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The story of India (part 1)
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[Music]
60 years ago India threw off the chains
nation and now the world's largest
democracy is rushing headlong into the future
future [Music]
[Music]
as the brief Heyday of the West draws to
a close one of the greatest players in
history is rising [Music]
[Music]
again India has seen the EB and flow of
huge events since the beginning of
History its tale is one of incredible
drama and the biggest [Music]
[Music]
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
ancient [Music]
[Music]
civilization this is the story of a land
where all human pasts are still
alive a 10,000 year epic that continues
today the story of India [Music]
[Music] [Applause]
a 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
memory only India has preserved The
Unbroken thread of the human story that
binds us all [Music]
according to the oldest Indian myths the
first humans came from a golden egg laid
by the king of the Gods in the churning
ocean modern science of course Works in
a less poetic vein but no less thrilling
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
India they were Beach
comers 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
the
fertility here down south you throw a
mango away and a tree will grow life is
super abundant so here some of them
Indians and all non-africans on the
planet can trace their descent from
those early migrations into India the
rest of the world was populated from
indeed and amazingly for so long ago
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
unsuspected for here you can even hear
their voices sounds from the beginning
of human [Music]
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
perform for centuries these incantations
or mantras have been passed down from
father to son only among brahmins exact
language only recently have Outsiders
been allowed to record them and to try
chants to their amazement they
discovered whole tracks 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 analog came from the Animal
Kingdom it was bird
song these songs are perhaps tens of
thousands of years old passed down from
before human
speech there are certain patterns of
sounds preceding and succeeding
texts that is what is called oral tradition
tradition
you can't write those patterns in book
it's unprintable so only orally it can be
be
transmitted through generations and this
Kerala for 12 days the priests and their
wives must stay inside the enclosure and
then when the ritual is over and the
world purified the Huts are burned down
all Trace obliterated save in the memory
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 [Music]
on over the hills in Tamil Nadu
geneticists from the University of
madere have been testing the DNA of tribal
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
people it's a direct evidence that we
are out of Africa and it's all a
brotherly good we are all the
same here among the kala people
Professor ramasami pitapan recently
tested a man called virumandi in his DNA
was the marker of that first human
migration wife very nice to meet you
since the migration of the first man
70,000 years ago and which V is probably
Carri that Gene m130 right great great
so so vandi how does it feel to be the first
first
Indian I'm very happy for
this that you have this G
G
wonderful vandi's tribe practiced 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 some 50 to 60,000 years ago this
m130 gene pool came over
here and luckily uh somebody stayed in
this Village and expanded then we could
identify you know to our surprise you
know that the whole village is of m130
everybody around us here everybody
around us here carries m130 so you you
call it as a foundary effect what would
be that you you've got the early migration
migration
in at least two waves language is only
devel developing later yes the scholars
feel that it is only just 10,000 years
old the spoken
language maybe only 10 to 15,000
maximum language is not the same as
ethnicity we need to make that clear
don't yes it is absolutely essential yes
it is not the language can easily be
adopted but the same is true with
religion too it's a kind of belief
system you believe in your system or in
your uh
education or in your capacity or in your
family or 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 the unity is that what
makes you an an Indian then yeah
probably yes a human being all the more
I would say
Indian and despite all the later
migrations and invasions India's gene
pool has remained largely constant it's
India languages and religions came only
[Music]
change but here in the south they've
passed down Humanity's oldest religion
too in the Great temple of madere they
still worship the female principle the
mother goddess as Indian people have
done for tens of thousands of [Music]
[Music] [Applause]
[Applause]
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
universe why have only one God when you
can have millions [Music]
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
madere 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 [Applause]
[Applause]
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 Ark from the
Mediterranean to India changes in
agriculture and that would be the motor
for the next turning point in the story of
of
in the Year 2007 for the first time in
history most of us will live in cities
countryside here in the Indian
subcontinent that process of
civilization began in 7,000 BC even
earlier than ancient Egypt with the
growth of large villages in the Indus [Music]
