Ages of Gold Michael Wood: The Story of India

INDIAN FUSION MUSIC PLAYS

All societies in human history,

I suppose, have imagined a golden age - a past time when people lived in peace and plenty,

when the rulers were just and the division between sacred and profane time had not yet happened.

DISTANT CHEERING

But here in India,

above all countries, that idea has been extraordinarily tenacious and powerful right down to today.

But is there a history behind such dreams?

This is a journey back to the golden age - real and imagined.

DISTANT CHANTING

INDIAN CYMBALS PLAY

In The Story Of India,

we've reached the year 400, the time of the fall of Rome and the Dark Ages in the West.

But here in India, great kingdoms rose then in the north and the south,

and in modern times, this has come to be seen as a golden age.

INDIAN FUSION MUSIC PLAYS THROUGHOUT

And if one story is at the centre of that idea,

it's the tale of Rama, the God who came down to Earth as a king,

who defeated evil and ruled with justice.

It's a tale known and loved by all Indians.

There are said to be 300 versions of the Rama story

in more than 20 different Indian languages.

MUSIC DROWNS CONVERSATION

DISTANT CHATTER

In the days of the Raj, the British called the Rama stories and plays

"the bible of India".

If you didn't know them, they said,

you couldn't know the people.

Nor would you understand the powerful, driving idea behind the epic tale,

that whether king or commoner, you should live in virtue - "dharma".

It's kind of wonderfully smoky and mysterious, isn't it?

Gods in glittering costumes standing among the trees

and a vast audience all sitting round.

We're on the next to the last day of 31 days

of performance of the plays of the story of Rama.

And for most Indian people, it's simply the best story in the world.

Sita!

EVIL LAUGH

Like the tale of Troy, it begins with the abduction

of a beautiful queen.

The wicked demon king seizes Sita,

the faithful wife of Rama, the exiled king of Ayodhyay.

Sita!

The demon king takes Sita back to his island fortress...

while the distraught Rama sets out to find her,

helped by the faithful monkey, Hanuman.

Eventually, with Hanuman's help,

Rama crosses the sea and rescues Sita after a heroic battle.

DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYS

After his triumph,

Rama returns to reign in the city of Ayodhyay

and brings in the Golden Age.

The story has bequeathed to Indian culture the ideal of a just rule.

In the modern freedom struggle against the British,

Mahatma Gandhi himself invoked the return of the rule of Rama.

THEY SING INDIAN HYMN

In around the year 400, the epic tale told by the poets

became fixed in a real place, and the myth became history.

It was back in the early fifth century AD,

the time of the fall of the Roman Empire in the West,

that a powerful North Indian dynasty took the story of Rama and made it their own.

They were called the "Guptas".

And the Guptas took a conscious decision to locate the golden city of Rama

in a real place from where they would rule and create their own golden time.

So the old town of Saketa was given a new name and identity -

Ayodhyay.

That story is still told by the pilgrim guides

on the river bank... with a few mythic embellishments!

MAN SPEAKS IN HINDI

So the myth became fact.

The city of legend became a real place,

and Rama was accepted as an incarnation of God on Earth,

here on the banks of the Gogra River.

But in recent times, the story has been fiercely contested,

used by fundamentalists to assert Hindu supremacy

in a country of many religions.

And in the name of Rama, the God king,

the ideal man, the epitome of justice,

sectarian violence was unleashed across India.

It's a far cry from the fairy-tale city of the Golden Age of Ayodhyay in the legend.

But you have to remember that for all the pilgrims jamming these streets,

this is the place where God came down to Earth.

For hundreds of millions of ordinary Indians, this is a beloved story.

It has the biggest ever book sales, the greatest ever TV audiences.

No wonder the fundamentalists wanted to harness the power of the story.

The soul of Ayodhyay is altogether ten "lakh" years old.

-Ten lakh years old?!

-Ten lakh years old. It has a very long history.

-Wow! This is a million years?!

-This is a million years.

-OK.

A millions years. Right.

So, it's a different conception of history

to the Western conception of history.

So, the fight is not just about the present, but about the past.

The issue at stake is the story of India itself -

who does it belong to? Had there ever been one Indian identity?

Or was the real history, as Nehru and Gandhi

and the freedom fighters believed, one of multiple identities and multiple narratives?

