01x02 - India- Empire of the Spirit

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This is the largest
gathering of people which has

ever taken place on
earth at any time in history.

It's the Kumbh Mela,
India's biggest religious festival.

By tonight, 15 or maybe 20 million
people will be here.

To bathe at the confluence of
the sacred rivers Jumna and Ganges.

Here in this greatest of all pilgrimage
places, the ashes of Gandhi and Nehru,

the architects of modern India,
were strewn on the waters.

And so too Nehru's
m*rder*d successors,

his daughter Indira, and
in 1991 his grandson Rajiv.

In India, the currents of sacredness run
deep indeed.

Among the millions of ordinary Indians
from all castes and walks of life,

are holy men and women who've
renounced the material world

for a life of austerity and meditation,
one of India's oldest callings.

Here too are followers of
the world's oldest living God,

the creator and destroyer, the
man-woman, the great yogi, Shiva himself.

India was one of the earliest
of the great civilisations,

and it defined the goals of civilised
life very differently from the West.

The West raised individualism, materialism,
rationality, masculinity as its ideals.

India's great tradition
insisted on non -violence,

renunciation, the inner life,
the female as pillars of civilisation.

And through all the triumphs and disasters
of her history, she hung on to that ideal.

An eternal quest to identify humanity
with the whole of creation.

A unity in diversity.

As our troubled century
draws to its close,

a deeper understanding of the
achievements of other civilisations

has become a necessity.

As Mark Twain said here a century ago,

the Indians may seem poor
to we rich Westerners,

but in matters of the spirit
it's we who are the paupers

and they who are the millionaires.

History is full of empires of the sword,

but India alone created
an empire of the spirit.

Our search for India's past begins
in an old British library

in the heart of Calcutta,

once capital of the British Indian Empire.

The British colonised India for 200 years,

but already that time is beginning to feel

like a temporary interruption

in the amazing continuities
of Indian history.

The memorials of that era are
fading now with every monsoon rain,

and a deeper past is reasserting itself,

the India before the Europeans.

India's history was almost unknown to
the outside world till the 18th century,

and then here in the Asiatic Society in
Calcutta the Europeans first discovered

that India's sacred language,
Sanskrit,

the root of all the North Indian dialects,
was akin to Greek and Latin.

The oldest living language.

It had entered India in the second
millennium BC with Aryan invaders,

and the earliest and most revered
Sanskrit literature comes from that time.

Of all the great collection of
Sanskrit sacred texts

known collectively as the Vedas,
the oldest is the Rig Veda.

It comprises about a thousand
archaic chants and hymns,

older even than Homer's Iliad and Odyssey,

preserved over an immense
period of time by oral transmission.

This is the oldest surviving
written text of the Rig Veda,

and it dates only
from the 14th century AD,

but the first hymns in this collection

could have been composed
as early as 2000 BC.

The tale they tell seems to be
one of the migration

of groups of Sanskrit speaking peoples

who called themselves Aryans,
literally the noble ones,

a migration into northern India.

It suggests that they found there
when they arrived

a civilisation which was already
thriving with cities and towns and forts

rich in cattle and treasure
with a dark-skinned population

who contrasted with the light
complexion of northerners, the Aryans.

The Rig Veda implies a long period of
interaction between the two cultures,

but it also certainly suggests

that in places the Aryans destroyed the
towns and cities of the native population,

subdued them and
carved up their land for settlement.

The location of these contacts and battles
is made quite clear in the poems.

It's that historical battleground extending
from the Kabul River in Afghanistan

through the Khyber Pass down into
what is now Pakistan and into the Punjab.

The area called by the Aryans Sabtasindaba,

the seven rivers, the greatest
of which was the Indus.

From the very beginning, rivers
were sacred to Indian culture,

literally the source of life,

and the first Indian cities grew up
on the rich alluvial soil

left by the annual
flooding of the Indus.

In the 1920s, the clues in the Rig Veda
led archaeologists here

to the burning plane of Sindh
in what is now the Pakistan,

to find a hitherto unknown
and unsuspected civilization.

A forgotten empire which had traded
with Babylon and Ur of the Chaldees.

During Egypt's pyramid age, Mahenjo Daro
had been the biggest city on earth

and center of the most
widespread civilization.

But the language spoken here
is still undeciphered.

It's the greatest mystery in archaeology,

and why the city died is still not known.

Yet all over Mahenjo Daro are clues
which point to direct connections

between this past and the present day.

In the middle of town was
a great brick-lined bath,

recalling the central importance
of ritual bathing in today's India.

Here, perhaps, was a priest or guru,
eyes narrowed in meditation.

On merchant seals were
sacred trees and animals

still characteristic of India today.

