The Meeting of Two Oceans Michael Wood: The Story of India

There are moments in history when civilisations aspire to greatness.

India had done so in ancient times and, at the end of the Middle Ages, it did so again.

And it was the coming of Islam that inspired the next great phase of Indian history.

Today the sub-continent is home to half of all the world's Muslims.

The ebb and flow of its history has been shaped by the encounter

of the two civilisations of India and Islam.

And, in all of history, there is no more dramatic tale.

The next chapter in The Story of India.

Muslim traders had settled in south India within memory of the Prophet's lifetime,

but the coming of Islam only began to work profound change

in the history of the sub-continent in the Middle Ages, with invasions and settlements here in the north.

That story begins in the city of Multan, in what is now Pakistan, exactly 1,000 years ago.

Here in Multan, a series of events began

which would shift forever the balance of history

in the sub-continent,

and the key figure was Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni.

Few characters in history have aroused more violent disagreement.

To some, he was a great prince,

a builder of empires and a champion of the faith.

To others, an oppressor, a fanatic and an iconoclast.

The head of a great Muslim empire in Afghanistan, Mahmud occupied the then Hindu city of Multan,

and used it as a base for a series of raids into India.

So your family were connected with Mahmud of Ghazni's family?

-Yes.

-And you've been in this quarter of the city for nearly 1,000 years?

We're living here all the time.

When our ancestor came, you see, and when he camped here you see, at the site where he is buried.

'The Gardezis' ancestor came with Mahmud's son in the 11th century.'

-It's through those doors he came riding on a lion.

-Oh, yeah.

With a live snake as a whip in his hand, and a pair of pigeons fluttering over his head.

'But their ancestor wasn't a warrior but a holy man, one among many who came in the Middle Ages into India.'

This is from the 12th century then, is it?

'This is his tomb.

'He was a Sufi, an Islamic mystic, and the Sufi saints, who are still loved across Pakistan

'and north India, will be very important in this story.

'For it was the Sufi saints who first brought Islam and the people of India together.'

Among the saints of Multan, I think Shah Yusef, our ancestor,

he's first of the Muslim saints to arrive in Multan.

I would call him the founder of Muslim Multan.

So the age of Mahmud was a time of violence, but also the beginning of a meeting of minds.

For, like the Hindu holy men,

the Sufis taught that people should strive to be with God

without any attachment.

And there lay the common ground between Islam and the religions of India.

Ah, the old Gardezi library.

I remember this place.

This was founded by my great-great-great grandfather...

'And even the dreaded Mahmud himself is remembered here as a prince of high culture.'

..From an old manuscript type, musty old books.

Some of them are 400-500 years old.

'He was the patron of the famous epic, Ferdousi's Book Of Kings.'

This is the Ferdousi. The Ferdousi was commissioned by Mahmud of Ghazni

to write the history of Persia and this part of the world in poetry form, and Mahmud promised

that he would give him one gold coin per couplet.

-For a couplet.

-For a couplet.

-He wrote 40,000 couplets.

40,000 couplets!

So Mahmud had a second thought and said, "Oh, a gold coin is too much.

"I think I'll give you a silver coin per couplet."

And he refused to accept it and he went back home and wrote a satire against Mahmud

which become so popular, in which he criticises Mahmud's ancestry and everything,

especially his mother's side.

His mother's ancestry. He says at one point...

HE READS THE TEXT OUT

"Oh, King Mahmud, oh, conqueror of the countries, of the nations,

-"if you are not scared of anyone at least be scared of God".

-Wow!

And that become so popular that every child in Ghazni

was reciting couplets of the satire more than that of the Shahnama.

All the original, the main text.

-So Mahmud deeply regretted...

-He regretted that and decided to honour his word and give a gold coin.

Mahmud led a dozen great expeditions into India.

The most famous left Multan in November 1025.

It took them a month to get down from Multan to the sea.

To survive through this kind of terrain,

they took 20,000 camels to carry the water.

In these earlier attacks on India, the goal wasn't conquest, but plunder.

Their target in 1025, the famous Hindu temple town of Somnath,

said to be incredibly rich in gold and silver.

Though, as can still happen, the invasion was given a different public justification

as a war against the infidel.

