Original subtitles

(bright uplifting music)

I'm Christopher Clark and I'm traveling the world

to discover its true treasures,

the UNESCO world heritage sites.

The baffling complexity of India,

the depth of its history,

the endless layers of language, culture and myth

have always fascinated me.

India is a study in contrasts.

Rich and poor, sacred and profane,

thronging mega cities and dreaming landscapes

full of ancient trees.

Nearly 1.4 billion people live here

and yet there's a mysterious feeling of unity.

What holds it all together?

India is a voice that speaks to us,

and not just in its hundreds of languages

and countless dialects.

This country speaks to our senses

with all the power of the rulers and religions,

all the peoples and cultures that have left their mark

on this enormous sub-continent over the millennia.

India is the sound of a cosmos,

much more than the sum of its parts.

And that's what makes this country at once

so rich and so bewildering.

Some of the most important traces of the country's past

can be found in the locations that UNESCO has named

as world heritage sites.

(speaking in foreign language)

Says the Hindu proverb.

Time waits for no man.

On that note, I'd better get cracking.

My journey will take me to Elephanta Island

in the Arabian Sea off the coast of Mumbai,

to Rajasthan, to Delhi,

and to Agra with the with the Taj Mahal.

And after a detour to visit the tigers

of Sundarbans National Park,

to the Himalayan foothills.

But it begins on the Ganges in Varanasi.

If you want to understand India,

Veranasi should be your first port of call.

It's the spiritual heart of the country,

on the banks of the Ganges,

the river gifted to the earth by the goddess Ganga.

The goddess offers the hope of life after death

and the cleansing of sins.

And the candles and lotus blossoms

that float on her waters are physical prayers.

Pilgrims have been traveling to this city

for more than 2,500 years.

All of them want to bathe in the Ganges,

and many would like to die and be cremated here as well.

This spirituality shapes the entire country.

You encounter it at every step along the way,

but especially on the shores of its waters.

(bell ringing)

India's rivers are it's true temples.

They are the arteries of India's sacred geography.

They've long been considered holy

since many years before the first temple

was ever constructed.

And for people here, they provide a sense of belonging.

That's especially palpable in Varanasi.

Here, the Ganges is the equivalent

of a cathedral in the Christian world.

When you are in it, you are close to the gods.

That's why this river is a common point of reference

for all Hindus.

But the very name of this country, India,

also stems from a river.

The Indus.

Rivers have always shaped the life

and culture of this sub continent.

Indians revere not only the Ganges

but also the Brahmaputra, the Indus, and many other rivers.

Rivers play an important role

in nearly all religious rituals.

And they're not just a symbol of life,

in many places they are its literal source.

But now I'm heading for an island

off the west coast of India.

We take a boat from Mumbai, once known as Bombay,

a city built on islands and reclaimed from the sea.

The roots of Hinduism, and consequently the roots of India,

can be explored at a UNESCO world heritage site

on Gharapuri island, which was later called Elephanta,

in the Arabian Sea.

After we've traveled seven nautical miles,

the island slowly emerges from the morning haze.

The cut stone sculptures here mainly date back

to the era of the Kalachuri dynasty,

which ruled here in the sixth and seventh centuries.

But Elephanta was always a spiritual place.

The small Buddhist stupa mounds on the island

date back to 200 BC.

Religious processions and sacrificial rituals

were part of everyday life here,

and to honor Shiva, six enormous cave temples

were carved from the basalt rocks.

The largest of them is 40 meters deep

with a ceiling up to five meters high.

I wonder what awaits me here.

The temple was created to honor Shiva

and its architecture and the symbols found here

invoke the divine presence of the greatest of all gods.

Two stone guardians watch over the center of the temple.

Lord Shiva is like a kind of cosmic jigsaw puzzle.

You can put him together.

You can take him apart.

And even the individual pieces of the puzzle

possess the fullness of his power.

