Original subtitles

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 when the division between sacred time and profane time

had not yet happened.

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.

WOOD: 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.

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.

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.

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

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 Ayodhya.

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.

After his triumph, Rama returns to reign in the city of Ayodhya

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.

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 5th 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.: Ayodhya.

That story is still told by the pilgrim guides on the river bank

with a few mythic embellishments!

(MAN SPEAKING HINDI)

WOOD: So 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 fairytale city of the Golden Age

of Ayodhya in the legend.

What you have to remember is that for all the pilgrims

who are 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 TVaudiences.

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

(MAN SPEAKING HINDI)

The soul of Ayodhya is altogether 1 0 lakh years old.

-1 0 lakh years old? -1 0 lakh years old.

It has a very long, long history.

-This is a million years? -This is a million years.

Right, okay, a million years.

WOOD: So it's a different conception of history

to the Western conception of history.

WOOD: 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 Ayodhya

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

Hindu Ayodhya, the 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 5th 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.

(ENGINE WHISTLING)

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, aren't they?

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 35-foot 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.

-WOOD: Forge welding? -Welding.

So what you do in this technique is you take lumps of iron,

about 20 kilograms in weight, and then you place them

on top of each other in a hot condition and you hit with a hammer.

Due to this forging action you have joined the material.

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

So that is actually a very marvellous engineering feat.

So really speaking, this pillar should be actually considered

as a metallurgical wonder of the world.

-Yes, yes, yeah. -Not just India. It belongs to humanity.

WOOD: Do we know who made it, who commissioned it?

Well, based upon inscription which you see on the pillar,

we know that it was commissioned by one Chandra.

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

But we now know, based upon analysis of the Gupta gold coins,

that this Chandra should be Chandragupta Vikramaditya II.

WOOD: ''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, at least, I am quite aware that, you know,

if you look at the kind of 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 the Gupta period, the people were focused on high quality.

And that was a time when Indian civilisation

actually takes a next major leap.

WOOD: 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 came out an estimate of the circumference of Earth,

which at that time he said it is 5,000 yojanas.

That is a unit of length.

Then it turns out that the present value is very close to that value.

WOOD: 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.

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 their 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...

(WOOD LAUGHING)

...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.

WOOD: 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 hard to describe it in English, but it's the sense of consciousness

of having all your sense organs elevated

when you are in the very act of 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 sound 'sut', 'dut', gasps, moans...''

''...and cries of 'Stop!' 'Harder!' 'Go on!' 'Don't kill me!' 'No!'

''are the generic name of sitkrta. ''

Sitkrta? What's this?

-Sitkrta. -WOOD: 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 of a kind of book of life, isn't it?

All of Hindu philosophy talks of something called the purushartha,

which are... Purushartha 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,

if, you know, 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 really 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.''

No, that doesn't work...

WOOD: In human relations,

there is always a gap between ideal and reality.

The Kama Sutra was written in the 5th century

but it was the product of an age where there was freedom of thought.

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

(SINGING)

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.

And for all our failures to achieve the ideal, in love, so India teaches,

we human beings are still touched by the divine.

So the age of the Guptas shaped

Indian civilisation in the north in the Middle Ages.

Here in the south, in the 1 0th 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 1 300 AD.

Just as the Guptas had in the North,

the Cholans reshaped the medieval world of the South.

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

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

Rajaraja, 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 Rajaraja the Great himself

inaugurated this temple in 1 01 0.

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 Rajaraja 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.

WOOD: 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 warlike.

The King himself, though, is portrayed on a modest scale,

as a philosopher prince.

In the old palace of the rajas of Tanjore,

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 1 0th and 1 1 th century,

here in the Cholan Empire is copper plates.

This is just one document from a temple treasury, about 1 5 copper plates.

There's the seal of Rajendra, the son of Rajaraja the Great,

the umbrella and the fish, the tiger.

Weighs about 40 kilos and there's thousands of these,

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 Rajaraja 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 Rajaraja 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 Rajaraja should be the next king.

No, over there, please. Just here.

Looking for a clue to the King's personality,

I went to see the present raja of Tanjore,

whose family lost their power in 1 94 7 but not their palace.

These Medieval Indian kings seemed 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.

WOOD: You're descended from the great rajas of Tanjore,

your palace is still right here,

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

Have you ever thought what Rajaraja was like?

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

He's such a great man.

And, you know, it makes you to feel very proud

and also it makes you to feel very small.

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

What do you think... What kind of people do you think...

What do you think Rajaraja was like as a person?

Have you any idea?

Yes, he's the greatest warrior but at the same time

with the most human touch, I feel. So he was with the people.

So 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 to his subjects.

There's nothing left of Rajaraja's palace here in Tanjore,

but if you want to imagine what it might have looked like,

just come here to the Raja's Durbar Hall,

the reception hall of the later kings of Tanjore.

We know it would have looked like this in Cholan times.

Archaeologists have discovered the stone bases

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

Rajaraja the Great would have sat on his throne here,

surrounded by his queens and his ministers,

his concubines and his poets, with the court there,

assembled in front, ready to receive the royal largesse.

(PEOPLE HAILING)

In modern times Rajaraja'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.

But Rajaraja himself deserves better to be remembered as 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 Tanjore.