There are many stories about why Mahmud attacked Somnath.

Long, long ago in Arabia, there was a goddess called Manat.

When Islam came, the shrines of the goddesses were destroyed.

But according to one version of the story, the stone image of Manat

was taken away from Arabia

and brought here to India, and Somnath became her temple.

Somanatha.

And it was to fulfil the work of the prophet that Mahmud led his expedition to the sea.

THEY SING AND CHANT

That story no doubt made Mahmud look good with the Caliph in Baghdad as a defender of the faith.

But it was fantasy. He'd come to loot the wealth of India.

And these tales became part of the mythology of the people in the border land of Rajasthan.

To them, Mahmud is still a bogeyman,

and they still sing of their heroic battles in the Middle Ages

against the Afghans and the Turks.

THEY SING

THEY CLAP

CAMELS SNORT

FARTING

Ah, nothing like that old sound of grumpy camels

clearing their throats and farting all night, is there?

Well, there isn't!

Mahmud's attack on Somnath led him 750 miles south from Multan,

across the great desert of Thar,

into Gujarat and down to the Arabian Sea.

There on the seashore lay the rich pilgrim shrine of Somnath inside a fortified town.

The Shiva temple here was destroyed and rebuilt several times

before it was restored in the 1950s after independence.

Mahmud reached here in January 1026,

sacked the city, destroyed the idol and plundered the temple's gold.

In today's India, the tale is still remembered with bitterness.

TRANSLATION:

Mahmud's expedition to Somnath was written up by his Persian and Turkic court poets

as an emblematic clash between Islam and Hindu idolatry.

The great historian Al-Biruni, who was no fan of Mahmud,

went with him to India and says the 12 great plundering expeditions

engendered a hatred among Hindus for the Turks.

By which he means, the Muslims.

But, as always in history, and especially in the history of India, there's another story.

And what appears to begin here as a clash of civilizations

will become, over time, one the most remarkable cultural crossovers in the history of civilization.

What a great Indian Muslim prince will later call "The Meeting of Two Oceans".

And it's Al-Biruni, a Muslim scholar who learned Sanskrit, who gives us the first signpost.

"You must bear in mind,"

he says, "that the Hindus entirely differ from us in almost everything.

"And the barriers separating us are many - language, manners, customs, rules of purity.

"And India is such a diverse land, from Kashmir in the north to the southern cultures -

"Telugu, Kanada and Tamil.

"In religion, the Indians totally differ from us,

"as we believe in nothing in which they believe, and vice versa.

"India's hard to understand, though I have a great liking for it.

"And our apparent differences would be perfectly transparent

"if there were more contact between us."

But in 1192, there came a new phase -

military conquest by Afghans and Turks, who became Sultans of Delhi.

Here, they built a giant minaret, which doubled as a tower of victory.

240 feet high, it's one of the wonders of the world, the Qutub Minar.

It's called the Might of Islam.

The Might of Islam.

So this a statement of conquest.

This is foreign conquerors coming in and creating their base here.

This base was very important

for taking the conquest into other parts of India.

So you can imagine, the Qutub complex

was the place which established Muslim rule in India.

This was built around the end of the 12th century.

There was a time when this Lal Kot area was taken over by the Afghans.

This is the first Indo-Islamic mosque in India,

-this particular mosque.

-This is the place.

-The first mosque.

And all around us, the remains of Hindu columns.

The inscription on the eastern gate says that 27 temples were actually dismantled to construct this mosque.

It was as much a political as a religious statement.

Since its first spread in the 7th century, the Islamic world had encountered many other religions,

but nowhere as big and diverse as India.

The fact was, as the Delhi Sultans soon realised, they couldn't possibly convert India.

Co-existence had to follow.

The different dynasties of the Sultans of Delhi ruled here for 300 years,

and you can still pick up their traces today in the back streets of old Delhi.

-So where are we heading?

-We are going to Mubarakul village...

-Yeah.

-..where a Saiyid king, who ruled sometime in 1430, is buried.

What was then just an obscure village,

built this rather elaborate tomb we're about to see.

Mubarak Shah's Tomb?

Mubarak Shah's Tomb? Round here?