And here, surrounded by wild beasts
sitting lotus fashion,

the ancestor of the great Yogi Shiva
himself, the oldest god in the world.

Those living links with the deep past

point our search for India's roots
to the village.

This is Kasambi on the Jumna River
south of Delhi.

The village has been the basis of Indian
life for thousands of years.

Two-thirds of her population of 850
million still live in places like this.

And absorbing the invasions
of Aryans, Muslims and British,

it was the village which preserved
the essential values of Indian culture.

The key to those values
is the deep-rooted belief

that all life is sacred.

In the overfed and secular west,

the idea of the sacred calf
may be meaningless.

But here, for poor people,

it pulls loads, gives milk,
butter, fuel, manure.

And to k*ll it is literally sacrilege.

The basic beliefs of Hinduism reinforce
this idea of the connectedness of life.

At a village shrine, one of the
highest priestly caste

offers a libation
and a Sanskrit prayer.

This black stone icon, descended from
the phallic stones of Mahenjo Daro,

is the mark of the god Shiva,
a symbol of the life force.

This well is used by the lowest caste,
the untouchables, who do the dirtiest jobs.

The caste system is an elaborate
graded form of social segregation

based on what job you do.

But it may have begun with colour,
a kind of apartheid,

keeping the light-skinned Aryan invaders

separate from the conquered,
darker-skinned native peoples.

In the first millennium BC, the fusion of
the Aryan newcomers and the older culture

bore fruit in some of the greatest
spiritual works of humanity.

And amazingly, these ancient poems
are still the most popular diet

for mass audiences in India today.

Especially the Mahabharata.

Today's episode is virtually the Indian
gospel, the Gita.

It is obsession with the senses and the
material life, says the divine Krishna,

which is the ruin of reason and
will destroy humanity itself.

India's conscience is perhaps
her greatest gift to the world.

Around 500 BC, city life revived
in the Ganges Valley,

and a renaissance took place as
glorious as the age of Pericles in Greece.

At its centre was Banaras.

For the pilgrims bathing here on the
morning of Shiva's festival day,

Shivaratri, the city of Shiva is beyond
time and history, a place of redemption.

Every pious Hindu hopes
to come here once in a lifetime

to bathe in Mother Ganges.

On the riverbank, pilgrim guides
tell of the deeds of Shiva on earth,

to religious tourists from all over India.

As early as the first millennium BC,

the Mahabharata visualised India as one
motherland united through pilgrimage.

And this vast and continuous
recirculation of money,

people and ideas is what
has given India the unity

which it never had in politics
until the British came.

These men are typical of
the thousands here today,

poor agricultural labourers
from a village near Kasambi.

In the last few days they travelled
by bus a 2,000 mile round trip,

visiting shrines high
up into the Himalayas.

They've spent their entire
savings for the year.

We do it, they say simply,
because our ancestors did it.

The rich are here too.

This is the Maharaja of Banaras.

He's revered by many as the living
representative of Shiva on earth.

At the heart of the sacred city is a
labyrinth of narrow alleys.

In the very centre is a small
Shiva temple viewed by the pilgrims

as the most sacred in India.

It's the goal of everyone tonight,
bearing their pots of Gange's water.

In the inner sanctum,
the simply black stone

is submerged with
offerings of milk and flowers.

These ancient rituals connect
the worshippers with their deity,

but also their history, their myths
and their deepest racial memories.

Western civilisation saw one God
who stood outside his creation.

India saw numberless aspects of
the same divinity, unity and diversity.

Each was a vision deeply rooted

in the distinctive character
of its own civilisation.

Four miles away from the gaudy
Tumalt of Banaras,

in about 500 BC,

a young Indian prince preached a sermon
which would change the world.

His name was Gautam, and
we know him as the Buddha.

I have reached the conviction, he said,

that human suffering
must be comprehended.

The Buddha's answer to the perennial
question was simple and typically Indian.

It is attachment to the senses
and to material desires, he said,

which is the root of
all human unhappiness.

Get rid of those desires and
you'll find the path to salvation.

The period of the Buddha's lifetime,
from the 6th to the 5th century BC,

has been called the Axis Age,

because so many of the great thinkers in
world history were alive at the same time.

The Buddha and Mahavira in India,

Pythagoras and the
early Greek philosophers,

the greatest of the Old
Testament prophets like Isaiah,

Confucius, Lao Tzu
and the Taoists in China,

and even some have
thought Zoroaster in Persia.

It's extraordinary to think

that many of those people could
actually have met each other.

It suggests that the ancient world,

which had emerged
from the first civilizations

of Iraq and Egypt, China and India,

was undergoing a crisis of spirit,
but also a crisis of opportunity.