This wonderful place sums up the layers of history of Ayodhyay

that go back long before the revival of the city under the Guptas.

Hindu Ayodhyay, that great Muslim shrine underneath us...

and below our feet, the Buddhist history.

So, what was India like in the Gupta age?

Let's go back now to the world at the time of the fall of the Roman Empire.

The fifth century AD was an age of migrations and wars.

The Huns swept out of Asia from the Great Wall of China to the Gates of Rome.

This was the time when the Gupta kings created their empire.

And by a lucky chance, there's an eyewitness to that time.

A foreigner, who like many later visitors, came here

seeking the wisdom of India.

Thank you.

Sun-dried, river...river mud.

Biodegradable, goes back to the earth once you've finished your drink.

HORN BLARES

The eyewitness was Chinese,

a Buddhist pilgrim whose name was Fa-Hsien.

He'd come to visit the Buddhist monasteries of North India, and he describes the country,

in the time of the great Gupta king, Chandragupta II.

Foreigners' views of other civilisations are always very interesting and revealing.

Fa-Hsien's portrait of India in around the year 400, about the time of the fall of the Roman Empire,

opens a window onto the Gupta age that you could never have imagined from what survives.

It's a portrait of a highly organised state with a very strong governing ethos.

In fact, a great, late classical civilisation.

Fa-Hsien travelled down the Ganges plain.

"This part is known as the Middle land," he says.

"Climate is temperate. The cities and towns are the greatest in India.

"The people are numerous and happy,

"the inhabitants of the cities, rich and prosperous, vie with each other

"in the practice of benevolence and righteousness.

"The king governs without capital punishment, and throughout the country,

"the people do not kill any living creature."

Fa-Hsien depicts India as a pluralist and tolerant country,

where Buddhism thrived along with the Hindu religions.

What he doesn't mention are the extraordinary artistic productions of Gupta civilisation,

like the gold coins of the kings, holding the golden bow of Rama...

Or the wonderful sculpture created by Gupta artists for all religions.

Nor does Fa-Hsien mention the Guptas' technological achievements.

The most mysterious - a 35ft iron pillar...

..which stands in Delhi today.

And the inscription on it... dates it to about 400 AD,

centuries before the Chinese developed their iron technology.

1,500 years nearly before the Industrial Revolution.

If Chinese are considered to be the masters of ceramic, Indians were the masters of metal.

There's no doubt about that. And particularly, the metal they were masters in was iron.

It was done by a technique known as forge welding.

-Forge welding?

-Welding. What you do in this technique is you take lumps of iron,

about 20kg in weight, and then you place them on top of each other in a hot condition

and you hit with a hammer. Doing this,

due to the forging action, you have joined the material.

-So you have constructed a pillar which is about 6,000kg in weight.

-That's unbelievable!

So that is actually a very marvellous engineering feat.

So this pillar should be considered

-as a metallurgical wonder of the world!

-Yes, yes, yeah!

-Not just India - it belongs to humanity.

-Yes.

Do we know who made it and commissioned it?

Based upon the inscription on the pillar, we know that it was commissioned

by one Chandra. It doesn't tell anything more, it just talks about Chandra.

We now know, based on the analysis of the Gupta gold coins, that this Chandra should be Chandragupta II.

"Chandra," says the column, "his face beautiful like the full moon,

"who won the sovereignty of the Earth and left the southern ocean

"perfumed by the breeze of his bravery."

What is it about them that makes them so creative? Can you explain that for us?

As a metallurgist, I'm aware that if you look at the metallurgical objects which have come -

iron, iron pillar, the gold coins, the variety of coins,

and the beautiful bronze castings of Buddha from Mathura,

it's very clear that during the Gupta period, the people were focused on high quality.

And that was the time when Indian civilisation actually takes the next major leap.

And the leap was in all fields. After defeating the Huns,

the Gupta kings made their court a centre of high culture, drama and literature.

But some of the most remarkable achievements of their age were in science. Just like today,

the ancient Indians were brilliant mathematicians.

Gupta scientists pioneered the use of zero,

the foundation of all modern mathematics.

It was a Gupta astronomer, in around 500 AD,

who proved the Earth went round the sun.

His name was Aryabhatta.

Aryabhatta was...one of the greatest Indian astronomers.

He came up with the concept of Pi.