'We're looking for the tomb of one of the Delhi Sultans,

'which over the centuries has become a shrine for the local community.'

-What? That thing there?

-Yeah.

I don't believe this, look at this, this is just amazing.

Why has it been caged in?

Because there is a very real fear that history may reach out and bite you.

MICHAEL LAUGHS

And in a bizarre twist, the Sultan has become a local holy man.

Our friend here tells us that, soon after a marriage, newly-weds would come here and pray,

not to a holy man but to a Sultan.

But he has become holy through the years, don't ask me how.

In an age where all Hindus in the north

were forced to pay a head tax to the Sultans to practise their faith,

here's a clue as to how things can change on the ground.

You won't die of hunger if you live in this vicinity because he will make sure that you have livelihood.

You won't die of hunger? Yeah.

So he still sort of protects the people who live around him.

That's a fantastic idea, isn't it?

But the biggest meeting of minds was brought about by the Sufi saints.

And these are really, really basic, the idea being that the people who came...

'For through the Sufis, the devotees of both faiths found their common ground.'

You can see the pots in the trees really well from here.

So these are all successful wishes?

These are wishes that have come true.

'And not just in folk beliefs, but in an idea deeply rooted in Islam's mystical traditions -

'the unity of all being and of all religions.'

The person who lies buried here is Abu Bakar Sheik Haidery Tusi.

-He belonged to the...Qalandariyah?

-Qalandariyah.

-Qalandariyah Silsila.

-This is a Sufi order that came from Iran or Iraq?

-Iran.

-Iran.

This is not just a conquest, is it? It's an intermingling.

A lot of people now increasingly see that, at least in North India,

Islam didn't spread through the sword, but through men like the person buried here, these Sufis.

And it sort of went on like a continuous stream, as it were,

for 300 to 400 years.

And perhaps real change in history has to happen at the grass roots.

The poet Amir Khusro grew up here in the Delhi Sultanate.

He's still a household name in old Muslim families. He's typical of the age,

a Muslim, whose parents were Turkic, who spoke Persian.

And this is his voice.

"India is our beloved motherland, a paradise on Earth.

"Intelligence is the natural gift of its people.

"There can be no better guide to life than the wisdom of India."

This cult is frowned on by the really orthodox kind of Islamic...

Some Islam would find this sacrilege, almost all of it.

It is considered completely un-Islamic.

So in the Middle Ages in the north, despite war and violence, forced conversion,

discrimination against Hindus,

the foundations were laid for the amazing events which would follow in the 16th century.

This is one of the most wonderful viewpoints in history.

This is the end of the Khyber Pass, the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

This is the route taken by many of the great invaders in history who came into the Indian subcontinent -

Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan and Tamberlane.

In late 1525, new invaders come down this corridor of history from Afghanistan.

Originally from Central Asia, the Moghuls had made Kabul their base

from which to mount an invasion of the plains of India.

After four failures, this was the final throw on which their leader, Babur, had staked everything.

It's April 1526.

The heat already clamping on the Delhi plain.

Temperature pushing up towards 40 degrees.

The Moghul army, 12,000 men.

Their leader, a grizzled veteran at 43 years old, inured to war since he was ten.

Descendant of Genghis Khan and Tamberlane.

And ahead of him, at Panipat,

the Sultan of Delhi, Ibrahim, with an army of 100,000 men

and 1,000 war elephants.

Babur's place of destiny, Panipat just north of Delhi, was the scene of several

great battles in Indian history going back to the legendary wars of the ancient epic of the Mahabharata.

But now it was Muslim ruler against Muslim invader.

Both sides had taken their positions a week before.

We know about Babur's preparation

more than Ibrahim's because Babur has left a record behind.

-He was outnumbered by one to five.

-Wow!

He has commandeered, he says, about 700 carts and tied them together with fibre cables.

What's he trying to do there to protect himself?

He's tied cannons in these carts.

There are several hundred cannons tied like this right in front.

He shoots the enemy with his cannon, which is for the first time happening in India,

it's in the battle of Panipat, that it's happening in India.

-The use of artillery?

-The use of artillery on that scale.

Behind that, his cavalry and behind that, his infantry.

-And how does he win?

-Well...

Is it the artillery that makes the difference?

