Sixty 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 1 0,000 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 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.
And when they came here to India,
they must have been overwhelmed by the fertility.
Here, down south, you throw a mango away and a tree will grow.
Life is superabundant.
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 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.
An ancient clan of Brahmins 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 1 2 days to perform.
For centuries, these incantations, or mantras, have been passed down
from father to son, only among Brahmins,
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 to make sense of the Brahmins' 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.
MAN: There are certain patterns of sounds preceding and succeeding texts.
That is what is called oral tradition.
You can't write those patterns in book. It's unprintable.
So only orally it can be transmitted through generations,
and this oral tradition is still alive in Kerala.
WOOD: For 1 2 days, the priests and their wives
must stay inside the enclosure.
Then, when the ritual is over and the world purified,
the huts are burned down, all trace obliterated,
save in the memory of the Brahmin 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 markers in the solution,
ancient markers, which can give you the clue
about the migrational history of the people.
It's a direct evidence that we are out of Africa
and it's all a brotherly hood. We are all the same.
WOOD: Here among the Kallar people,
Professor Ramasamy Pitchappan recently tested a man called Virumandi.
In his DNA was the marker of that first human migration.
PITCHAPPAN: Virumandi's wife.
WOOD: Very nice to meet you.
Since the migration of the first man 70,000 years ago,
and which Virumandi, he probably carries that gene, M1 30, right?
WOOD: Right, great.
So, Virumandi, how does it feel to be the first Indian?
Yeah, yeah.
I am very happy for this...
-PITCHAPPAN: That you have this gene. -Gene, yes.
WOOD: 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.
PITCHAPPAN: Some 50 to 60,000 years ago,
this M1 30 gene pool came over here
and, luckily, somebody stayed in this village and expanded,
then we could identify.
You know, to our surprise, you know, that the whole village is of M1 30.
WOOD: Everybody around us here?
Everybody around us here carries M1 30,
so you call it as a ponder fact, what will be that.
You've got the early migrations in at least two waves,
language is only developing later?
Yes, the scholars feel
that it is only just 1 0,000 years old, the spoken language.
PITCHAPPAN: Maybe only 1 0 to 1 5,000 maximum.
Language is not the same as ethnicity. We need to make that clear, don't we?
Yes, it is absolutely essential. Yes, it is not.
The language can easily be adopted.
But the same is true with the religion, too.
-Ah. -It's a kind of belief system.
You believe in your system, in your education,
or in your capacity, or in your family, whatever way you feel like.
You have every liberty to feel proud of what you are.
This is because of this reason, I believe that India has become
such a cosmos of humanity with the diversity,
but still with a unity.
WOOD: Is that what makes you an Indian, then?
Yeah, probably, yes. A human being all the more, I would say,
rather than Indian.
WOOD: 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 principal,
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 prehistory,
like the worship of the goddess here in Madurai.
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.
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 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.
WOOD: Hello.
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?
-PASSENGER: Ah, yes. -Ah, yes.
-Very nice. -What work you doing?
Making 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,
large-scale, highly organised societies, monumental 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 1 94 7.
Because it was here in the valley of the Indus River,
comparatively recently, in a series of amazing discoveries,
revealed a hitherto completely unknown ancient civilisation.
Those first discoveries took place in the 1 920s
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 what is now Pakistan and India
might be heirs to ancient civilisation far 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.
And nobody even suspected that India had a prehistory.
But all that changed in 1 92 1 when British and Indian archaeologists
arrived at this little place in the Punjab.
-How are you? How nice to see you. -Good. Thank you.
-Thank you for having us. -Here.
That's wonderful.
WOOD: 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 Tutankhamen 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, at the moment,
''as if we are on the threshold of such a discovery
''here in the plains of the Indus. ''
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 and trade,
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.
WOOD: When does Harappa begin?
Harappa was beginning 3500 BC,
5,000 years ago from here.
WOOD: 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 from 2900 BC
to 1 900 BC.
This is the highest period, and we call it Mature Harappan Period.
And how many people do you think...
How many people do you think lived here in the height of its power?