That is a very significant contribution by him.

And, of course, he was... In the field of astronomy also, he estimated the circumference of the Earth,

which, at that time, he said was 5,000 "yojanas".

That is...the unit of length. It turns out that the present value is very close to that value.

That's almost exactly the Earth's true circumference of 24,900 miles.

All this was part of wider speculation about the place of humanity in the cosmos,

a cosmos imagined by ancient Indians in billions of years,

way beyond what anybody came up with in the West, before the age of radio telescopes.

And the ability to imagine like that has always been a mark of Indian civilisation.

Unlike the West in the age of Galileo, India was not traumatised

by the revelation that the universe is infinite and the human place in it, tiny.

That all things, the Gods too,

are subject to cycles of cosmic destruction over aeons of time,

and that human life is a pool of light in an infinite darkness.

Just as a man in a moving boat

sees the stationary objects on shore move in the opposite direction,

so a person standing on the equator would see the stationary stars

move directly towards the West.

DISTANT SINGING

More than anybody else in the Gupta age,

Aryabhatta gives us an idea of the incredible breadth of intellectual speculation going on here in India,

at the time of the Barbarian Invasions and the fall of the Roman Empire in the West.

And those speculations went from contemplation of the cosmos to the life of the mind.

Indian thinkers of the Gupta age were especially interested

in the psychology of human relationships and the art of sex...

..an area that in western Christian civilisation was for so long associated with guilt.

India has always been a guilt-free society as far as sex is concerned.

-Obviously we are 1.2 billion people so...

-HE LAUGHS

There's no guilt here, you know?

Sex is fun and it's good. Even when it's bad, it's all right.

So just...

Yeah, yeah.

The most famous product of the Gupta age, at least in the West,

is the Kama Sutra.

The consciousness of being in an elevated situation

when you're in love, or making love, is called "kama".

It's how to describe it in English, but it's the sense of consciousness.

Having all your sense organs elevated when you are in the very act making love is "kama".

You need to have an element of fun. It's not all about positions

and contortions, it's also about having fun and enjoying this.

"The sound, "Him", a sound like thunder, the sounds "sut",

""dut", gasps, moans..."

"..and cries of "Stop!" "Harder!" "Go on!" "Don't kill me!" "No!" are the generic name of sitk..."

Sit... What's this?

-"Sitkrta".

-Sitkrta.

The Kama Sutra, contrary to many perceptions in the Western world,

is not just about sex or about sexual positions, isn't it?

It's more a kind of book of life, isn't it?

All of Hindu philosophy talks of something called the "Purusharth" which are...

Purusharth is what a man needs to do, right?

Which is "dharma", the whole quality of being a righteous human being.

You have "artha", which allows you to...which is gathering wealth.

So, it could be just business, it could be governance...

Then you have "kama", the idea of love.

And the last of these that you need to do in life is seek "moksha", which is liberation.

Hinduism extols every human being to actually explore all these aspects of life.

It tells us important things about the Gupta age, doesn't it?

We know who it was aimed at. I mean, are women intended as readership as well as men?

Women were equal, and the Kama Sutra too encourages women to seek their own levels of satisfaction.

Right? Because it recognises a very important thing,

and this is the most important thing about the Kama Sutra,

that it looks at relationships as a two-way...relationship,

of give and take, of mutual loving.

-It's a symbiotic relationship.

-It's a very modern text...

-It's a very modern text.

It's a very modern text. It's not, "Oh, thank you, ma'am" and... No. That doesn't work.

TABLA MUSIC PLAYS

ANKLETS JINGLE

In human relations,

there's always a gap between ideal and reality.

The Kama Sutra was written in the fifth century, but it was the product of an age

where there was freedom of thought.

And such an enquiry into love surely is the mark of a high civilisation.

MUSIC: "San Sanana" by Anu Malik and Gulzar

From Bollywood movies to the sublime passion of religious poetry,

the transcendent moment of human love in Indian culture

is a mirror of our relation with the gods.

For all our failures to achieve the ideal,

in love, so India teaches, we human beings are still touched

by the divine.

DISTANT HORN

So the age of the Guptas shaped Indian civilisation in the north in the Middle Ages.

Here in the south, in the 10th century, another great civilisation arose

and created an empire that would rule across Southern India

and the islands of the Indian Ocean.