Partly, very largely it does make a difference because, you know...

What do the elephants and horses do against the artillery?

So, like his contemporaries, Cortes and Pizarro in the new world, in one battle

the Moghul conquistador Babur had gained the heartland of India.

In thanksgiving, he built a little mosque overlooking the battlefield,

the first mogul mosque in India.

So this place marks the start of a new age and of a new style

that we now think of as quintessentially Indian.

This is a palace built by Babur for this Queen

-while he's saying it's a mosque built by Babur for his army to say their prayers.

-Wow!

So there are two different stories. In India, Babur is known as a warrior, as a conqueror,

a great soldier.

In his home, back home in Tajkan area,

probably nobody even knows that he came to India and conquered

but they remember him as a great poet, a very, very great poet.

He's a man of many, many parts, and above all a very honest sincere man,

a very charming, loveable man.

He was also a devout Muslim.

Not a very, what shall I say, dogmatic Muslim, but a devout Muslim

who said his prayers regularly five times a day.

After saying his prayers, he had a cup of wine, of course.

So, it's a very human figure, you know.

-He was a live man.

-Yeah, yeah.

-A regular guy, you said earlier.

-A regular guy.

And after the battle, what Babur does next is another clue to what will follow.

He enters Delhi, but doesn't plunder the city.

Instead, he comes here to the old Sufi Shrine of Nizamuddin,

still a favourite among Delhiites of all communities, Hindu as well as Muslim.

And here he offers a humble prayer before going back to camp to have a cup of wine and write poetry.

Thank you very much.

'And that will set the tone of the next amazing phase of the story of India.

'Devotion to the Sufis will mark all of Babur's descendants.

'Just as respect for all religions marked his ancestors back to Tamberlane.'

Beautiful place.

'Under the Moghuls, the story of Islam and India will move on

'to a different plane, which still has lessons for the world today.'

Oh, that's very, very kind, thank you. Thank you very much.

-This is the most important of the shrines of the saints in Delhi.

-Yes.

-This great Sufi Saint.

-Great Sufi Saint.

The tale of the Moghuls is a family story -

one of the most remarkable and gifted dynasties in history.

They ruled India for 330 years before they were deposed by the British.

But immediately after Babur's death, his son Humayun was driven into exile,

where his wife gave birth to a son who would become one of the greatest of all Indian rulers, Akbar.

The tale of Akbar takes us first to Rajasthan,

where the local Hindu Rajas had always resisted the Muslim conquerors.

In the 16th century,

the majority of Indian people in the north were still Hindus

who followed the old religions of India - of Shiva, Vishnu and the Goddess.

They had often endured intolerance and forced conversion under the medieval sultans.

Kushbu, I am Michael.

-My name is Michael, and this is your brother?

-Mohit.

Mohit! Mohit.

Thank you, this is the best place in Jodhpur.

Akbar would change the relations between Hindu and Muslim in India.

When he was born in the house of relatives of the royal family of Jodhpur,

there were omens which foretold his future greatness

just as there were for other giants of history, like Alexander.

So back in 1542, when the astrologers did his horoscope,

what did they see in Akbar's line of life?

I asked the present Maharaja's astrologer to redraw his chart.

Mr Sharma, lovely to see you again. Hello, Abhisekh.

That's great. So? How did we do?

What, um...first of all, the date, the 25th of October 1542.

-Sunday morning.

-It is Sunday morning.

-Saturday night and the Sunday morning. 2am is the...

-2am?

Yes. That at the time of his birth, Sagittarius was in the fifth house.

That's astrologically.

So this is the Emperor Akbar's chart here? Fantastic.

This is computer-made chart.

He was born in the Leo Ascendant.

In Leo Ascendant?

These people are very,

very confident about they are doing

and they are very keen and they are focused about their goals.

The aspect of Sun and Saturn, it is the Kingdom, Yog,

as we describe in the astrology, which is the Maharaja Yog.

He was born when Scorpio was in the fourth house. That was why

he was bound to have lead a good and comfortable life,

though born at a different strata,

but the horoscope indicates that he was not to get ancestral property

and this holds good because he later acquired kingdom.

After the sixth day of his birth, the astrologer must have calculated his birth chart.

