[Music] 60 years ago India threw off the chains of the British Empire and became a free nation and now the world's largest democracy is rushing headlong into the future [Music] as the brief Heyday of the West draws to a close one of the greatest players in history is rising [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] 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 [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] [Applause] [Music] 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 Lost in Time Beyond 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 of the cosmic ocean modern science of course Works in a less poetic vein but no less thrilling to the imagination for what science tells us is that our ancestors first walked out of Africa only 70 or 80,000 years ago round the shores of the Arabian Sea and down into South India they were 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 fertility here down south you throw a mango away and a tree will grow life is super abundant so here some of them stayed and they were the first Indians and all non-africans on the planet can trace their descent from those early migrations into India the rest of the world was populated from here Mother India indeed and amazingly for so long ago those first Indians have left their Trail if you go Inland from the beaches of Kerala into the Maze of backwaters deep in the rainforests you'll still find their traces Clues to What Lies Beneath all the later layers of Indian history clues that till recent ly were completely 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 take 12 days to perform for centuries these incantations or mantras have been passed down from father to son only among brahmins exact in every song but some of the mantras are in no known language only recently have Outsiders been allowed to record them and to try to make sense of the brahmin's 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 you can't write those patterns in book it's unprintable so only orally it can be transmitted through generations and this oral tradition is still alive in Kerala 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 of the Brahman [Music] 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 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 Indian I'm very happy for this that you have this 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 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 rather than Indian and despite all the later migrations and invasions India's gene pool has remained largely constant it's one of the unchanging roots of India languages and religions came only later and they are always subject to [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] [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 multiplicity 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] 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 technology led to the invention of agriculture and that would be the motor for the next turning point in the story of India the rise of cities [Music] in the Year 2007 for the first time in history most of us will live in cities rather than in the countryside here in the Indian subcontinent that process of 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 there such continuity of settled 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 completely unknown ancient 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 arrived at this little place in the [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 [Music] too that night in the Dig Hut I read again the Romantic account of those first discoveries at the same time as the finding of tutan Kon in 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 had been vast cities here in 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 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 big big city for the ancient [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 urban giant a Bronze Age 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 people the world's biggest population but their writing is still undeciphered then after several centuries of stability the city's declined trade collapsed and urban life itself ended people went back to the land but why the indust cities died is one of the greatest mysteries in 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 world's largest mountain belt 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] [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 life itself [Music] 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 plain of the river Ganges and here the next chapter in the story of India will take [Music] [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 story texts we can not just hear but read the language is sanskrit the ancestor of all the modern dialects spoken in the north of the subcontinent across Pakistan India and [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 Ganges plain or did it come from outside India like Latin Sanskrit is no longer a spoken language but here in the holy city of Varanasi young Brahman Boys Still learn it to recite their earliest scriptures the vas for traditional Hindus these are the most ancient scriptures in the world older by far than the Bible 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 Stonehenge was still in 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 within families of Brahman 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 Samar after samarat after the Holy Spirit yeah yeah [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 burning forests looking for new [Music] lands the leaders of these tribes spoke Sanskrit the rig Vader shows that they fought back battles among themselves and they called themselves [Music] arens the significance of that story only began to be understood in the 18th century when the British came here to Kolkata the key figure was a Welsh judge called William Jones who founded the 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 the world's languages including our 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 Greek and even to English and his native 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 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 than 2,500 years the first verse of the in the rig Vader there are many Clues to the origin of the Sanskrit speaking peoples first the rigvedic gods are not originally Indian the most important God was Indra Indra was the god of thunder he was the god of rain the God of Thunder and the god of rain 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 enter India with new gods and a new 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 river which flows down from Afghanistan and they herded their cattle on the river SWAT today in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier the heart of the early 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 here in the bizaar at 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 look like this you have fantastic fantastic he has the natural plant here yeah yeah can be 1 foot 2ot 3T long scented like ah this is it this is it smells slightly like [Music] Pine if I boil this up in water I should be able to taste the the bitter taste of it yeah yeah 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 an aphrodiziac as 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 religion it came from 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 up this is a really important aspect of the rig Vader there are many many of the 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] 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 mountains of the Hindu Kush the clues now point us northwards into Central [Music] Asia and our search for the Aran led us into Turkmenistan to ascad a closed world in the last days of its strange and secretive ruler turkman Bashi and here we gathered supplies for our journey onwards to the sight of a sensational new archaeological 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 harappa and the heno 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 find a l civilization sarun is Excavating a vast fortified mud Bridge enclosure and a huge sacred Precinct with tombs and fire altars the material culture here is the mirror image of the arens of the rig Vader and their ancient Iranian cousins who followed the zoroastrian 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 invest invest in 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 me I tell 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 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 it's great to finally get here and that night Under the Stars another thought came to me about the rig bade done women the communal drinking the convivial Feast was that how some of this ancient poetry was composed by the BS in front of the Aran Kings Mighty Indra let your Regal mounts bring you here to drink somar the juice which is swifter than thought [Music] Indra wield your Thunderbolt Indra bring rain Grant all our desires part the sky and make all things [Music] visible part the sky and drink s that opens our mind to the vastness of your [Music] skies [Music] [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 [Music] mahabarata composed in Sanskrit it's the longest poem in the world and for all Indians The Greatest Story Ever Told [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 3,100 BC for Indian people the battle has always marked the Divide between the time of myth and the beginning of real history it's the last time when men and gods walked the Earth together the story of the Rival families the kurus and the 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] 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] 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 it was 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] 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 destroyed part of the city [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 turned on a wheel and it's 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 real history and it was their own over the next 3,000 years Greeks and Huns Turks and Afghans Moguls and British Alexander tamboline bble will all come and fall under India's 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] [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 beginning to 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] 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 are just the surface movements and they make up that deep core of the identity of India and this 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 idea in the world 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] [Applause] a