This for example, is the Shiva Linga,

the penis of Lord Shiva.

And here especially you can feel his creative power.

Hindu belief and symbology are finely rendered

in the overall planning of the caves.

The layout, including the pillar components,

is a landmark of rock cut architecture.

The combination of the aesthetic beauty

and sculptural technique reached an apogee

at the Elephanta caves.

Elephanta is one of the hearts of India's spiritual life.

UNESCO named this place a world heritage site

in recognition of its relationship

with the origins of the ancient Hindu religion.

And here we meet Lord Shiva.

One of the most important divine powers in the Hindu cosmos.

Shiva unites all contradictions within himself,

but why is he shown here with three faces?

Because he creates, maintains and destroys.

He embodies the harmony of the world in contradiction.

There's nothing monolithic about Hinduism.

Its forms are endlessly various,

but they always come back to an order of the world

and of the people in it that is enclosed

within an eternal cycle.

Shiva appears here as a being between man and woman,

with Nandi, the bull, a gate guardian deity.

The pillars symbolize the universe that Shiva destroys

in a cosmic dance, only to rebuild it again.

Everything in the cave is focused on

this eternal cycle of life,

but nothing else in this religion is set in stone.

Hinduism has never been centered on a single holy book

full of commandments and prohibitions

and strict injunctions in the manner

of Christianity and Islam.

The faith and the faithful themselves

are an open book that is continuously being written.

This process still shapes the country today.

80% of Indians are Hindus.

The desire for contact with the divine world

continues unabated in India.

In fact, it's growing in importance,

even for younger generations.

This religion thrives on recurring rituals

that also shape the everyday lives of Hindus.

Young priests, known as pundits, swing lamps.

The fire links this world and the spirit world.

When the faithful come together for ceremonies

like the Ganga Aarti,

it feels like a funfair and it's just as loud,

as if the revelers want to make sure

that the Gods up in heaven can hear them.

When the writer and the world traveler Mark Twain

was in Varanasi, he believed he could sense

the roots of all religions here.

The city, he wrote, was older than history,

older than tradition, older than legend itself.

Whilelife on the banks of the Ganges

revolves around piety and spirituality,

the state of Rajasthan is all about power and beauty.

In the 18th century, the Maharaja of Jaipur

commissioned the construction of the water palace Jal Mahal,

just outside the gates of his city on an artificial lake.

It was a pleasure palace and a luxurious perch

for the duck hunting he enjoyed so much.

Jaipur is the capital of Rajasthan,

a colorful and somewhat chaotic metropolis

with more than 4 million residents.

This place brings together all the cultures of India.

The skyline is full of temples and minarets,

modern and ancient things are jumbled together

in a maze of roads that appear to have no names.

In Jaipur you can learn,

in a very firsthand and visceral way,

just how Indian street life works.

The heart of Jaipur is still the Maharaja's palace,

built by the same Rajput dynasty

that founded this royal state.

Their origins remain a mystery even today.

The Rajputs, which roughly translates as sons of kings,

lived together in clans that they called brotherhoods.

They were exceptionally gifted, proud warriors

with an elaborate code of honor.

And they saw themselves as descendants of the gods,

bearers of a tradition as old as the world itself.

For Hindus, this attitude must've seemed quite arrogant,

but depictions from the time indicate

that the princes really didn't view themselves as divine.

They lived in the many kingdoms that once made up Rajasthan.

With the Rajasthanis, a unique and independent

civilization arose within India,

with impregnable fortresses whose interiors

they built into exquisite fairytale palaces.

These ruling families rained for 1,000 years.

They successfully battled the Persians and the Turks,

the powerful Mughals and the sultans of Delhi.

Their kinds, the Maharajahs, were always the embodiment

of romantic chivalry.

Rajasthan is crisscrossed with walls,

relics of an era of never ending wars

that demanded the construction of strong defenses

high up on the mountain peaks.

They wind their way through this rugged countryside.