Because we believe that on sixth day the Goddess of Fortune comes

and he writes the fortune of the child.

They saw the future fortune...

Because the Sun and Saturn...

Saturn is the main planet who gives the kingdom.

If Saturn is on the highest state it must have given the kingdom,

it will give at that time, they have thought.

And they were right!

Akbar became king in 1556

when his father died after falling down his library steps in Delhi.

At that moment, much of north India was controlled by their enemies

and the Moghuls might just have been an unlamented blip in the story of India.

It's an unlikely place, isn't it?

But there was a beautiful Moghul garden here in 1556.

Akbar was proclaimed king here at Kalanaur by generals loyal to his father.

Thank you.

So where is it?

Here? This is it?

Well, how about that?

Isn't that extraordinary, doesn't look as if there's any of the garden left, does it?

It's a beautiful spot. Akbar came back several times in his later life.

Gorgeous, isn't it, this evening?

That was the throne platform there. He would have sat on that.

You have to remember he's only a 13-year-old boy.

He'd been brought up in exile among tough warriors in Afghanistan.

You can imagine the sort, I'm sure.

He played truant from school, preferred outdoor sports and games

and remained illiterate all his life.

-What is your name?

-Namke.

Namke? Yah?

And how old are you?

-TRANSLATION: 12.

-12.

So you are nearly the same age as Akbar. He was 13 and you are 12.

It's an incredible thought, isn't it, that he was only this age when he became king.

Maybe because the intellectuals and the scholars and the mullahs had never got

their intellectual straightjacket on him, he retained a wonderful capacity

to make unexpected, unconventional connections.

As we would put it, to think outside the box.

At this point, the Moghul Kingdom had shrunk to a few small pockets around Kandahar, Lahore and Delhi.

But young Akbar acts fast, defeats his enemies and wins the kingdom.

And then over the next ten years, he expands it across to Bengal

and down to the Deccan to become one of the world's great powers.

And soon the illiterate, young tough guy was showing unexpected skills in rulership

and an unsuspected interest in India's different philosophies.

Akbar is not very religious,

he has attachments to Sufis,

superstitious attachments, let us say, to the Ajmer Shrine and so on.

India was what he experienced.

He liked this language. He liked mixing with the people.

As you know, he was a bit of a lover in the beginning, so he loved the people

and often went to gatherings even when he had become a king, without courtiers, incognito.

He was a different type of sovereign altogether.

In January 1575, Akbar came with his closest Hindu advisor

here to the junction of the Ganges and the Jumna Rivers

at the time of the great bathing festival.

What Akbar saw here was one of those great Hindu melas

where millions of people come down to the junction of the rivers to take a holy bath.

Akbar's advisor tells the story how a strange thing happens at that time.

He says, "When the planet Jupiter enters the constellation of Aquarius

"and then a small mound - island rises in the middle

"of the River Ganges and all the people go out to it to do worship."

Akbar was so touched by his experience that he named the Hindu sacred place

Allahabad - The City Of God.

So here having already lifted the hated tax on Hindus,

Akbar begins to embrace all India's religions.

The Sikhs were one of the radical religious groups who'd sprung up

out of the interaction of Hinduism and Islam in the 16th Century.

Their first guru, Nanak, who died in 1539, asserted, "There is no Hindu or Muslim,"

and laid stress on the worship of one God and works of charity.

His legacy today is a world faith, singled out by the turban

that all men must wear to enter their holy shrines.

And it was Akbar who gifted them land here in Amritsar to build the Golden Temple,

the most famous landmark of Sikhism today.

It would be under the later Moghuls that the Sikhs became a military sect,

bearing the symbol still carried by all practising Sikh men today, what they call the Five Ks.

The first K is the Kesh which is unshown hair.

-You don't cut your hair?

-No. Hence, therefore the appearance...

you don't cut your hair.

And second one is Kanga which is a wooden comb.

-Comb?

-Wooden comb, yes.

-And you keep that with you?

-We keep that in the hair here.

And third one is bracelet...

It is called Kara - starts with K.

Fourth K is your Kachhera which is a baggy shorts, briefs.

Baggy briefs which you wear as undergarment.

Right, and the fifth one, finally?

