the myth.

This is a view of the Hastinapur mound. And we put a long trench across the mound.

This is the mound from the west. On the eastern side, the river used to flow.

Right by the side of the old River Ganges in ancient times.

His guide wasn't only archaeological science, but the tradition handed down in the Mahabharata.

On the western side of the mound, we were getting the painted greyware. On the eastern side, we were not.

I spent many nights without sleep. And the texts say a great flood came in the Ganga

and washed away Hastinapur.

-A great flood washed away Hastinapur.

-And you can see that man there

-is pointing to the erosion mark left by the river.

-It's very clear.

So you'd found the key evidence that the tradition was correct, that there had been a flood

-that had destroyed part of the city?

-Yes.

When you go to Hastinapur today,

you'd almost think it could be then.

What Lal found under the ground was so similar to what is still above it.

The country people of India live the same way. They build the same kind of houses.

Ancient Hastinapur was recognisable in the India of today.

This is the trench that Professor Lal dug through the mound nearly 60 years ago.

It's crumbling now. But you can still make out the different layers of the city.

It's a bit bigger than Troy, for the sake of comparison, about 700 yards across.

A royal citadel of one of these early kings of the Ganges valley, with mud-brick defences,

storerooms, rooms for the warriors.

And somewhere here presumably a palace, although Professor Lal never found that.

Now what connected this place with the war in the Mahabharata?

Well, remember, three things - the legend which named the place, the story of the flood

and the pottery. This kind of stuff you can pick up even today

after the rains, all over this site. They call it painted greyware.

You can see why - it's grey, beautifully turned on a wheel

and it's painted.

That was the evidence that led Professor Lal to believe

that the great war of the Mahabharata really took place.

Remember, this was the first great excavation done after independence.

It was of crucial importance for the Indian people's view of their own history.

The Mahabharata was their greatest epic. And here this excavation seemed to prove

that long before all the colonial periods, there was a real history, and it was their own.

Over the next 3,000 years, Greeks and Huns, Turks and Afghans, Moguls and British,

Alexander, Tamburlaine, Babur will all come and fall under India's spell.

And India's greatest strength, as the oldest civilisations know,

will be to adapt and change, to absorb the wounds of history

and to use its gifts, but somehow magically, always remain India.

This is the sacred city of Mathura on the River Jumna. The cool season is over now. The rains are ending.

And the heat is beginning to rise.

The Festival of Holi celebrates the coming of light, the triumph of good, the growth of life.

And down there, there's bank managers and IT boffins rubbing shoulders with rickshaw men,

all of them dancing for a god from pre-history.

This amazing journey has already taken us from the Deep South of India

to the wilds of the Hindu Kush in Central Asia and here to the heart of the Ganges plains.

Already you can see the cultures and the languages and the religions of India

have been built up over tens of thousands of years.

They're the deep current on which the great events of history are just the surface movements.

And they make up that deep core of the identity of India.

And this...

And this is just the beginning!

CHEERING

Next in The Story Of India, tales of war and peace,

and the power of ideas -

the greatest warriors, the greatest thinkers and the most dangerous idea in the world.

Subtitles by Subtext for Red Bee Media Ltd 2007

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