Video Details

The Story of India

Grade Levels:	9 - 13+
Core Subject(s):	Science
Website:	http://www.uen.org/emedia
Usage rights:	Download and retain personal copies in perpetuity.

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Episodes:

• The Story of India: Episode 01 Beginnings

  The first episode looks at identity and the roots of India's famous "unity in diversity". 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 Michael Wood takes us 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 our view of the migrations that have helped make up Indian identity.

  Length:	00:55:07

• The Story of India: Episode 02 The Power of Ideas

  The second episode of Michael Wood's journey through Indian history covers the last centuries BCE 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. Beginning with incredible images of a Jain festival that takes place once every twelve years, Wood sees the Buddha as India's first protester, follows the invasion of India by Alexander the Great and ends with the birth of the first great Indian empire.

  Length:	00:55:11

• The Story of India: Episode 03 Spice Routes & Silk Roads

  The next episode in the story of India takes us to the early centuries CE, the time of the Roman Empire in the west, and to "the happiest time in the history of the world" as the historian Edward Gibbon put it. In this period, located at the "center of 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. Beginning in Kerala, Michael Wood journeys on an old wooden sailing boat plying its trade from South India to the Gulf, and tells how the spice trade with Rome opened India up to the world as well as giving us a recipe for dormouse stuffed with peppercorns!

  Length:	00:55:02

• The Story of India: Episode 04 Ages of Gold

  Episode Four is the story of India in the Middle Ages. 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. In this episode Michael Wood shows us some of the amazing achievements of medieval India: In astronomy they discovered the heliocentric universe, zero and the circumference of the earth. They mastered the world's first large scale wrought iron technology the Delhi iron pillar, and their courtly culture was the setting the world's first sex manual, the Kama Sutra.

  Length:	00:55:09

• The Story of India: Episode 05 The Meeting of Two Oceans

  The fifth episode of the story of India takes us to the time of the Renaissance in Europe, when India was the richest, most populous civilization in the world. We visit the desert cities of Rajasthan and travel among the fabulous Mughal cities of Delhi, Agra and Fatepur Sikri. At the Taj Mahal just voted one of the new Seven Wonders of the World by 100 million voters worldwide Wood demolishes an old myth about the Taj and offers a startling new theory about its construction.

  Length:	00:55:08

• The Story of India: Episode 06 Freedom

  This 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, the jewel in the crown of the greatest empire the world had ever seen; and how the Freedom Movement delivered Independence to India in 1947, albeit a divided India. The series ends by acknowledging the extraordinary achievements of Indian democracy over sixty years and flags India's predicted rise to be the largest country and the second largest (or even the largest) economy in the world in the next three decades.

  Length:	00:00:55

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