The long wall around Fort Kumbhalgarh

is known as India's great wall,

a reference to the Chinese fortification system.

There were 23 kingdoms in total, each ruled by a Raja.

The most important mountain fortresses

are cleverly distributed across Rajasthan,

a territory approximately the size of Germany.

UNESCO named the forts as world heritage sites,

partly because they demonstrate how the Rajputs

protected their nightly culture

from external hostilities between the 11th

and 18th centuries.

Islamic conquerors in particular were becoming a threat.

And here you can see how together

they form a protective ring,

always commanding the highest ground.

The Amber Fort, with its massive walls

of marble and sandstone,

is one of the largest and most beautiful

mountain palaces in Rajasthan.

Today, Amber is one of the most visited spots in India,

along with the Taj Mahal.

These elephants are used to carry tourists

up to the Amber Fort.

India has now decided that this trade should be shut down.

It's now illegal to capture elephants in the wild

and to place them in the service of human beings

in this way.

It's regarded as cruel, inappropriate, for these animals.

And I think actually I'd rather walk.

Inside and out, Amber Fort is the perfect symbol of power,

an ideal symbiosis between an impregnable fortress

and a sumptuous palace.

There were audience halls, treasure chambers,

pavilions and elaborate gardens,

and safe behind these massive walls,

the ruling families lived luxurious lives.

The Sheesh Mahal, the elaborate hall of mirrors.

Natural light is reflected by tens of thousands

of tiny Venetian mirrors.

At night, the entire hall could be lit with a single candle.

This is India's Versailles.

The Amber Fort served as the Maharajah's

seat of power for almost 700 years,

until they moved to the new capital of their kingdom,

Jaipur.

Officially there haven't been any Maharajahs in India

for half a century.

Even the legendary wealth of these former rulers

is largely gone.

The Maharajahs lost most of the golden jewels

they had once had an abundance,

as well as their palaces and estates.

But some families still remain extremely wealthy.

The current Maharajah of Jaipur ascended the throne at 12.

He's 21 today.

When he's not playing polo all over the world,

he celebrates traditional festivals

with the people in the courtyard of the palace.

The fire is intended to drive off evil spirits,

and everyone is welcome to take some fire home with them

on a wooden stick.

Behind the palace walls there are still

relics of the old times.

This gangajali is the largest object

made of solid silver anywhere in the world.

It was built in 1894 by the then Maharajah

to store Holy Ganges water for his use

and the use of his family.

In 1902, when he traveled to England

to take part in the coronation of Edward VII,

the Maharajah took two of these things with him.

Fortunately, it was a short visit.

The 4,000 liters of stored Ganges water

sufficed to cover the Maharajahs needs,

which was just as well because he didn't trust

the British water supply.

The most famous landmark in Jaipur

is the Hari Mahal Palace of the Winds.

For the numerous ladies of the court

who were not permitted to mix with commoners,

the palace was a place where they could observe

the everyday lives of normal people,

which they naturally found very exotic.

Jaipur was founded by Maharajah Jai Singh II.

He ascended the throne in 1699

when he was just 11 years old,

and he went on to reign for nearly half a century.

He built this city and he named it after himself,

Jaipur.

The word Jai wasn't just his name,

it also means victory.

And Jaipur, the city of victory,

became a flourishing metropolis.

Over time, the war-like Rajputs

became the peace loving inhabitants

of a commercial urban culture.

The pink blush that suffuses this cityscape

dates back to 1876,

when the British Prince Albert Edward visited Jaipur.

The then Maharajah ordered that every building

be painted pink.

And even today, the residents of the old city

of Jaipur are required to paint their houses pink.

If they don't, the city government does it for them

and sends them the bill.

Jai Singh's true passion was astronomy.

It looks like a modern sculpture park, doesn't it?

But this Jantar Mantar was built just under 300 years ago.