-I think about two lakh peoples. -200,000 people?
Yes, according to their houses and streets, it is an estimated guess.
WOOD: Wow, but it's a big city for the ancient world.
The next year, 1 922,
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 un-deciphered.
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.
GUPTA: About 1 80 million years ago,
India was actually an island floating in this vast ocean that we call Tethys,
and it was moving northwards for about 1 30 million years.
Eventually, about 50 million years ago, it actually rammed into Asia,
collided with Asia, to produce the world's largest mountain belt,
the Himalayas.
WOOD: 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 are 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.
GUPTA: What we've been doing is to look at satellite imagery
to try and see if you can trace paleo river channels,
essentially, on the flood plains.
WOOD: So this is the area just along the border between India and Pakistan?
GUPTA: That's right, and we are going to basically zoom in on an area over here
and look at some satellite imagery in some detail.
So in this satellite imagery, what you can see are these light areas
which are desert areas, sand dunes, etc,
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.
If we now 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.
WOOD: It is very clear there, isn't it?
Absolutely matches the curve of the channel bed.
And you can trace it actually from India into Pakistan,
into the area that's called Cholistan, where you have numeral sites.
WOOD: Oh, yeah, yeah. So this is from the height of the Indus civilisation?
Yeah, probably between 5,000 to 4,000 yeas 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...
WOOD: Oh, yes.
What you see is that there is a major shift eastwards,
into the eastern part of the...
Central and eastern part of the Ganges Plain,
away from the major Ghaggar-Hakra settlements over here.
-Wow. -In the last 1 0,000 years,
we've actually seen a progressive decline
in the strength of the Indian summer monsoon and particularly around...
Some people suggest that around 3,500 years ago,
there was actually a major decrease in the strength of the monsoon.
Climate change isn't just happening now, it's happened in the past.
All these early settlements,
these Mature Harappan civilisation settlements,
just completely disappear and we see this major shift eastward
into the central part of the Ganges Plain.
WOOD: 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.
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's 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.
-Hi, sir. How are you? -Hi. How are you?
-How is the water? The water is good? -Yeah, 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 very short time after the end of the last Indus cities,
let's say around 1 500 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 the 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 Brahmin boys still learn it
to recite their earliest scriptures, the Vedas.
For traditional Hindus, these are the most ancient scriptures in the world,
older by far than the Bible.
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 a thousand hymns called the Rig Veda,
which start around 1 500 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 Brahmin priests.
Is it easy to understand today
or is the Sanskrit, ancient Sanskrit, very difficult to understand?
-Yes, is very difficult is Sanskrit. -It's very difficult?
Very difficult is Sanskrit.
-WOOD: Only through Brahmins? -Only Brahmins.
WOOD: Only Brahmins learning.
So all the boys here today are Brahmin boys?
-After Upanayana Samskara. -After...
Upanayana Samskara, the holy thread.
Oh, after the holy thread, yeah, yeah.
WOOD: Out of the poems of the Rig Veda, a story emerges.
Over several centuries, it's the tale of tribes moving across North India,
lead 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.
The significance of that story only began to be understood
in the 1 8th 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 Brahmin scholar to teach him Sanskrit,
and what he found would rewrite the history of the world's languages,
including our own.
On February 2nd, 1 786,
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,
is pitar in Sanskrit.
The word for ''mother'', mater in Latin, meter in Greek,
in Sanskrit is matar.
And most amazing, the key word for horse in Sanskrit, aszwa,
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 that Jones was right,
and though this is now hugely controversial in the subcontinent,
most linguists agree the common source lay outside India.
Oh, thank you very much. Oh, this is very exciting.
WOOD: So where had Sanskrit come from?
In the Rig Veda lies the key to the next phase of the story.
So, Professor Biswas, this is...
I'm looking in the modern catalogue, 6608, and we are looking for bundle 1 4.
-BISWAS: Bundle 1 4, this one. -Yeah, great.
It says here, ''Copied in Samvat,
''the year 1 41 8,'' which is AD 1 362.