Valley so despite the divisions made by
modern borders nowhere else on Earth is
life
hello Alum 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 molan your native place yes oh yes
yes yeah very
nice making historical film for BBC London
these days civilization is very
problematical word with many shades of
meaning but to historians and
archaeologists it means living in cities
large scale highly organized societies
Monumental architecture law and writing
and to find the origins of Indian
civilization we need to come first of
all to Pakistan once part of India but
split to become a separate country in
1947 because it was here in the valley
of the Indus River comparatively
recently in a series of Amazing
Discoveries revealed a hitherto
civilization those first discoveries
took place in the 1920s at a little halt
on the railway line between maltan and
laor harappa [Music]
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 ancient civilization
far older than the Bible Greece and Rome
would have seemed
incredible the Europeans saw India as a
primitive backward place they believed
civilization 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 1921
when British and Indian archaeologists
[Music]
Punjab Sal how are you it's nice to see
you fantasting thank you for having us
yeah that's
wonderful the archaeologists camped in
tents here and they were plagued by mosquitoes
mosquitoes [Music]
too that night in the Dig Hut I read
again the Romantic account of those
first discoveries at the same time as
Egypt not often is it given to
archaeologists wrote the British
excavator John Marshall as it was given
to SCH demon at minini to light upon the
remains of a forgotten
civilization it looks however at the
moment as if we're on the threshold of
such a discovery here in the plains of
the Indus [Music]
[Music]
like the other great ancient
civilizations in Iraq Egypt and China
India's first cities had grown up on a
river the ruins of haraa stood on the
dried up bed of a tributary of the river
Indus its huge Citadel walls have been
quarried Away by Victorian Railway
contractors but there was still evidence
of industry and trade of writing and
high level organization at a huge
population rapper was Far older than
anything previously known in
India amazingly at the time of the
building of the pyramids of Egypt there
India when does haraa
begin Hara was bring in
3,500 BC uh 5,000 uh years ago from here
right 3,500 BC so this is very very longlasting
longlasting
place and and when was the Hey Day the
high period of the indust civilization
the high period of IND civilization
started from
2,900 BC to 1900 BC this is the highest
period and we called it mature heran
period right and how many people do you
think how many people do you think lived
here in the the height of its power I
think 2 lakh p 200,000 people according
to their houses houses and streets wow
it is the
estimated guess wow but it's a it's a
[Music]
world the next year
1922 British and Indian archaeologists
targeted an untouched site to the South maheno
Dara by ancient standards it was an
Manhattan just like the modern Indians
and pakistanis the Indus people were tra
from here their boats Persian Gulf and
Iraq carrying caros of ivory te and Lapis
lauli 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 civilization in the
ancient world and with up to 5 million
undeciphered then after several
centuries of stability the city's
declined trade collapsed and urban life itself
itself
ended people went back to the
land but why the indust cities died is
archaeology back in London I went to see
Dr Sanji Gupta who offered me a much
bigger picture as to why civilizations
rise and
fall about 180 million years ago India
was actually an island floating in this
vast ocean that we call teis and it was
moving northwards for about 130 million
years eventually at about 50 million
years ago it actually rammed into Asia
collided with Asia to produce the
Himalayas so there's a different
perspective to the historian's view
civilizations come and go
environment and climate are what shape
our human story in the long term as
we're 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 civilization when they
failed it did
too the key was the shifting and drying
up of rivers and one great river system
in particular
what we've been doing is to look at
satellite imagery to try and see if you
can trace Helo River channels
essentially on the flood planes so this
is the area just around along the border
between India and Pakistan that's right
and we're going to basically zoom in on
an area over here and look at some uh
satellite imagery and some
detail so in the 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 uh Channel like
feature which people believe is the
trace of an ancient river wow and if we
now put the sites on for the main phase
of the haran
civilization you can see beautifully how
those sites are actually strung along
the trace of this ancient Channel clear
there isn't it absolutely matches the
the curve of the channel bed and you can
trace it actually from India into
Pakistan into the area that's called
Chalan where you have numerable sites oh
yeah yeah so this is from the height of
the indust civilization probably between
5 thou 5,000 to 4,000 uh years ago when
mahena Dar and Hara are at their height
so what happens to these sites in the at
the end of the Civ the haraan
civilization actually if we look at the
later Haren
stages oh yes and what you see is that
there's a major shift
Eastward uh into the eastern part of the
Central and Eastern part of the Ganges
plane away from the major Gaga hakra