Along with his palace, Maharajah Jai Singh

commissioned the construction

of 19 astronomical instruments,

including the world's largest sundial.

It's 27 meters tall.

Jai Singh was not just a popular Maharajah

but also a formidable thinker and inventor.

At the age of 13, he developed an irrigation system

for the hanging gardens of his fort.

And he reached for the stars.

He was a passionate astronomer.

This enormous observatory was Jai Singh's brainchild.

He knew that in astronomy, size matters.

The bigger an instrument is,

the more precise are its measurements.

Even after almost 300 years,

everything works here as it did on the first day.

And in fact, he was able to prove

that local time in Jaipur deviated

from the official time mandated

by the capital city of Delhi by exactly two seconds.

These instruments could even predict

the intensity of a coming monsoon,

which was absolutely invaluable for farming.

(thunder claps)

When the monsoon rains come to India

between June and September,

the Ganges alone holds more water

than all the rivers in Western Europe combined.

Only the Amazon exceeds this volume.

And the rivers have been depositing sediment

at their mouths for millions of years.

The fertile earth extends kilometers deep at some points.

India's rivers are a vital lifeline.

India's fabled riches attracted Islamic rulers

from the northwest around the year 1000.

And along with these new dynasties,

merchants, artists and scholars came to cities like Delhi,

bringing an entire culture with them.

the buildings and gardens created by architects

from the Islamic world are what we might today

describe as typically Indian.

The powerful Mughal empire which spanned

almost the entire Indian subcontinent

and lasted nearly 300 years has its roots here.

The Muslim rulers were known as Mughals or emperors.

They originally came as conquerors from Afghanistan

and brought their religion, Islam, with them.

It became the second most prevalent faith in India

after Hinduism.

The Mughals had a highly developed courtly culture.

The showpieces of their architecture

communicate their unique understanding

of death, paradise and universal rule.

Symbols of that understanding can be found

everywhere in India.

A few kilometers south of Delhi,

the archeological area of Qutub contains

funerary buildings and two mosques,

including the oldest in northern India,

built of materials re-used from some 20 Brahman temples.

Built in the early 13th century,

the red sandstone tower of Qutub Minar

is one of the highest minarets in the world.

72.5 meters high.

This is why UNESCO made it a world heritage site.

In the 16th century, the Mughal empire

was firmly established and its influence

could be felt everywhere.

The great Mughal Humayun is symbolic of this development,

the face of an entire culture changed.

This was not Humayun's palace,

rather it's his modest tomb in Delhi,

the earliest example of Mughal architecture in India.

A woman commissioned the construction of this mausoleum.

She was Humayun's widow.

She hired a Persian architect

and personally oversaw the works for nine years.

Hamida Banu Begum, that was her name,

even set up camp in these gardens

to keep an eye on everything.

She was the mother of Humayun's son Akbar,

the most legendary Mughal of all.

When he was off on a conquest

or traveling across his extensive empire,

he left the business of governing

to his highly intelligent mother.

It's striking what powerful figures

the women of these Islamic dynasties were,

and how they were revered.

And how, for a very long time,

an open and generous form of Islam was practiced here.

The people valued religious tolerance,

music, literature and painting.

Later on, this tomb served as a model for the Taj Mahal,

which was a declaration of love to a woman.

The Taj Mahal on the Yamuna River is considered

one of the most beautiful examples

of Muslim architecture in India.

The mausoleum was commissioned by the great Mughal

Shah Jahan, in memory of his beloved wife.

She died in 1631 while giving birth to their 14th child.

More than 20,000 laborers worked on

the construction of the Taj Mahal.

1,000 elephants transported material to Agra

from all over Asia.

It's said that the great Mughal had the brick layers

and even the architect's fingers cut off

so that they could never create

anything as spectacular again.

Today, the Taj Mahal is one of the most famous buildings

in the world, and India's greatest landmark.

Without the Humayun mausoleum in Delhi as a model,

it never would have been built,

says art historian Ratish Nanda.