These were the "Cholans",

and their heyday was from around 900 to 1300 AD.

Just as the Guptas had in the north,

the Cholans reshaped the medieval world of the south.

Their capital still stands today, Thanjore, in Tamil Nadu.

At its heart, the temple of the creator of the empire...

Raja Raja, the king of kings.

Brilliant statesmen, builders and artists, the Cholans have been called the Athenians of India.

And what's so extraordinary is that their civilisation is still alive today.

The priests have been doing that ritual here every morning for the last thousand years,

since Raja Raja The Great himself inaugurated this temple in 1010.

The tallest building in India when it was built,

the temple was dedicated to the great god of the Cholan royal family - Shiva.

The temple, though, really,

is a monument to Raja Raja himself.

It's named after him, and the inscriptions all round the walls

extol his deeds as king of kings, lion of the solar race,

lord of the world.

Like all empires, the Cholan state used violence.

They conquered the whole of South India and sent their fleets to Indonesia.

The temple carries inscriptions to 30 royal regiments, and on its walls,

even the images of the gods are war-like.

The king himself, though, is portrayed on a modest scale -

as a philosopher prince.

In the old palace of the "rajas" of Thanjore, there's another insight into the Cholan age.

Here, in the former royal library, is a vast store

of ancient Tamil literature going back to the Cholans and beyond.

Grammar, poetry and philosophy...

Many of the texts are preserved on fragile, palm-leaf manuscripts,

which are now being carefully restored.

And one fascinating and little-known aspect of their culture is that the Cholans

also wrote their own history.

What would be a manuscript book, a chronicle in Western Europe,

say in the 10th and 11th century, here in the Cholan Empire,

is copper plates.

This is just one document from a temple treasury,

about 15 copper plates.

There's the seal of Rajendra,

the son of Raja Raja the Great. The umbrella and the fish, the tiger...

Weighs about 40 kilos!

And there's thousands of these, most of them still kept by individual temples.

These things were used for recording genealogies, royal pedigrees, land grants, but also history.

And they include the history of how Raja Raja The Great came to the throne.

And it's a dark story.

A tale of palace intrigue and murder,

of whisperings in corridors and shadowy deals.

His brother, the heir, was assassinated.

His father died of a broken heart,

and his mother committed suicide, "Sati", on the funeral pyre.

And then, his wicked uncle took the throne.

But still Raja Raja did not desire the burden of kingship.

But the astrologers had seen certain marks on his body that showed he was the God Vishnu on Earth.

And so it was agreed that Raja Raja should be the next king.

No, over there, please. Just here.

Looking for a clue to the King's personality,

I went to the present Raja of Thanjore, whose family lost their power in 1947...

but not their palace.

These medieval Indian kings seem to me men of strange contradictions.

The mix of violence and beauty, blood and flowers... But today's prince just sees a real person

living according to the kingly ideal of "dharma" - virtue.

You're descended from the great Rajas of Thanjore. Your palace is still right here

where the Cholan kings' palace was a thousand years ago.

Have you ever thought what Raja Raja was like?

Raja Raja...when we just think about him, our blood shoots up.

He's such a great man!

And you know, it...

It makes you feel very proud, and also it makes you feel very small.

If our ego shoots up, it makes it...come down.

What do you think... What kind of people... What do you think Raja Raja was like as a person?

-Have you any idea?

-Yes.

Er, he's...the greatest...

..warrior,

but at the same time, with the most human touch, I feel.

So, he was with the people. Otherwise, just by command and force,

he could not have built such a huge...temple

or he could not have planned such a golden period for his subjects.

There's nothing left of Raja Raja's palace here in Thanjore,

but if you want to imagine what it might've looked like, just come to the Durbar Hall...

..the reception hall of the later kings of Thanjore.

We know it would've looked like this in Cholan times. Archaeologists have discovered the stone basis

to the immense, wooden columns in the front of the reception hall.

Raja Raja The Great would've sat on his throne here, surrounded by his queens and his minister,

his concubines and his poets, with the court there assembled in front ready to receive the royal largesse.

CHANTING IN HINDI

In modern times, Raja Raja's reign

has come to be seen as a Tamil golden age, celebrated in novels,

plays and in movies. Indeed, in the civil war in Sri Lanka,

the Tamil rebels have even modelled their oaths of loyalty on those of the Cholan army.