Is Kirpan. Kirpan is actually...

Now if I can take you through this.

It's not a sword and it's not a knife either.

-May I look?

-Yes, sure.

It is called Kirpan. It is to defend your respect.

To stand against the tyranny of the time, so that we could defend the faith.

"Now it has become clear to me," said Akbar,

"that it cannot be wisdom to assert the truth of one faith over another.

"In our troubled world, so full of contradictions,

"the wise person makes justice his guide and learns from all.

"Perhaps in this way the door may be opened again whose key has been lost."

The New Age demanded a new capital.

Fatehpur Sikri was built in the 1570s in the plain near Agra.

Above the entrance is a quotation from a Christian saviour and Muslim prophet - Jesus.

This is the great gate of Akbar's city at Fatehpur Sikri.

The inscription reads this,

"Jesus, peace be upon Him, said this.

"The world is a bridge, cross it but build no house upon it

"for the world endures but a moment and the rest is unknown."

The new city was built around the tiny shrine of a Sufi saint

whose blessing Akbar had sought to get a son and heir.

And the lavish celebrations when his son was born are still remembered

by the ancient guardian of the shrine.

While the new city was being built and Akbar was beginning

his philosophical enquiries, he also oversaw a great reform of Moghul government.

The administrative structure of Moghul Empire is practically complete.

Provinces are established from 1580, the centralised administration is then already established.

In 1574, he establishes his military service - bureaucracy and army are combined.

He has the new land revenue system,

conquers are going on. Now Akbar is not personally involved.

OK.

So actually this philosophy is,

the philosophy of politically leisure hours, let us say.

-Partly leisure hours.

-Personal search.

But he's seeking for a justification of sovereignty.

And how to justify sovereignty.

To create an allegiance in a nation of such diversity, that was the question.

Akbar's big idea was very simple.

No one religion can claim absolute knowledge, absolute authority.

He'd already had discussions with Muslim wise men, Sunni and Shia,

but he'd been shocked by how quickly they'd come to blows with each other.

Now he summoned leaders of all the religions of the world.

Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Parsees, Jains -

to find the common ground of all religion.

And in those weekly seminars here at Fatehpur, perhaps for the first time in human history,

the absolute claims of religion itself were put under scrutiny.

THEY TALK HINDI

Every religion is wrong but all differences have to be tolerated.

He says in India there are so many religions and therefore the sovereign

should not identify with one. He's the...

just as God can't identify himself with one religion,

so the sovereign can't identify, as sovereign.

From Moghul India to Christian Europe, it was a Renaissance world

and Akbar even received a letter from his contemporary, Elizabeth I.

In her letter to the Emperor Akbar, Queen Elizabeth of England says something very interesting.

She says that, "The singular report of your majesty's humanity

"has reached even these most distant shores of the world."

Humanity? Not power, glory, riches.

But it's right to talk about Akbar's humanity still.

It's what makes him one of the most engaging figures in history,

but it's not the whole story. The other side is his rationality.

Don't think for a moment that his dream of one religion was some New Age whim.

It was conceived as rationally as all his other great policies.

His drastic overhaul of the land revenue and taxation system of his great Empire,

his overhaul of the Moghul Civil Service,

his effort to make his Hindu subjects more equal under the law.

These were all big ideas, the sort of big ideas that would become

part of the mainstream in Europe in the 18th-century Enlightenment.

But in 16th-century Europe, no Renaissance prince, not even the brilliant Elizabeth Tudor,

tried so consistently as Akbar to bring in the Age of Reason.

After a reign of nearly 50 years, Akbar died in 1605, two years after Elizabeth I.

He would be succeeded by his son, Jahangir and his grandson, Jahan,

both men of high sensibility but with inner demons drawn to dissipation.

Akbar had laid the foundations - administrative, fiscal and moral,

for Moghul India's future greatness.

At his death, India had the largest GDP in the world.

Before it, lay the possibility of an Indo-Islamic enlightenment.

So what went wrong?

Why did it fail after Akbar's death?

Why did the Age of Reason not come?

It wouldn't be the first time in history and it certainly wouldn't be the last that an Empire lost its

way because of over-consumption, extravagance, bad leadership and unwise foreign wars.