This was a political statement more than anything else.

It was the grandeur of the structure

on a never before scale,

never before seen in the Islamic world,

was a statement that Akbar and the Mughals were making,

saying, you know, we are here to stay

and this is who we are.

Nothing in this tomb

is reminiscent of death.

Everything is broken down into geometric shapes,

into symmetries cubes, arches and ornaments.

Time is suspended.

It has been transformed into space.

The Dormitory of the Mughals

Humayun's mausoleum was called,

because in addition to Humayun himself,

the building serves as the final resting place

for 160 of his family members.

Humayun's son Akbar the Great became

the most important ruler in the country's history.

To the Indians he must have been

what Charlemagne was to the Europeans.

Akbar really employed Islamic geometry

as defined in the Holy Quran,

in the building of this mausoleum and the adjoining gardens.

Now, the Holy Quran repeatedly promises the fateful

gardens beneath which rivers flow

as their final resting space.

And it must have been a huge challenge

to have flowing water on the plains,

but the four rivers of paradise were represented

by the four axial pathways.

And each of the four quadrants was then subdivided

into eight blocks because paradise is hasht-behesht

or eight spaces of paradise.

And, what is very interesting is that the building plan

is also following the same Quranic geometry.

And the plan is the introduction of the hasht-behesht plan

with eight chambers around the central chamber

built in here.

So what is interesting for me

is this building has absolutely no precedent

anywhere in India or the Islamic world.

How do you preserve an enormous

16th century building that has been named

a world heritage site?

Thousands of craftsmen worked for six years

to restore the mausoleum,

which was on the verge of falling into disrepair.

And before the restoration work began,

years of research went into determining

which stones and paints the original craftsman had used.

So for us to restore that reminder

was extremely important.

And we were very fortunate that we were able

to figure out the exact patterns of the tile work.

But the craft skill having died out,

we invited craftsmen from Samarkand

and trained local youth in these works.

But it took us about 20,000 samples of testing

to really make the lapis blue.

There are also five other colors.

There's turquoise blue, yellow,

two shades of green and white.

But lapis blue, which is used predominantly

in buildings in this mausoleum area,

took us about two years to work out.

At some point, Akbar the Great

relocated his capital.

He'd been looking for a silent place

for an almost sacred landscape,

and finally decided to build Fatehpur Sikri near Agra.

At the time, there were only small villages and farms,

a bucolic atmosphere, perfect for contemplation

and the right place for Akbar to establish his new capital.

On the way to the palace there are small hints

at his legacy.

The Hiran Minar is covered with stone projections

in the form of elephant tusks.

For a long time it was thought to have been erected

as a memorial to the emperor Akbar's favorite elephant.

But it was probably used as a milepost.

The new city with Akbar's imposing palace in the middle

became a haven of tolerance.

He participated in festivities of other religions

and abolished the taxes that non-Muslims had to pay.

And he surrounded himself with theologians and priests

from a range of different faiths.

Muslims, Hindus and Jesuits.

He himself married a Rajput princess,

a Hindu woman.

For a long time she was unable to conceive a child,

and then the Sufi saint Salim Chishti

foretold that she would bare the king,

their long desired heir to the throne,

within the year.

And she had 13 more children after that.

The saint is still worshiped in a temple

on the palace grounds of Fatehpur Sikri,

mainly by women who hope to have children.

Amidst all the antiquities that bear witness

to India's history over the millennia,

it's sometimes easy to forget that

Indians live in a modern nation.

Since 1947, India has been the largest democracy

in the world, with a population of 1.4 billion.

Nearly 20 million people live on the coast

of the Arabian Sea in Mumbai,

which used to be known as Bombay,

after the Portuguese for beautiful bay.

The Portuguese were also colonial rulers here for a time.

But before the Portuguese arrived,

the city was a scattered amalgamation of seven islands.

The natives of the area lived here as fishermen.