-''Appearance very old.'' -Yeah, yeah.
And probably this is the earliest manuscript of Padapatha.
The earliest manuscript. This is fantastic.
This is the earliest manuscript of Padapatha.
WOOD: When this text was written down,
it had already been passed down orally for more than 2,500 years.
BISWAS: The first verse of the Rig Veda...
WOOD: 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, he was the god of rain.
The god of thunder and the god of rain.
He brought down the water from sky to earth.
-He bought down the water from the sky. -From sky.
WOOD: Then there's the chariots and horses.
Horses are not known in the Indus civilisation,
and yet they're a key part of the society of the Rig Veda.
Chariots were drawn by the horses.
They used to ride the horses
and it was very familiar animal to them.
And I think that they tamed the horse at a very early period.
WOOD: And another clue is the evidence of a migration eastwards.
So a movement eastwards can be determined.
And some of the rivers are identified
with rivers almost towards the Afghan border?
-Yeah, yeah. -The Swat, Suvastu 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 sabhya.
-The socialised, civilised person... -Noble or... Yeah. Refined...
-Refined person. -Yeah.
And so, the use of the word arya.
-That's what they called themselves? -Yeah.
WOOD: So this is a key moment in the story.
Around 1 500 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.
And here I hope to solve another clue.
The Rig Veda talks about a sacred drink central to 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 brown twig-like plant
which you crushed to create a kind of distillation.
Now, in the mountains of Afghanistan, there's still a drink called Soma today,
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.
A long stalk, no leaves,
makes bitter, very bitter taste.
-Soma? You have? -Yeah.
Ah, fantastic, fantastic!
-He has the natural plant here? -VENDOR: Yeah, yeah.
WOOD: It can be one foot, two foot, three feet long,
scented like...
Ah!
This is it.
This is it, smells slightly like pine.
If I boil this up in water,
I should be able to taste the bitter taste of it. Yeah, yeah, okay.
We don't know exactly how Soma was prepared,
although we do know that they sweetened its bitter taste with honey.
What we want is a pot of this, full boiling water,
-but a lot of it so it's strong. -MAN: Okay.
WOOD: 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 is,
well, if you take too much of it, 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 compose their songs often at night
having drunk Soma,
and, of course, Indra, King of the Gods, drinks vast quantities of this
perhaps because 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.
And today, it's no longer part of Hindu religion.
It came from outside.
Now I'm getting a kind of tingling feeling all over.
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,
senses just slightly sharpened up.
This is a really important aspect of the Rig Veda.
There are many, many of their thousand poems devoted to the merits
of drinking Soma, almost as an elixir of the gods
and chiefly of the King of the Gods himself.
WOOD: It also makes you talk too much.
So the northwest frontier and the rivers of the Punjab
were the first home of the 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.
Four thousand 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.
So Professor Sarianidi is, to say the least, a living legend.
One of the great Russian archaeologists, who's been excavating out here
in the wilds for many years
and found what few archaeologists are ever lucky enough to find,
a lost civilisation.
Sarianidi is excavating a vast, fortified mudbrick 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.
What date does the site finish... Stop being used?
So change of river and climate change moves the population?
This is where the Soma Haoma was prepared?
-The sacred drink, in this kind of bowl? -SARIANIDI: Yeah.
What were the ingredients of the sacred drink? What went into it?
-Have you tasted? -No!
-Have you made today? -Well, probably.
Too early in the morning?
Well, it certainly is for me, I'll tell you that!
When you look at the connections, you've got the sacred drink here,
the Soma, you've got the fire altars,
you've got the beginnings of very 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?
WOMAN: Yes. SARIANIDI: Yeah, yeah.
The horse sacrifice was the greatest ritual an Aryan king could do.
WOOD: All of these are royal tombs?
And in these tombs, you found wheeled vehicles, like carts.
-With four wheels? -Da, yes.
With four wheels, yeah. Really interesting, isn't it?
You know, the Rig Veda, when they talk about the wheeled vehicles,
in the early Rig Veda, they used this word ratha, in Sanskrit. Ratha.