Through the 17th century, the Moghuls pursued their futile

dream of regaining their ancestral homeland in Central Asia.

And at home they engaged in vast building projects.

The most famous was the Taj Mahal.

Now you might have thought that the best-known building in the world had no more secrets.

The Taj is told in all the tourist guides as a monument to love,

the tomb of Shah Jahan's favourite wife, Mumtaz,

and later of Jahan himself.

A teardrop on the face of time.

But new discoveries suggest the design may go back

to the Moghuls' beloved Sufi saints,

that the key to the Taj may be a mystic map of a Sufi's dream.

It's a map of the day of judgement.

The cosmos is seen as a rectangle.

On one side, the fields of paradise, on the other side, the path,

a serat - the way - the bridge over which the righteous must pass and be judged on Judgement Day.

In the middle, a pool and the congregation grounds

for the faithful on that day of judgement.

And in the centre, the throne of God himself.

When you walk through the Taj, you come finally to the great platform

on which the tomb chamber stands,

underneath which Shah Jahan and Mumtaz are buried.

But that's not the last point in the journey.

To see the full plan unfold,

we've got to the cross the river and see what's on the other side.

Now you begin to see what the architect of the Taj is doing.

He's including the sacred River Jumna, the Hindu sacred river,

in the architecture of his own sacred space.

Legend says that Jahan planned a black Taj as a mirror image

on the other side, but archaeologists have found something more haunting still.

Across the river was a walled paradise garden.

In it were night-scented trees and flowers, red cedars and magnolias.

There were fruits and nuts, jujubes, mangoes, sugar palms...

whose sweet kernel tastes like pistachio.

Here the great Moghul could sit in his pavilion in the moonlight

and look at his creation.

So the Taj is a product of the Hindu-Muslim synthesis

that took place over much of India in the 17th century.

But the world's richest economy had begun to decline.

British visitors give graphic accounts of the shocking poverty of the rural workforce

in Jahangir's day. Even though the cities were still wealthy,

Agra here three times the size of London.

But more than 20% of the national income was spent on the Court elite,

on an upper class who lived at a higher level of consumption

than any European aristocracy.

You can still glimpse the incredible richness of Moghul art in the jewellers' workshops in Jaipur.

The Kasliwal family

were jewellers to the Moghul Court in the 17th Century.

Jewellery was always considered to be a symbol of power.

-And what stone is this?

-A ruby.

-Ruby.

And also with the Moghuls what was quite treasured were the spinels,

you know, which are quite rare stones.

What is spinels?

Spinels, for a long time spinels were confused to be rubies.

So when we see those pictures of the Moghul emperors often with what look like rubies, it's probably these.

-Yeah, spinels.

-God, how amazing.

These exquisite Moghul arts went from the scale of the Taj

to the smallest turban pin.

You see that's the base of the box and then you open it inside.

-See there are various...

-Oh, yeah.

Gosh, now look. So you can see through it.

It's just like a filigree.

It's all cut work. It's almost like lacework in gold.

So it's perfect from each angle.

It was your ancestors that actually made these things.

I like this one here,

like an opium box.

All these are rubies which have been calibrated to fit into this shape.

So the great Moghul would have kept his opium in something like this

and what? Laced his wine with it?

Did they smoke it? Or put it in their wine?

No, opium was, you know... We used to have opium ceremonies

where you would offer opium to your guests.

The Moghuls had come to India as conquerors but bearing

the tolerant views of their ancestors

they ruled North India for more than 300 years.

At their best, creating an extraordinary Hindu-Muslim synthesis,

almost healing the wound of history.

And now with hindsight, after the British

and the partition of India in 1947,

their wonderful buildings and creations

have become memory rooms for the story of India.

And also perhaps, symbols of what might have been.

But go to great cities like Lahore in Pakistan today,

the most romantic of Moghul cities, and you still feel the living presence of that lost world.

Its poignant beauty and its refinement.

BELLS JANGLE, MUSIC PLAYS

But in the mid-1650s, behind the extravagance of the Court,

discord was looming.

The ailing Jahan, now incompetent, was imprisoned

and his sons prepared to fight for the kingdom.

The civil war was as much about faith as about empire.

