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Review
The past comes alive
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Americans are beginning to get the complexities of real India…
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In love with the land and the people: Michael Wood on location...
Over the decades, American stereotypes of India have changed: it used to be the land of snakes and tigers, Mahatma Gandhi and the Taj Mahal. Now it is the world’s biggest democracy, a rising economic power, known for its IT industry, or, for th
e Mumbai attacks. Apart from that, there is not much Americans know about India. So, last month’s airing of PBS’s colourful six-part TV series, “The Story of India”, was long overdue. Made by popular British historian Michael Wood, known here for his “Great Railway Journeys” which took arm-chair travellers on international train rides, the films have been universally acclaimed as “timely,” “wondrously informative,” “visually dazzling,” “history on location”.
“Beginnings”, the documentary’s first part, offers a revelation: using DNA and climate science, ancient manuscripts, oral tales and elaborate graphics, Wood shows how 10,000 years ago, African migrations brought the first settlers to south India. From there on, it’s a dizzying ride as Wood, youthfully handsome at 60, criss-crosses the country with unflagging energy and enthusiasm. Leaving Kerala’s backwaters, he takes us through the ruins of Harappa and Mohenjodaro — both more impressive in aerially filmed vistas than onsite in Pakistan. Discussing the Aryan conquest, Wood flies through Peshawar, where he searches for the mythic soma, over to Turkmenistan where a Russian dig bares a civilisation contemporaneous with the Aryans’. Wood dwells lovingly on the Rig Veda and especially on Sanskrit which he claims came from Turkey, then engendered Indo-European languages.
The second part (“The Power of Ideas”) zeroes in on the Buddha, “India’s first and greatest protester”, much loved in America. Wood talks to the Dalai Lama, visits Bodhgaya, and Kushinagar where Shakyamuni died. He marvels at Chandragupta Maurya, the first to consolidate India into a nation, who ended by abdicating all to follow the spiritual path. His grandson Ashoka’s life and achievements are given their full due. Ashoka’s pacifism, his edicts and stupas, the decoding of their ancient scripts, all fascinate Wood.
Highly selective
By necessity, a TV documentary cannot take in every topic, it has to be highly selective. Wood focuses on history’s high points, ancient figures that stand out, and his own special interests. Thus, he revisits Hastinapur and the court of Tanjore, highlights Kanishka and Raja Raja, compares Sanskrit with Greek and Latin. He talks to experts and ordinary folks, illustrates his film with Bollywood’s (“Ashoka,” “Lagaan,” “Mughal-e-Azam”), folk theatre (“Ram Leela”, “Krishna Leela”), ancient works (“Kama Sutra”), then fast paces it all to hold viewers’ attention.
Throughout, he uses meaningful comparisons to contextualise Indian history by relating it to what would be familiar to Westerners. Thus, instead of cataloguing India’s achievements with meaningless dry dates, he showcases them: he compares Rama to King Arthur, relates events in India to Europe’s landmark achievements with allusions to Hadrian’s Rome or Britain’s Stonehenge. He informs viewers that the zero was invented in India, that Indian astronomers knew that the earth rotated around the sun and calculated its circumference precisely.
Talking about the Kushans, Wood calls the Silk Road “a precursor to globalisation”. This is history packaged for modern viewers, not a dull academic turn-off. The liberal choices an Englishman makes are enlightening: he admires Chandragupta Maurya for his nation-building, Ashoka for his philanthropy and pacificism, Kanishka for empire creation (from Afghanistan to the Bay of Bengal), and Akbar for his visionary secularism and patronage of arts. These great emperors built the nation long before the coming of the British who gave India a sense of itself. Wood visits Calcutta’s Asiatic Library, admiring the painstaking documentation of his forebears but refuses to gloss over the evils of colonialism: the 1857 Mutiny and Jalianwalla Bagh incriminate the British.
And how to visually embody those glories of times past? Wood films modern India, offering his “dear ordinary viewer” a painless travelogue through colourful city streets filled with bright-eyed brown faces and the sensory riot that is India. He weaves through crowds, talking, explaining, interacting. In a Tamil Nadu village, he sits on the floor to eat off a banana leaf; in a Lucknow home, he savours the “best biryani”. He reaches through the present into the past: this living connection of today’s Indians with their ancestors, their age-old traditions and rituals most mesmerises Wood — and the West. Indians take it for granted but modernisation has robbed the West of such vital connections to its heritage. Wood cherishes rootedness and sees it surviving in India. For Americans, too, roots are precious: long lost, they can only be yearned for. Wood brings India’s unique legacy home to nostalgic Americans — it is not the economy, it is their rich past that Indians live and breathe.
VIBHUTI PATEL
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