settlements over here wow in the last
10,000 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 and a half thousand 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 the M mature harapan
civilizations settlements just
completely disappear and we see this
major shift Eastward into the central
part of the Ganges plane [Music]
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
so climate change shifted the center 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
and here the next chapter in the story
of India will take [Music]
place how are you Hi how are you hello
how is the water H the water is good good
so the first great Indian civilization
died out or did it the mystery of the
Indus cities is so tantalizing and the
differences with later Indian
civilization apparently so great that
it's easy to think that there was a
major break in continuity of Indian
civilization but history is not like
that especially Indian history and it's
only a very short time after the end of
the last tiest cities let's say around
1500 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
read the language is sanskrit the
ancestor of all the modern dialects
spoken in the north of the subcontinent
across Pakistan India and [Music]
[Music]
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
civilization did it grow up here in the
India like Latin Sanskrit is no longer a
spoken language but here in the holy
city of Varanasi young Brahman Boys
Still learn it to recite their earliest
vas for traditional Hindus these are the
most ancient scriptures in the world
the Vaders 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 Vader
which start around 1500 BC a time when
use it's quite a thought as is 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 Vader have
been passed down word for word only
priests is it easy to understand
today or is the Sanskrit ancient
Sanskrit very difficult to
understand yes very difficult Sanskrit
it's very difficult very difficult
s only through brahmins only brah only
Brahman learning so all the boys here
today are they are Brahmin voice yeah after
after
Samar after
[Music]
out of the poems of the rig Vader a
story emerges over several centuries
it's the tale of tribes moving across
North India led by the god of fire
[Music]
lands the leaders of these tribes spoke
Sanskrit the rig Vader shows that they
fought back battles among themselves and
arens the significance of that story
only began to be understood in the 18th
Kolkata the key figure was a Welsh judge
called William Jones who founded the Astic
Astic
Society unlike some of his
contemporaries Jones admired Indian
civilization he persuaded a Brahman
scholar to teach him Sanskrit and what
he found would rewrite the history of
own on February the 2nd
1786 Jones gave a lecture here to the society
like others before him he noticed a very
close similarity between Sanskrit Latin and
and
Welsh take the word for father p in
Greek and P in Latin is p in
Sanskrit the word for mother
mat in Latin m in Greek in Sanskrit is
mat and most amazing the key word for
horse in Sanskrit ASA is exactly the
same thousands of miles away in
Lithuania no philology 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 controvers
in the subcontinent most linguists agree
the common source lay outside India oh
thank you very much well this is very
exciting so where had Sanskrit come from
in the rig Vader lies the key to the
next phase of the story so Professor Biz
this is I'm looking in the modern catalog
catalog
6608 and uh we're looking for bundle 14
Bund 14 yeah this one great it says here
copied in at the year 1418 which is AD
1362 appearance very old yeah yeah and
tobly this is the earliest manuscript of
B the earliest manuscript this fantastic
when this text was written down it had
already been passed down orally for more
in the rig Vader there are many Clues to
the origin of the Sanskrit speaking
peoples first the rigvedic gods are not originally
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 rain he brought down the
water from Sky he brought down the water
from the
sky then there's the Chariots and horses
horses are not known in the indust
civilization and yet they're a key part
of the Society of the rig Vader Chariot
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 very early
period and another clue is the evidence
of a migration
eastwards so a movement eastwards can be
determined and and some of the rivers
are identified with rivers almost
towards the Afghan border the SWAT sasu
and the caral river this is the first uh
movement of arens is this the name they
called themselves what does it mean it
actually means the Civilized the
S the socialized civilized person
civilized defined person and so they use
the word
Arya that's what they call themselves
yeah so this is a key moment in the
story around 1500 BC after the death of
the Indus cities Aran tribes began to
language the earliest hymns in the rig
fader are mentioned places in the
Northwest where the Aran 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 carpal
Afghanistan and they herded their cattle
on the river SWAT today in Pakistan's Northwest
Frontier the heart of the early Aran
territory was the region of peshawa in
Pakistan and here I hope to solve
another clue the rig Vader talks about a
sacred drink Central to the aran's
rituals a speciality of the tribes
around here it was called s rig Vader
says it was taken from a mountain plant
didn't have leaves or berries it was a 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 th today and if
we're likely to find it anywhere will be
peshawa just off the street of
