Wood - The Story of India

CONTENTS

ONE
ORIGINS AND IDENTITY

TWO
THE POWER OF IDEAS

THREE
THE GROWTH OF CIVILIZATION

FOUR
MEDIEVAL INDIA: AGE OF GOLD AND IRON

FIVE
THE RULE OF REASON: THE GREAT MUGHULS

SIX
FREEDOM AND LIBERATION

About the Author

For more than 20 years, historian and broadcaster Michael Wood has made compelling journeys into the past, which have brought history alive for a generation of readers and viewers. He is the author of several highly praised books on English history including In Search of the Dark Ages, The Domesday Quest, In Search of England and In Search of Shakespeare. He has over 80 documentary films to his name, among them Art of the Western World, Legacy, In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great, Conquistadors and In Search of Myths and Heroes.

Michael was born in Manchester and educated at Manchester Grammar School and Oriel College Oxford, where he did postgraduate research in Anglo-Saxon history. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

About the Book

In The Story of India, Michael Wood weaves a spellbinding narrative out of the 10,000-year history of the subcontinent. Home today to more than a fifth of the worlds population, India gave birth to the oldest and most influential civilization on Earth, to four world religions and the the worlds largest democracy.

Now, as India bids to become a global economic giant, Michael sets out on an epic journey across this vibrant country to trace the roots of Indias present in the incredible riches of her past. The Story of India is a magical mixture of history and travelogue, and an unforgettable portrait of India past, present and future.

With love to Jyoti and Minakshi
Nagaratinam, Tatta, Punnidah, Shanti,
Chitra, Akila, Kartik and Sivakumar,
Lakshmi Vishwanathan and Sushila Ravindranath

INTRODUCTION

THIS BOOK HAS COME OUT of a long attachment to India an attachment filled with deep respect and admiration, but most of all love for India and its cultures. I have made twenty or thirty journeys to the subcontinent during the last three decades, and feel that in some ways my life has become enmeshed with India. Those journeys have so often made me think what a great privilege it is to be welcomed into another culture and to spend time in it, especially one so rich and diverse and perennially illuminating. My wife and I fell in love in India and were married there; our children have Indian names. We have travelled together in India as a family, and some of our most vivid memories are associated with the children when they were young: celebrating Pongal, the spring festival in the traditional household of Tamil friends; travelling the south by local bus to visit the old shrines of the Cavery delta; or, most memorably perhaps, staying with friends in a tent in the middle of the Kumbh Mela of 2001, the greatest human gathering on Earth not to mention escaping afterwards to semolina pudding and fruit cake at our favourite little Parsee hotel in Allahabad.

But this is also a book by a historian. I have been travelling the world for forty years, most of that time working as a historian, writing books and making films, nearly a hundred of them, on travel, history and adventure (sometimes, as when we followed in the steps of Alexander over the Hindu Kush, all three at once). I have filmed with traditional civilizations in the Americas and Africa, in the great Old World civilizations of Iraq, Egypt, Iran and China, and have been lucky enough to see at first hand the incredible beauty, richness and diversity of human life on Earth. If there is a uniting theme in these experiences, it is the continuance of the past in our present. It is almost a truism that we live in a time when human identities civilizations, cultures, tribes, individuals are being erased everywhere across the globe; identities built up often over thousands of years and lost in just a few generations. When you travel you see, no less than with the environment, landscapes, climates and species, that modernity and globalization are rubbing out human differences too, the intricate web of languages, customs, music and stories that makes us who we are. We may be the last generation to see many of these things still alive. But it seems to me that nowhere on Earth can you find all human histories, from the Stone Age to the global village, still thriving, as you can in India. And that is the big story told in this book.

India became a free nation only sixty years ago, but in a real sense it has existed for thousands of years. The story of India is a tale of incredible drama, great inventions, enormous diversity, phenomenal creativity and the very biggest ideas. But it is also the history of one of the worlds emerging powers. Today the population of the subcontinent as a whole India, Pakistan and Bangladesh is currently 1.5 billion, more than a fifth of all the worlds people, and India itself will soon overtake China as the worlds most populous country. India has twenty-two official languages (including English), and 400 smaller tongues and dialects: as a medieval Indian writer noted proudly, the people of Asia, the Mongols, the Turks and the Arabs get tongue-tied speaking our Indian languages, but we Indians can speak any language of the world as easily as a shepherd tends his sheep. India, no doubt, has always been polylingual. It has also always been pluralist: its great regional cultures are civilizations in themselves (Tamil alone, to give one example, has a literature going back to the third century BC richer and older than that of most western European nations). And that pluralism and diversity imbue everything from large to small. Indian society is made up of nearly 5000 castes and communities, each with its own rules, customs and stories. India gave birth to four world religions, and, along with its legendary 33 million gods, has a bewildering plethora of sects and sub-sects. It is also the second largest Muslim country on Earth, and the subcontinent as a whole has half of all Muslims in the world. India welcomed Christianity long before Europe embraced it, and has welcomed adherents of many other faiths, including Jews and Parsees (the Zoroastrians of Iran), as refugees from persecution.

And now, as the brief hegemony of the West is coming to an end, India, with all this amazing diversity, is rising again. Historical economists conjecture that Indias GDP was the largest in the world until around 1500, when it was overtaken by China, only for both to be eclipsed in the age of the European empires when the centre of history shifted away from the landmass of Asia to the western European seaboard, transformed by the wealth of the New World. By 1900 both China and India had sunk to generating a tiny percentage of the worlds wealth (in Indias case, less than 3 per cent). For the first forty-five years after Independence in 1947, the Indian government followed a protectionist policy, loyal to the ideals of its founders, liberal socialists, but also Gandhians, espousing self-sufficiency, non-alignment and non-violence. Only in the last fifteen years has India followed Chinas lead in terms of growth. The chief factor in todays global world is sheer population, but mastery of information technology, skill in mathematics, and technical and linguistic skills are all playing their part, along with the widespread use of English as a lingua franca, and the size, spread and influence of the Indian diaspora. Leading financial analysts now predict that on present trends Indias GDP will overtake that of the USA in the late 2030s. The twenty-first century, then, is seeing the history of the great ancient civilizations of Asia return to centre stage.