Discovery channel presents 'The story of India'

Media News

Chennai, April 4, 2008

For over two millennia, India has been at the centre of world history. India is the world’s most ancient surviving civilisation, with an unbroken continuity going back into prehistory. The country is poised to become the next superpower and the reasons lie not just in its present but also in its past. The world’s largest democracy, a nuclear power and a rising economic giant, India is moving at a high-speed into the third millennium. But while doing so, it remains as one of the few civilisations on the face of this earth which is still in touch with her ancient past. But how did India come to be? Who were the first Indians? Can they be traced? How did the world’s first civilisation vanish? These are the big questions which lay at the heart of Discovery Channel’s new six-part series ‘THE STORY OF INDIA’.

Through the course of this landmark series, historian and series’ narrator Michael Wood will embark on an exhilarating journey through India to uncover the sights and sounds, the dazzling achievements and the dramatic history of the world’s oldest, richest and most influential civilisation. In the series, he will look to the present for clues to her past and to the past for clues to her future. This mystical storytelling of India will air on Discovery Channel every Wednesday at 8 pm starting April 16th. The episodes will encore every Sunday at 11 am.

Speaking about the series, Mr. Deepak Shourie, EVP & Managing Director, Discovery Networks India said, “THE STORY OF INDIA is a chronological history of India. It will reveal the wonders of India, the diversity and richness of its people, cultures and landscapes and the intense drama of its past, including some of the most momentous events in world history. Viewers will witness the intense journey of a nation which has over the centuries regenerated itself several times. The series is replete with wondrous revelations in quintessential Discovery style.”

Some of the elements covered in the series

First Indians: Science tells that our ancestors first walked out of Africa some 70,000 years ago, around the shores of the Arabian Sea and down into South India. Driven by chance and necessity, and surely by curiosity, when they came here to India, they must have been overwhelmed by the land’s fertility. So some of them stayed and they were the first Indians. All non-Africans on the planet can trace their descent from those early migrations into India.

First Indians’ DNA found in Tamil Nadu: Geneticists from the University of Madurai tested the DNA of tribal villagers in Tamil Nadu to get a clue about the migrational history. Professor Ramsamy Pitchappan tested a man called Virumandi and in his DNA (Gene - M130) was the marker of the first human migration that took place some 70,000 years ago.

Mantras still recited in Kerala, from times when humans’ speech was not developed: In a village in Kerala, an ancient clan of Brahmins performs a 12-day long religious ritual for the God of Fire. For centuries these mantras have been passed down from father to son, only among Brahmins; exact in every sound. But some of the mantras are in no known language. Only recently, outsiders have been allowed to record and decipher them. To their amazement, they discovered that whole tracts 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 analogue came from the animal kingdom; it was a birdsong. These sounds are, perhaps, tens of thousands of years old passed down from before human speech.

First Civilisation - Harappa: The process of civilisation began in 7,000 BC here in the Indian subcontinent, even earlier than ancient Egypt, with the growth of large villages in the Indus valley. Like the other great ancient civilizations in Iraq, Egypt and China, India’s first cities grew up on a river. The ruins of Harappa stood on the dried up bed of a tributary of the river Indus.

Why did civilisations disappear? Environment and climate are what shape our human story in the long term as we are now discovering to our cost. The Himalayas draw warm air from the south which precipitated in rain, the monsoons. The monsoons made the first Indian civilisation; when they failed, it did too. The key was the shifting and drying up of rivers. Climate change isn’t just happening now, it’s happened in the past. All early settlements just completely disappeared and caused this major shift eastwards into the central part of the Ganges plain. So climate change might have shifted the centre of gravity of Indian history, 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.

Using all the tools available to the historical detective – from DNA to climate science, oral survivals, ancient manuscripts, archaeology and exploration of the living cultures of the subcontinent, the series takes the audience from the tropical heat of South India to the Ganges plain and from Pakistan and the Khyber Pass out to Turkmenistan where dramatic new archaeological discoveries are changing the view of the migrations that have helped make up Indian identity. It will journey through Indian history covering the last centuries BC - the age of the Buddha, the coming of the Greeks and the rule of the emperor Ashoka, one of the greatest figures in world history.

The series will take the audience to the early centuries AD, the time of the Roman Empire in the west. In this period, located at the ‘centre of the world’, India became a great player in the first global economy. As the spice routes and the silk roads opened up, Indian civilization grew enriched by contact and exchange. The series also tells the story of the forgotten empire of the Kushans that ruled India in the first centuries AD: one of the greatest and least known empires in history whose story can only now be told with the recent decipherment of their language.

At the time of the fall of the Roman Empire in the West and the European Dark Ages, India had a series of great flowerings of culture, both in the north and the south. The series shows the audience some of the amazing achievements of medieval India: the discovery of the heliocentric universe, absolute zero and the circumference of the earth; the world’s first large scale wrought iron technology - the Delhi iron pillar and the world’s first sex manual, the Kama Sutra.

Viewers will visit the desert cities of Rajasthan and travel among the fabulous cities of Delhi, Agra and Fathepur Sikri. It also offers a startling new theory about the construction of the Taj Mahal.

The last episode tells how a foreign multinational (the East India Company) thousands of miles away, gradually and almost by chance took power over great swathes of the Indian subcontinent; how after the horrendous shock of the 1857 ‘Mutiny’ the British state took over and turned this supremacy into the Raj, and how the Freedom Movement delivered Independence to India in 1947, albeit a divided India. Home to more than one billion people, India continues to be a land of amazing contrasts: it contains side by side the high-tech brilliance of Bangalore’s Silicon Valley and the archaic splendour of the Kumbh Mela where 25 million pilgrims come to bathe in the sacred river Ganges.

For further information, please contact:

Discovery Networks India

Ruchika Tandon

Tel: +011-41491127

Mob: +98102-02457