INDIAN MUSIC PLAYS

But Raja Raja himself deserves better to be remembered as a great ruler and patron...

and an even more assiduous record keeper. Don't think for a moment

that it was the British who brought bureaucracy into India.

The reality of the Cholan state is revealed in an amazing series of records

carved on the walls of the great temple in Thanjore.

The temple's not only a monumental piece of self-advertisement,

it's also a written record of the administration of the Cholan Empire.

It even lists all the staff, hundreds of them,

who were brought in to serve the emperor's new foundation.

Craftsmen, artists, musicians, and 400 dancing girls.

And they're listed by name, by house number and by street

in the quarter that was specially built for them.

For the historian, the detail is irresistible.

For history, after all, is not just about kings. It's about ordinary people

who are usually nameless, but not here.

Who, for example, was the dancer Thirumala

who lived here in Raja Raja's new royal city on South Street

on the south side in house number 88?

Where is the numbering of the street? Oh, I see! OK.

Ah! Thank you. Yes, yes.

There is a difference between old numbering and new numbering!

Nobody's expecting the 11th century numbering to be quite the same as it is today.

But counting the houses from the junction of the street,

number 88, where a dancing girl called Thirumala lived, is somewhere...

..here. Come on!

Hello.

This is the kind of courtyard that would've existed

in the private houses in Cholan Thanjore.

Every one would've had its own well

and, er, little shrines.

MAN SPEAKS IN INDIAN LANGUAGE

So, is this a private temple? A private temple!

-So, this is as old as the time of Raja Raja the Great?

-Yes, a thousand years old.

-This is "Aman" temple or Shiva?

-Ambal, Ambal.

-Ambal, Ambal.

So, it's a little goddess shrine, a family shrine. Isn't that absolutely wonderful?

I think, when you look at those documents for the dancers,

that...Thirumala, the dancer who lived at number 88, lived in a place just like this,

with a little shrine to the goddess, a yard where she cooked,

and spent a life devoted to the service of Shiva in the great temple of Raja Raja.

SINGING IN INDIAN LANGUAGE

And the dance has survived until today.

The style of dancing, Bharata Natyam, is another of the artistic traditions

of South India that's come down to us in an unbroken line

from the Cholan era a thousand years ago.

Back in Raja Raja the Great's time, it was a religious dance.

Those girls in the temple were dancing for God.

And the poses of the dance still today

are the 108 classic poses of that Shiva himself is said to have danced

in his cosmic dance.

In the Tamil countryside, you can still stumble on scenes straight out of the Cholan world.

DRUMS AND PUNGI FLUTE PLAY

This is Thiruvengadu, a centre for the arts in Raja Raja's day.

The king made an official collection of the hundreds of popular songs to the god Shiva.

And these are still sung today.

When the king first heard them, he said they'd made his hair stand on end.

HE SINGS IN INDIAN LANGUAGE

In this and many other ways, the ritual and psychological order established in the Middle Ages

defined the forms of Hinduism still practised today in the south.

DRUMS AND PUNGI FLUTE PLAY

But the Cholan age was also one of the greatest periods of Indian art.

And this one, perhaps the most famous.

Just come and look at this! About as close as we could possibly be

to one of the greatest masterpieces in...metal casting in the world.

It shows Shiva as the herdsman.

He would've been leaning on his bull, Nandi, but the bull hasn't been found.

Fantastic detail on the fingers, isn't it?

A turban of snakes...

And what a wonderful figure he's got, hasn't he?

Rather lovely midriff! The...

The girdle, the detail on the girdle here!

And, of course, the consort of the god is always here as well.

This is Parvati...Shiva's wife.

And this is the classic image of Cholan beauty, South Indian beauty.

In fact, it becomes the classic image of beauty in...in India altogether, you know?

You see any of the classic historical Bollywood movies and they kind of look like this.

Except the upper part of their bodies is dressed too!

And one of the families of bronze casters who worked for Raja Raja still exists...

..and they're still making bronzes today.

So, how many generations of names back? 15 generations?

-More.

-More? 20? More?

According to family tradition, their ancestors

worked on the temple in Thanjore. And they still make the images in exactly the same way.

-...flexible, we put it in the water.

-All right.