storytellers is the alley of the
apothecaries and here I tried out the
rig Vader's description of the S
plant no not
it a long
St no leaves makes bitter very bitter taste
taste
have fantastic fantastic he has the
yeah can be 1 foot 2ot 3T
this is it this is it smells slightly like
like [Music]
[Music]
Pine if I boil this up in water I should
be able to taste the the bitter taste of
okay we don't know exactly how s 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 but a lot of a lot
of it so it's s is still used as a
medicine in Central
Asia the active element in the plant is
iDine and the effect that it has
according to the rig Vader is well if
you take too much of it it can cause
nausea it can be frightening it can give
you vertigo um uh it's vomiting if you
take it in the right measure
it enliven the senses sharpens you up
keeps you awake The Poets in the rig
Vader compose their songs often at night
having drunk s and of course Indra King
of the Gods drinks vast quantities of
this perhaps because it's thought to be
well my God look at the color of
it but s's not an Indian plant it
doesn't grow in the humid Plains and
today it's no longer part of Hindu
outside getting a kind of tingling
feeling all
over just sharpens the senses up um
makes you slightly oh go on then inra
penan thank you Shak Shaka slight
feeling all over now slightly
tingling heart beating slightly
faster um sens is just slightly sharpened
sharpened
up this is a really important aspect of
the rig Vader there are many many of the thousand
thousand
devoted to the merits of drinking Som
almost as an elixir of the Gods and
chiefly of the the king of the Gods
himself it also makes you talk too [Music]
[Music]
much so the Northwest Frontier and the
rivers of the Punjab were the first home
of the arens inside
India but the rig Vader suggest they'd
come from much further field beond
beyond the Kaiba pass even beyond the
Kush the clues now point us northwards
[Music]
Asia and our search for the Aran led us
ascad a closed world in the last days of
Bashi and here we gathered supplies for
our journey onwards to the sight of a
Discovery we'd arranged a rendevu out in
the kakum the Black
Desert on the migration route by which
the ancestors of the arens must have
come out of Central Asia in the Bronze [Music]
Age 4,000 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
daro out here we made our rendevu with
Victor sanid so Professor s
is uh to say the least a living legend
one of the great Uh Russian
archaeologists he's been Excavating out
here in the Wilds for many years uh and
found what few
archaeologists are ever lucky enough to
civilization sarun is Excavating a vast
fortified mud Bridge
enclosure and a huge sacred Precinct
altars the material culture here is the
mirror image of the arens of the rig
Vader and their ancient Iranian cousins
religion it is first time we founded in
all archaeology of near East The
Ensemble with
with many Temple which is belong to the
ran religion what date does the site
finish stop being used I think in uh
second millennium BC because the mgap
river coming in West and the Life coming
together with water in West in other
place so change of river and climate
change moves the population moved moved
this is where the the s h was prepared
the sacred drink in this in this kind of
bowl yeah what were the ingredients of
the Sacred drink what went into it oh it
just ingredient yeah poppy poppy
cannabis cannabis ephedra edra have you
tasted no have you made today prob
no two in the morning certainly is for
that when you look at the connections
you've got the sacred drink here the S
you've got the fire altars you've got
the beginnings of very close
similarities with what we heard in the
rig Vader what about horses then uh
Victor yeah have you found evidence of
horses the horse was first domesticated
out here in Central Asia
so this is a foe for a king's morelan yeah
yeah
yeah the horse sacrifice was the
greatest ritual an Aran King could
do all of this King M all of all of
these are are royal tombs and in these
tombs you found wheeled wheeled Vehicles
like carts with four wheels yes with
four wheels yeah really interesting
isn't it you know the rig V when they
talk about the wheels vehicles in the
early rig Vader they use this word Rafa
in Sanskrit Rafa and it's not a chariot
it's it is actually a cart and here
they've actually found the cart inside
of these stps we founded three
Von the origin of the Aran 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
here and that night Under the Stars
another thought came to me about the rig
women the communal drinking the
convivial Feast was that how some of
this ancient poetry was composed by the
Kings Mighty
Indra let your Regal mounts bring you
here to drink
somar the juice which is swifter than thought
thought [Music]
Indra wield your Thunderbolt Indra bring
rain Grant all our desires part the sky
and make all things [Music]
[Music]
visible part the sky and drink s that
opens our mind to the
vastness of your [Music]
[Music] skies
[Music] [Applause]
[Applause]
Indra It's a Wonderful t izing mystery
isn't it the Aran 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
mud brick 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 1700 1800 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 [Music]
phase now again we need to jump the
Centuries by around a th000 BC Aran
tribes were settled across North India
and fighting each other for Supremacy
and that period of heroic Warfare was
eventually crystallized in a great myth the
the [Music]
[Music]
mahabarata composed in Sanskrit it's the