They formed their own cast by the name of Koli.

They helped develop the harbors

and the coastlines around Mumbai.

The name Mumbai stems from the Mumba Devi Temple in Dongri,

where the Kolis worshiped their gods.

Can you make a good living out of fishing in these waters?

We have been facing problems.

There are barriers or restrictions.

No fish to catch.

Fishing has not been that rewarding anymore.

It's not just the fishermen who suffer from the pollution.

Today the city is continuously growing.

Everyone wants to come to Mumbai, the golden city,

in search of a better life.

The influence of the British colonial era

is also still highly visible in Mumbai.

After all, Queen Victoria was also Empress of India.

In 1888 the Victoria Terminus was inaugurated

to mark the Queen's Golden Jubilee.

It's the most impressive example

of Victorian Gothic architecture in India

and as part of the Victorian Gothic

and art deco ensembles of Mumbai,

it's a UNESCO world heritage site.

("Rule Britannia")

Half the sub-continent was part of British India back then,

and the train station was considered

its largest and most important building.

With its beautiful stained glass windows,

the enormous dome at the top,

the extravagant stone vaults,

this feels like a place of worship.

This is railway station as cathedral.

That's how British India celebrated itself

in the 19th century.

("Rule Britannia" continues)

But those days are over and the train station

is no longer called Victoria Terminus.

Today it is named after Indian national hero

Chhatrapati Shivaji, a Hindu leader from the 17th century.

A fitting patron because Shivaji was an early campaigner

for Indian independence.

Now, the terminus is undergoing intense renovation.

Pollution from the enormous traffic volumes

and industrial pollution in the region

have damaged the stone structure of the building.

Another problem is the saline air from the sea.

Craftsmen from all over India are working on the site,

just as they did when the station was built.

British architects worked with Indian craftsmen

to include Indian architectural traditions,

thus forging a new style unique to the city,

which was then still called Bombay.

In any case, the train station is still in operation today

and it's a key transport hub in India.

More than 1,000 trains pass through here every day,

heading in every direction across the subcontinent.

2 million passengers per day,

vast numbers of whom are commuters from the suburbs.

I'm taking the train to Kolkata,

and from there I will explore Sundarbans National Park,

a UNESCO world natural heritage site.

As I leave Mumbai, I can only think about how Victoria,

who had originally lent her name to this palatial station,

never experienced the wonder and beauty

of this sub-continent firsthand,

despite the fact that she was Empress of India.

In the northeast of India, seven rivers and hundreds

of smaller streams form an extensive network of channels.

This place, the Ganges Delta in the northeast of India,

is home to mangrove forests that are by far

the largest in the world.

World heritage is about more than just culture.

It's also about protecting the world's

unique natural treasures.

India's most important UNESCO world natural heritage site

is Sundarbans National Park.

It's located at the point where India's mighty rivers,

the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, flow together.

Mangroves even thrive in the salt water

that mixes with the fresh water of the rivers here.

Sundarbans, a Bengali name, means beautiful forest.

And it's an ideal refuge for many

endangered species of animals.

This place is a perfect hunting ground

for the spotted owlet.

The lesser adjutant specializes in wetlands.

There are more than 270 species of birds in the Sundarbans.

The Sundarbans covers more than

10,000 square kilometers of territory,

and during the floods it is flushed with seawater.

It is home to enormous saltwater crocodiles,

rare species of heron and tiny mudskippers.

The primeval ghost crab has its sanctuary here,

as does the chital deer.

This is where you'll find the world's

largest mangrove forests,

though it's also home to India's national animal,

the Bengal tiger, an endangered species.

Unfortunately, this majestic creature

is still mercilessly hunted by poachers,

despite the fact that killing these magnificent animals

is considered a blasphemy in India.

The tiger is the mount of the goddess Durga,

who uses her weapons to defend humanity's divinity

and to battle demons.