MAN SPEAKS IN INDIAN LANGUAGE

So, you don't... You don't use a ruler?!

You don't use feet and inches?

HE SPEAKS IN INDIAN LANGUAGE

All right...

-So, this is one face?

-One face.

-Quarter...quarter face?

The measurement is by the face. Yeah.

HE SPEAKS IN INDIAN LANGUAGE

Chest.

Abdomen. Yeah.

Upper leg...

Knee... Lower leg... Foot.

The model is then made in beeswax.

Just...

Why beeswax?

Every civilisation has its idea about how God should be represented.

But this Tamil version of God is a dancer. This...

is unique and, er...

..wonderfully laden with symbols.

The drum that beats...

..creation into existence. The fire...

which will destroy everything,

destroying the demon of ignorance.

Every part of the image,

which the "Sthapathy" is constructing,

is loaded with meaning.

The casting of the bronze begins with a prayer...

and then the mould is slowly heated to melt the wax inside.

MEN SPEAK IN INDIAN LANGUAGE

You have to do things the way that it was always done.

You know, 21st century and... modernity, but you still do things the way that they were always done.

This ancient craft is called the lost wax process.

It's easy to see why.

Then the mould is filled with a special mix of molten bronze.

The exact composition? A secret of the bronze master.

What a way to make...the most beautiful pieces of art!

His job is simply to do the pouring!

He hasn't been around all day, just came in to do the pouring!

Everybody has their own role in the task.

The bronze is left to cool for a day,

and then the mould can be broken.

This art was at its height 1,000 years ago

in the hands of masters whose work has never been surpassed.

But today's craftsmen still work in their line, crafting images

in the 21st century that go back to the deepest layers of the Indian tradition.

MAN SINGS IN INDIAN LANGUAGE

This is a particularly precious image because it's one

of only two that survived of the 66 bronzes that Raja Raja The Great

commissioned for the opening of the temple here in Thanjore in 1010.

And from this place, that image spread out over the whole of South India.

Even today, it's synonymous with Tamil, South Indian culture.

MEN SING IN INDIAN LANGUAGE

Indeed, synonymous perhaps with all Indian culture.

And a reminder too, that though we talk of golden ages,

civilisation, in reality, is made by the toil of generations,

of craftsmen and women, of workers and labourers in the fields.

There's a last story about Raja Raja...

Hello! How are you?

'When he was young, though he had many queens, he lacked a son and heir.

'So, he prayed to the god Shiva.

'The son was born and reached manhood, and at the end of his own life, Raja Raja made him king.

'And then, he came here to give thanks.'

It's an extraordinary sort of story. It's one of the few places

where you can actually stand where Raja Raja the Great came.

Raja Raja's craftsmen had created a huge cow made out of gold.

So you have to imagine the Cholan court in all their finery

in 1012 coming...

'The ceremony was called the "Ceremony of the Golden Air God"

'with the golden wolves, a kind of renewal ceremony. The queen was passed through the mouth of the cow

'and then the cow was broken to pieces and the gold given to the priests.'

And the moustache!

He's wearing a moustache!

'And the king himself,

'was weighed in gold.' ...the earrings of a woman and a headdress.

But in that moment, the king was celebrating a long reign of prosperity,

as his inscriptions say, when the goddess of victory,

the goddess of...fortune...

and the matchless goddess of fame had all become his wives.

Within months, Raja Raja died. But he'd laid the foundations for the Tamils to dominate South India

for nearly 300 years.

MAN PRAYING IN INDIAN LANGUAGE

HE SPEAKS IN INDIAN LANGUAGE

Through the 11th century, the age of Byzantium and the Muslim Kahel-Fitr,

the Cholans were one of the world's great powers,

making colonies in Java, Sumatra and the islands of Indonesia.

So, in the story of India, that's how civilisation

flowered in the Middle Ages in the north and the south.

The legacy of those centuries would be far-reaching in Indian history

and down here in the south, where the tempo of change is slower,

where later wars and invasions had less impact, the continuities can still be seen today.

One is in that central concern of medieval government - irrigation.

Like all the great ancient civilisations,

The Cholan culture grew up on the banks of a river - the Kaveri.

But at this point, the two great streams of the Kaveri almost touch each other.

But the bed of that stream is about ten feet lower

than the bed of that.