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 are 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 Tirumahalam

who lived here in Rajaraja's new royal city

on South Street, on the south side, in house number 88?

Where is numbering of street?

Oh, I see! Okay. Thank you, yes.

So, of course,

there is a difference between old numbering and new numbering.

Nobody's expecting the 1 1 th 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 Tirumahalam lived, is somewhere here.

Hello.

This is the kind of courtyard that would have existed

in the private houses in Cholan Tanjore.

Every one would have had its own well, and little shrines.

(SPEAKING TAMIL)

So is this a private temple?

Private temple.

So this is as old as the time of Rajaraja the Great?

Yes, thousand years.

This is Amal temple or Shiva?

-Ambal. Ambal. -Ambal.

-Ambal. -WOOD: Ambal.

So it's a little goddess shrine, family shrine.

Isn't that absolutely wonderful?

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

that Tirumahalam the dancer, who lived at number 88,

lived in a place just like this with her 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 Rajaraja.

And the dance has survived until today.

This style of dancing, Bharatnatyam,

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 Rajaraja 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 1 08 classic poses

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.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

This is Tiruvengadu, a centre for the arts in Rajaraja'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.

(SINGING)

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.

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

And this one, perhaps the most famous.

Just come looks 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 have been leaning on his bull, Nandi, here,

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 girdle, the detail of 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 India altogether.

You know, you see any of the classic Bollywood historical 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 Rajaraja still exists

and they're still making bronzes today.

So how many generations of names back? 1 5 generations, more? 20, more?

WOOD: According to family tradition,

their ancestors worked on the temple in Tanjore

and they still make the images in exactly the same way.

(SPEAKING TAMIL)

So you don't use a ruler? You don't use feet and inches?

(SPEAKING TAMIL)

So this is one face, quarter face. The measurement is by the face, yeah?

Chest.

Abdomen.

Upper leg.

Knee. Lower leg. Foot.

The model is then made in beeswax.

WOOD: Why beeswax?

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

but this Tamil version of God as a dancer is unique

and wonderfully laden with symbols.

The drum that beats creation into existence,

the fire which will destroy everything at the end,

destroying the demon of ignorance.

Every part of the image which Sthapathy is constructing

is loaded with meaning.

The casting of the bronze begins with a prayer.

Then the mould is slowly heated to melt the wax inside.

(SPEAKING TAMIL)

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

You know, 21 st 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? The 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.

WOOD: This art was at its height a thousand 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 2 1 st century

that go back to the deepest layers of the Indian tradition.

(SINGING)

This is a particularly precious image

because it's one of only two that survive of the 66 bronzes

that Rajaraja the Great commissioned for the opening of the new temple

here in Tanjore in 1 01 0.

And from this place

that image spread out over the whole of South India.

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

(CHANTING PRAYERS)

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 Rajaraja.

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, Rajaraja 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 Rajaraja the Great came,

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

You have to imagine the Cholan court in all their finery

in 1 01 2 coming...

WOOD: The ceremony was called the ceremony of the golden egg

or of the golden womb, 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 a moustache. He's wearing a moustache!

And the King himself was weighed in gold.

But in that moment, the king was celebrating

a long reign of great 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 Rajaraja died,

but he'd laid the foundations for the Tamils to dominate South India

for nearly 300 years.

(CHANTING)

Through the 1 1 th century, the age of Byzantium and the Muslim Caliphate,

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 1 0 feet lower than the bed of that.

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

So what the Cholans did was create a great dam, the Anicut,

a snaking brick structure more than a thousand feet long,

60 feet wide, 20 feet 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

and 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 1 8th 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 where the, uh, you have family festivals in here.

WOOD: Tell me about the community.

So the job of your caste was to maintain

irrigation in the rice paddy fields and all this,

this was a special job.

-What is this part of the house, here? -This part is...

WOOD: 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 in the south.

-And the grinding stone. -The grinding stone.

And here cooking is tied to many important social rituals

at the family hearth, especially for married couples.

WOOD: So it is like a test for the new wife.

Thank you.

So this is dhal and rice from family fields or...

-Yeah. -Oh, right.

-First starting. -Fantastic.

Mmm, it's lovely food.

And, always, the women wait for the men to finish?

-Yeah. -This is tradition.

WOOD: Oh, really? Husband and wife share the same leaf?

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

Yeah.

WOOD: One of the highlights of the year for traditional Tamil women

is the festival of light.: Karthigai.

WOOD: 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: Tiruvannamalai.

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.

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.

(INAUDIBLE ABOVE MUSIC AND CHATTER)

What's going to happen in about an hour is that the bronze images of the gods,

Shiva, Parvati, Ganesh, Chandikeshwara,

will be brought out and put on these chariots here.

Then carried round? All round the courtyard?

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 got to 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 seems to me that golden ages can only ever exist in the past.

For they are the products of our imaginations

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

in the present.

WOOD: So, Shanti, this is first time you were here?

-Yeah. -Yes. Enjoy?

-Enjoying, very much enjoying. -Yes?

I am lucky.

I thought we would never see the jyothi. So this is auspicious.

Yes.

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 part is the key to the story of India.

(FESTIVE MUSIC PLAYING)

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 Moghuls.

And the extraordinary quest for one world religion.