But it would appear that the demons that drive humanity

to devastate its natural environment

are very difficult to defeat.

No one knows exactly how many Bengal tigers

still survive today.

Estimates suggest that there may be

fewer than 200 in the Sundarbans.

The tigers drink the brackish water,

which has very high salt content,

and that reduces their life expectancy.

So they're facing a double threat,

from humans and from nature.

The Sundarbans region has been under growing threat

from climate change.

If the sea level continues to rise at such a rapid pace,

it will throw off the delicate equilibrium

of this unique biosystem.

The Ganges, which flows into the Sundarbans,

is one of the longest rivers in the world,

at 2,600 kilometers.

It has its source in a Western Himalayan glacier,

crystal clear and high up in the mountains,

and that's exactly where we're headed now,

up the river to Shimla,

the capital of the state of Himachal Pradesh.

On the horizon are the Himalayan foothills,

with their 8,000 meter mountains.

The area around Shimla used to be dotted with

nothing but mountain cabins and nomads tents.

Today, the Queen of Hills, as Shimla is locally known,

is inhabited by almost 200,000 people.

In the 19th century, the British came

and the English Viceroy had a palace built

on a commanding hill in English Renaissance revival style.

Suddenly there was hustle and bustle.

Half timbered houses and a traditional Anglican church

were erected in the Himalayas.

Shimla became an exclusive mini empire for the Brits,

with afternoon teas, garden parties and cricket matches,

with English architecture and gardens to match.

And because the wives of the civil servants

and officers were often left to their own devices here

for long periods of time,

Shimla soon became known as the capital city of adultery.

It's the strangest feeling to visit this handsome

but rather provincial Victorian English confection

in the midst of an Indian landscape.

You get the feeling that the British

colonial rulers of India wanted to be here

and not to be here at the same time.

The Indian national leader, Nehru,

found an interesting way to put it when he said

the British ultimately failed as colonial rulers

because they failed to become Indian.

Instead, they left landmarks of their own culture.

There is, for example, Northern India's second oldest

Anglican church, Shimla's Christ church,

overlooking the central square,

where at the time local farmers

and craftsmen offered their goods for sale.

In the Indian plain it can get unbearably hot,

at least for Europeans.

In the summer of 1864, Viceroy of India

and representative of Queen Victoria John Lawrence

decided in one fell swoop that the seat

of the British colonial government

should be transferred in the hot months of every year

to a city in the mountains.

That was Shimla.

All the important civil servants had to move here

to the foothills of the Himalayas.

The entire bureaucracy was relocated,

lock, stock and barrel, to higher altitudes.

An endless caravan of over 20,000 porters

dragged the civil servants possessions

across the country in high summer

and then back again when the summer was over.

To put an end to this drudgery,

construction on a train line

from the city of Kalka to Shimla

began in the late 19th century.

Like India's other mountain railways,

the Kalka-Shimla railway is a UNESCO world heritage site.

On its 100 kilometers of track

it climbs 1,500 meters skyward,

which is why the trip takes nearly six hours.

But the train offers spectacular views

of the Himalayan foothills and wooded valleys.

This stretch of railway only has one track,

so the journey can't continue until the oncoming train

has reached the station.

The track gauge is just 762 millimeters,

which is why it's also known as a toy train.

The railways are as much a part of India

as the Taj Mahal or the Ganges,

and just like the rivers,

they are a lifeline for this country,

a piece of living history to be experienced firsthand.

This railway is one of the finest legacies

of the British colonial rulers in India.

It's a masterpiece of British engineering.

It was completed in 1903.

The Kalka-Shimla railway, with its 864 bridges

and it's more than 100 tunnels,

is listed in the Guinness Book of Records

as possessing the steepest incline in altitude worldwide.

And I must say this particular stretch

is just a little bit hair-raising.

Every day, on average, more than 8,000 trains

travel 80,000 kilometers of track,

carrying more than 23 million passengers.