The younger son, Aurangzeb, wanted to return to orthodox Islam.

The elder, Dara, following in Akbar's footsteps had translated Hindu sacred texts.

-It's gorgeous. When was this written?

-This was written in 1655.

He explains in the introduction that

having become a Sufi, he wanted to find out about the wisdom

of the Indian religions and he also mentions that he's written this work

for his family only, not for the general public.

Dara even tells how the Hindu God Rama had met him in a dream and embraced him.

Dara's project was bold in his own time,

but now in the age of wars on terror, almost inconceivable.

He took his lead from the Sufi idea of the unity of being

and the Koran's revelation that God had sent messengers to earth before the Prophet Mohammed.

And he argued for the unity of religion.

Islam and Hinduism were twins, he said, hairs of the same head.

He tells us, "I talked to the Hindu holy men,

"people who had attained the highest level of spiritual enlightenment,

"and in our conversations they were free and open.

"I detected, although there were verbal differences,

"no essential disagreement on our understanding of God.

"And so I decided to write a book about that, about the religions

"of the two communities, and I called it The Meeting Place Of The Two Oceans."

It was a project that was heroic,

quixotic even, and it would cost him his life and his crown.

The decisive battle between Dara and Aurangzeb

was fought outside Ajmer in 1658.

Now the story unfolds with all the momentum and awful sense of destiny of a Shakespearian tragedy.

The battle was fought here, in this wide valley, just outside Ajmer,

on the railway line to Rajasthan.

Dara and his European artillery officers had chosen a good position,

with their wings anchored on the hills on either side of us,

but there was one weakness to the position.

A secret path led over the mountains

and round to the back of Dara's army and he was betrayed to Aurangzeb.

The issue now was what should be done with Dara.

To gauge the public mood, Aurangzeb decided to humiliate him.

Strip him of all marks of office and mount him on a clapped out

old female elephant driven by a slave in rags,

parade him here, down the great market street of Delhi.

But the onlookers were all horrified by Dara's fall.

Many of them burst into tears.

With that, Aurangzeb decided that Dara should die.

The killers came that night to his prison by Humayun's Tomb.

There they found Dara cooking lentils with his little boy, Prince Salim.

His son clung desperately to his father's legs but was dragged away.

Dara was overpowered and they cut his head off and sent it to his brother.

"Ugh," said Aurangzeb, "I wouldn't look the Kaffir in the face while he was still alive, and I won't now."

And he sent his head in a box to their father, Sha Jahan,

in his prison in the palace in Agra.

Jahan opened it at table while he was eating and collapsed, fainting, broke his front teeth.

As for Dara's little boy, he was given a draft of opium

and then strangled.

The father and the son were buried here, in the tomb of Humayun.

Dara's death marks the end of that story.

But for all the ebb and flow of India's history since then,

the quest for Hindu-Muslim unity has never been abandoned.

Religions still, from that time

till today - religions are the same, teachings are the same,

and it is the misinterpretation

which takes the...brotherhood apart.

Whether it is Hindu or Muslim or Sikh or Christian,

if that person follows his religion correctly,

so I don't think there will be any problem. Because you are doing,

you will do correct, each and every thing correct.

We are talking about specially India and in India it's so diversified as far as religions are concerned.

-I think the most diversified country in the world.

-I think so.

As far as the religions are concerned, as far as the

cultures are concerned, as far as the languages are concerned.

Can we judge the past by the standards of the 21st Century?

Should we judge our time by theirs?

The Moghul Empire began and ended with war.

In a few decades, they created

a civilisational wonderland here in India, a kind of Indo-Islamic synthesis.

Their rulers were not only practical men but visionaries.

Babur's imperial dreams, Akbar's utopian visions,

but waiting in the wings with ominous patience

were the British who had a very different idea

of what bringing in the Age of Reason could mean.

Next in the story of India...

The last invaders - the British,

-the first war of freedom. So your family were committed to fighting against the British?

-Yes.

And the horrors of the Great Mutiny.

-And what happened here?

-The British destroyed it.

With the 16lbs gun.

The balance sheet of the British Raj...

The British gave us a complete map of India.

..and the coming of freedom.

You know bondage nobody likes.

Everybody likes to be free.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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