The danger is that all the water will flow away that way towards the sea.

What the Cholans did was create a great dam, the Anicut,

a snaking brick structure more than 1,000ft long,

60ft wide, 20ft high that diverted the waters

of that stream of the Kaveri off into the delta

where they could irrigate vast, new areas of rice fields that feed a booming population.

So, the centuries of medieval rule bequeathed later generations

and modern Indians one of the richest and most productive places on Earth.

In the 18th century, British administrators described the rice fields of the south as

"The most fertile lands they ruled anywhere in the world, giving three harvests a year."

And they thought the people of the southern rice fields among the most moral and hard-working.

And those people are still here, like the old agricultural caste

who supervised the irrigation long ago under the Cholan kings,

still maintaining the ancient rituals in the modern world.

This is... You have family festivals in here?

Right, right, right.

Tell me about the community.

-So, the job of your caste was to maintain irrigation...

-Irrigation.

-..of the rice paddy fields and all this. This was a special job.

-Yeah.

MUSIC DROWNS CONVERSATION

Like all their community, they believe in killing no living thing, even insects,

and are strictly vegetarian.

-This is our kitchen.

-Oh, great!

Vegetarian cooking, "the food of Shiva",

as they call it here, is the great tradition.

And the grinding stone...

And here, cooking is tied to many important social rituals at the family hearth,

especially for married couples.

-So, it IS like a test for the new wife?

-Yeah.

Thank you.

Yeah, yeah, thank you. This is daal and rice

-from family fields or...?

-Yeah.

-Oh, right! Fantastic.

Mm, it's lovely food.

-And always, women... The women wait for the men to finish?

-Yeah.

-This is tradition?

-Yeah.

-Oh, really? Husband and wife share the same leaf?

-Yeah!

-This is what...one of the things that...which is what it means to be Tamil.

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

One of the highlights of the year for traditional Tamil women is the festival of light - Karthigai.

BELL RINGS

Modern Indian women and yet still, bearers of an ancient civilisation.

And at the time of the festival of light, just as they did in the Middle Ages,

people go on pilgrimage.

All these people are heading for a small town in the South Indian plain.

The name of the place - Thiruvannamalai.

Pilgrimage is another living legacy of the Middle Ages. It's one of those things

that gave Indian people a sense of cultural identity,

long before India achieved political unity.

A sense of India as a holy land, from the Himalayas to the deep south.

DISTANT CHATTER

BABY CRIES

It's all a bit like an Indian Canterbury Tales,

and this is just one of thousands of sacred sites

dotted across the south.

All through the day, the more vigorous pilgrims

scramble up to the top of the mountain, where a sacred fire will be lit after dark.

Down below, inside the giant temple, the crowds gather and just wait...

Wait for an ancient ceremony to greet the fire on the mountain,

a ritual a thousand years old, and who knows, maybe much older.

UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYS

BACKGROUND NOISE DROWNS SPEECH

What's gonna happen in about an hour, is that the bronze images

of the gods Shiva, Parvati, Ganesh,

will be brought out and put on these chariots here.

-Then carried round?

-Yeah.

-All round the courtyard?

-Yes.

And now, everyone's waiting for the light...

the light that will cut through the darkness. It's one of the oldest ideas of humanity.

This has gotta be the only place in the world where you can get run over

by Bronze Age priests!

There's India, as it always does, stirring those ancient memories.

So, the light has been lit on the top of the hill. They're all looking to see it.

As for the idea of the golden age,

it seemed to me that golden ages can only ever exist in the past.

For they're the products of our imaginations,

and we humans, after all, can only ever exist here,

in the present.

-So, Shanti, this is the first time you're here?

-Yeah!

-Yes, enjoying?

-Enjoying, very much enjoying!

-Yes?

-I am lucky.

I thought we would never see the "jyoti", but...

-So, this is auspicious?

-Yes.

-Yeah?

-Sure.

In a world where the identities and traditions of the ancient civilisations

have been wiped away in a few generations, here in India alone,

they've kept touch with their deep past and indeed, one might say, with the past of all humanity.

And that, perhaps, is the key to the story of India.

Next in The Story Of India,

the clash of civilisations that shaped our world...

the fabulous tale of Indian Islam...

..the dazzling culture of the Moguls...

..and the extraordinary quest for one world religion.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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