longest poem in the world and for all
[Music] [Applause]
like Homer's tale of Troy the mahabarata
is a story of war and tragedy a doomsday
epic it harks back to the time when the
AR 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 kurk
chetra to celebrate a battle which in
Indian tradition took place in
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
pandas would permeate Indian culture in
all Indian languages a fundamental guide
to how to live your life and do your
duty it's a battlefield for cororo and
P at the time of daper daper is a
chrisan Time Lord krishna's
time all the Warriors they belong to his
own family all family [Music]
[Music]
relatives he don't want to do war with
his own he doesn't want to fight against
War yes and what Krishna say to him then
Krishna teach advise him how to
performance of Duty importance of
Performing Duty for a king your duty is
to fight ah performance of Duty is [Music]
[Music]
must 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 Leery and Ambitions and and and
fears people who have committed acts of
betrayal and and and and and and sold
each other down the river uh it's a
tremendous amount of it it sort of to
read the Mahabharat today is to
recognize how thrilling it must have
been to hear at the first time somewhere
between between 400 BC and 400 ad which
is roughly the 8800e span during which
composed during that period the tale was
told and retold 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 [Music]
[Music]
Mahabharat all sorts sorts of things got
tossed into
this literally every single thing that
people want to talk about their times
was interpolated into a retelling of the
Epic so for 800 years the Mahabharat
became the story of [Music]
India and stories too become part of a
nation's identity for they help create a
shared past that binds us all
irrespective of Lang or religion making
an allegiance to the idea of India
itself but was the war more than just
m so these are all places that were
famous in the legend that these names
have not changed till today they bear
the same name the reason is that they
have been under success in 1949 2 years
after Independence a young archaeologist
BB L went to the Citadel of the Waring
Clans at hastinapur to see if history
lay behind the
myth right this is a view of the asapur
mound and we put a long trench right
across the M we are looking at this M
from the West on the Eastern side the
river used to flow right by the side of
the Old River Ganges in ancient
times his guide was not only
archaeological science but the tradition
handed down in the
mahabarata on the western side of the
mount we were getting the painted gra on
the Eastern side we are not getting it
so I was very much worried I spent many
nights without
sleep and the text say a great flood
came in the ganga and washed away Hur a
great flood washed away H and you can
see the man in this figure is pointing
to the erosion Mark left by the river
it's very clear isn't it yeah yeah so so
you'd found the the the key evidence
that the tradition had was correct that
there had been a flood that had
[Music]
yes when you go to hastinapur today
you'd almost think it could be then what
L 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 recognizable in
the India of [Music]
today this is the trench that Professor
L dug through the mound nearly 60 years
ago it's crumbling now but you can still
make out the 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
mud brick defenses um store rooms uh
rooms for the Warriors who were their
armed following and somewhere here
presumably a palace although Professor
Nile never found that now what connected
this place with the uh the war in the
mahabarata well remember remember three
three things the legend which named the
place the story of the
flood and the pottery and 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 gray wear
you can see why it's gray beautifully
painted that was the evidence that led
Professor L to believe that there was
truth behind the legend and that the
Great War of the mahabarata 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 mahabarata 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
own over the next 3,000 years Greeks and
Huns Turks and Afghans Moguls and
British Alexander tamboline bble will
spell and India's greatest strength as
the oldest civilizations know will be to
adapt and change to absorb the wounds of
history and to use its gifts but somehow
magically always remain India [Music]
[Music] [Applause]
[Applause] [Music]
[Applause]
this is the Sacred City of matura on the
river jumna the cool season is over now
the rains are ending and the heat is
rise the Festival of holy celebrates the
coming of light the Triumph of good the
growth of life and down there there's
bank managers and it boffins rubbing
shoulders with farmers and Rick Shaw men
all of them dancing for a god from [Applause]
[Applause]
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 Gangi
plane and already you can
see the cultures and the languages and
the religions of India have been built
up over tens of thousands of years there
the deep current on
which events the great events of History
movements and they make up that deep
and this is just the [Applause]
beginning next in the story of
India Tales of War and Peace and the
power of ideas the greatest warriors the
greatest thinkers the most dangerous
and that story continues next Friday at
mine here on BBC 2 next the 60s chicks
come to terms with aging but not without
a moan grumpy old women on the way [Music]
[Music] [Applause]
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