And it's not a chariot, it is actually a cart,
and here they have actually found the 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'd like to toast you. Thank you for your hospitality.
-It's great to finally get here. -SARIANIDI: And we help you, if we may.
Thank you.
Cheers. To women. To the women...
WOOD: And that night under the stars,
another thought came to me about the Rig Veda.
WOOD: The women!
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!
WOOD: It's a wonderful, tantalising mystery, isn't it?
The Aryans, or to be more precise,
the cluster of languages that would become
modern English, German, French, Latin and Greek, Persian and Sanskrit.
Where did they come from and 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 mudbrick 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 1 700 and 1 800 BC, they moved on again,
perhaps this time because of overpopulation, climate change,
the shifting of rivers.
But this time, they moved southwards
towards the passes of the Hindu Kush and the Indian subcontinent.
The history of India was about to enter its defining phase.
WOOD: Now again, we need to jump the centuries.
By around 1 000 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 the great god Shiva,
and the pilgrims are gathering here by the enormous sacred pool
at Kurukshetra
to celebrate a battle which, in Indian tradition, took place in 31 00 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.
MAN: It's a battlefield for Kaurav and Pandav,
at the time of Dwapara. Dwapara is Krishna's time.
Lord Krishna's time.
All the warriors, they belong to his own family,
all family relatives.
He doesn't want to do war with his own...
WOOD: He doesn't want to fight against his own people.
And what did Krishna say to him?
Then Krishna teach, advise him,
how to perform his duty,
the importance of performing duty for the king.
-WOOD: Your duty is to fight? -The performance of duty is must.
MAN: It's really an epic that speaks to every age.
It is an epic full of stories of human beings with feet of clay,
with lust and lechery, and ambitions and fears,
people who have committed acts of betrayal
and sold each other down the river.
There's a tremendous amount of it, and sort of...
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.
THAROOR: During that period, the tale was told and re-told
to a point where it became a sort of national library of India,
where every tale that had to be told was incorporated
into a retelling of the Mahabharata.
All sorts of things got tossed into this.
Literally every single thing that people wanted to talk about their times
was interpolated into a retelling of the epic.
So, for 800 years, the Mahabharata became the story of India.
WOOD: 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?
WOOD: So these are all places that were famous in the legend?
MAN: These names have not changed.
Till today, they bear the same name. The reason is that they have been...
WOOD: In 1 949, 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.
-Right. -This is a view of the Hastinapur mound,
and we put a long trench right across the mound.
We are looking at this 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.
WOOD: His guide was not only archaeological science
but the tradition handed down in the Mahabharata.
LAL: On the western side of the mound, we were getting the painted grey ware.
On the eastern side, we were not getting it.
So I was very much worried. I spent many nights without sleep.
And the texts say, a great flood came in the Ganga and washed away Hastinapur.
WOOD: A great flood washed away Hastinapur?
LAL: And you can see the man in this figure
is pointing to the erosion mark left by the river.
-WOOD: It's very clear, isn't it? -Yeah.
So you'd found the key evidence that the tradition had... Was correct?
That there had been a flood that had destroyed part of the city?
LAL: Yes.
WOOD: 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 mudbrick defences, store rooms,
rooms for the warriors who were their armed following,
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.
A legend which named the place,
the story of the flood and the pottery.
Now, here's the pottery.
This kind of stuff you can pick up even today after the rains
all over the site. They call it ''painted grey ware''.
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 there was truth behind the legend
and that the great war of the Mahabharata really took place.
Remember, this was the first great excavation done after independence,
and it was of crucial importance
for the Indian people's view of their own history.
The Mahabharata was their greatest and most loved epic.
And here, this excavation seemed to prove that
long before all the colonial periods which had dominated India,
there was a real history and it was their own.
Over the next 3,000 years, Greeks and Huns, Turks and Afghans,
Moghuls 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 Yamuna.
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 ITboffins
rubbing shoulders with farmers and rickshaw men,
all of them dancing for a god from prehistory.
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 Plain.
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 events, 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!
WOOD: 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.