Cargo trains transport 3 million tons of goods and more.

The total distance India's trains travel every day

is three times the distance from the earth to the moon.

Indian traditions are partly responsible for this.

People are always traveling for religious festivals

and family celebrations.

After the trip on the Kalka-Shimla railway,

it's time for some relaxation,

and an ancient Indian invention is just the ticket.

Yoga.

The goal of yoga is to exercise control

over your body and the mind.

Maybe yoga really does allow you

to overcome physical limitations,

to think without thoughts.

(speaking in foreign language)

In the theory of yoga, a human being is a traveler,

moving through life in a horse drawn cart.

The body is the cart, the mind is the driver,

and the five senses are the five horses pulling the cart.

The soul is the passenger and the harness

controlling the whole thing is known

in the Sanskrit language simply as yoga.

Yoga is much more of course than a relaxation technique

for stressed out modern people.

It's said that the first yogis were part of

the advanced civilizations of the Indus River Valley

over 5,000 years ago.

We can see this on ancient depictions.

For a long time, this kind of meditation,

this self-improvement technique, only existed in India,

where it was closely linked to Hinduism.

Then in the 19th century, Yogi Swami Vivekananda

set yoga on the path to its current world hegemony.

He made a case for Hinduism as a world religion

and heightened global awareness

of India's cultural importance.

We are visiting Yogi Rakesh Pandey,

one of the most famous Indian masters.

He practices yoga as a science.

(speaking in foreign language)

Guruji, yoga is more than just a bodily discipline.

Where does the thought behind yoga come from?

This came from the Vedas.

in Indian, Vedas.

And the Vedas had the divided four part,

Rigveda, Samaveda, Atharvaveda, Yajurveda.

So in the Rigveda, all my yogis, all my saints,

Rishis, Munis, says you do the yoga.

All the time, at that time,

yoga is not this one little exercise.

At that time, yoga is a philosophy.

Yoga is a lifestyle.

Many of the asanas, the position you showed us,

looked like dance.

And you sang before and after,

you chanted musically before and after the positions.

Is there a connection between yoga and music?

Yoga is like the music.

The rhythm of the body.

The melody of the mind.

Harmony of the soul.

Create a symphony of life.

This is yoga.

I can think of no other country

as enthralling and baffling as India.

Nothing is straightforward.

The riddles are never resolved.

The sacred sites of Hinduism suggest

a deep reverence for the natural environment,

yet one also finds traces of a certain disregard

for the upkeep of natural spaces

and even for the bodies of water that many consider holy.

Sewage from private households and industrial plants,

rubbish deposited along thousands of kilometers of river,

avalanches of garbage,

and not just on the outskirts of the cities.

Just over there there's a temple,

and down here on the street the cows

are doing their business, there's rubbish everywhere.

In India, holiness and dirt are often found close together.

And I think the reason for this

lies partly in the Hindu concept of Maya,

which means literally veil,

that signifies the idea that the world

that we can see and touch is not the thing

that matters most,

that the truly essential things lie

in the domain of the invisible.

India gives wings to our imagination.

It fuels our dreams.

But so much that matters is hidden from view.

Its history has never moved in straight lines.

It's not an easy place to understand

and that's exactly why I'll be back.

No one who comes to India could fail to be astonished

by the diversity and number of its cultures,

aptly represented by its UNESCO

world cultural heritage sites.

India is not a country.

It's a country of countries, a civilization.

Buddhism, a world religion, had its origins here,

and Hinduism is present almost everywhere now

thanks to the global reach of the Indian diaspora.

But unlike Europe, India has never sought

to reshape the world in its own image.

Instead, the world came to India,

and everything that immigrants and conquerors

brought to this subcontinent was absorbed

and transformed by a society that was open

but never servile.

The thread of continuity with a deep past

was never entirely broken.

And the result is a nation unique

in the richness of its contrasting colors and layers.

(gentle music)