After three months spent in Bangalore, I have completed all six episodes ‘The Story of India’ a comprehensive but by no means exhaustive account of India and her people. Narrated and presented by the BBC’s Mike Wood, the documentary exposes viewers to the rich tapestry that is Indian history and culture, North, Central and Southern alike. As a new inhabitant, I found was captivated from beginning to end, but I’m sure that my Indian friends who know their history would still learn something from watching.
The series begins in Kerala, where Wood says that the earliest Indians migrated from Eastern Africa, settling in India’s extreme South more than 70,000 years ago. He takes us to a village where the brahmin families recite mantras so old they are unlike any know language and yet they preserve the earliest human speech forms as they were spoken millennia ago. Adding further evidence to the argument, Wood visits a village in Tamil Nadu where the resident’s DNA contains a marker, M130, that conclusively proves that their ancestors have been living in the same place for over 70,000 years–making all non-Africans in Europe and Asia their descendants. As someone who delighted in the study of prehistoric archeology in college, such information makes me giddy at the possibilities.
Should I live in India another 20 years, I doubt I will have the opportunity to conduct such an exhaustive and exilhirating sojourn, but I comforted by the fact that even in a lifetime, one can only know a tiny sliver of all that is India. I feel fortunate also that the BBC funded such a massive undertaking which has contributed immensely to my understanding of Indian history, mythology and customs, though it is surely no substitute for personal experience and interaction.
Embedded below are all six episodes for your viewing pleasure. While you may not have time to watch all six in a single sitting. I implore you to watch the first 15 minutes of the first episode dealing with prehistoric Indian history. If you are Indian, you are bound to learn something about your own history and if you are non-Indian, you may be shocked what it teaches you about your views on the world.