Fundamental questions were
being asked about the nature of God,

about the meaningfulness of life on earth,

and about the basis of the
authority for kings and states.

And at the heart of that, the question
which still plagues governments

even today in the United
States and the Soviet Union,

how do you persuade your
citizens to act as moral beings?

How do you persuade them to be good?

The different ways in which
those civilizations attempted

to come to terms with these questions
still shape them and us today.

The Near East took the path
of monotheism, which would

become central to the ideology
of the West as well as Islam.

China, the Confucian
conception of the individual,

the family, and the state in a
perfectable moral order on earth.

Whereas in India, the great
tradition asserted that this

earthly material life is simply illusion,

and that true enlightenment
can only come by forsaking it,

the absolute opposite
of the Western ideology.

And so the social and economic
character of these great cultural blocks

is still shaped by that
revolutionary epoch even today.

The Khyber Pass on the northwest frontier,
a battleground for millennia.

Here the Aryans had entered India,
the first great wave of invaders.

And in 326 BC,

Alexander the Great's armies
poured across the Khyber into India,

the first great clash
between east and west.

But only decades later, an Indian Buddhist
emperor set up inscriptions here in the

Khyber, recording the first attempt to
impose a political unity on India.

This was the Mauryan empire,
and the emperor, the great Ashoka.

Little known outside his own country,

Ashoka was one of the most
remarkable people in world history.

His story can be pieced
together in his own words

from inscriptions on stone columns,

like this one at Kasambi,

still today an object of veneration
for Buddhist pilgrims.

It was after a victorious w*r in which
he k*lled a hundred thousand people

that Ashoka became
convinced that w*r was wrong.

Then he developed the idea
which would echo across the ages

right down to Mahatma
Gandhi, Ahimsa, non-violence.

From now on he said, I will try to conquer
by right conduct alone.

And then, all across India,
columns like this were set up

literally as pillars of morality
in order to explain

what this doctrine of right
conduct, Dharma, actually meant.

Remarkably, it was not based on religion.

It was a secular ideal of
the dignity of human beings

and the humanistic
possibilities of civic morality.

And in the clauses on these
inscriptions appear all those words

which modern politicians find
so difficult to pronounce today.

Compassion, tolerance, gentleness,
truthfulness,

the clauses on non-violence
of dual meat eating

and preserve a whole range of species
from the parrot to the rhinoceros.

Forests, Ashoka says, with prophetic force,

must not be burned uselessly.

In all this, and especially the ecology
and the conservation measures,

Ashoka sounds astonishingly modern
to us today, perhaps misleadingly so.

As he does in his wide-ranging
social and welfare legislation.

But so too in that bane of our time

massive state intervention
with an army of spies

and thought police to check
up on what people were doing.

It sounds intolerable to us today,

and no doubt it was to
some people at the time too.

But Ashoka is an extraordinary product

of that extraordinary age,
the Axis age.

Turning from the authority
of religion and magic

to that of reason and
morality as a basis for politics.

And however imperfectly
he tried to execute it,

his idea of dharma,
of right conduct,

was one of the great ideas
of human history.

To set beside Greek democracy,

the American Bill of Rights,
the communist manifesto.

And as one stands with the late


one might be forgiven for thinking

that this was an idea
whose time has almost come.

Ashoka's ideals had responded
to a deep current in Indian culture.

Here in the southwest Kerala has
long been a cosmopolitan place,

Chinese fishing nets lining its lagoons.

From the first century AD, Mediterranean
merchants drawn by its wealth

flocked here on the monsoon winds,

as in later times did Vasco de Gama
and the Chinese Admiral Zheng He.

From ports like this, Cochin,

Arab traders bore some of India's greatest
scientific discoveries to the west,

including her most brilliant invention,
the mathematical system we all use today.

But the real motive for the trade
was spice.

Here in Cochin, for centuries,

foreign merchants bought the famed
spices of the Malabar Coast,

especially pepper and ginger,
which are both words from South India.

Such contacts help breed an
outward-looking and tolerant society,

as it still is.

Sail up the little rivers and creeks
in the Cochin backwaters,

and you'll come across
communities which embody

the Indian idea of
civilization as pluralism.

Tradition says the Jews came to this
village from Iraq in the 6th century BC.

Theirs must be one of the oldest and
loveliest synagogues in the world.

They're only one family now, carefully
maintaining the rights as best they can.

But recently local girls have
converted to marry into the family,

so they still hope their
traditions will be passed on.

The Syrian Christians claim their church
was founded by the Apostle Thomas himself.

Islam, meanwhile, came by sea
in the 7th century with Arab traders,

peacefully, not as elsewhere
by w*r and conquest.

So here today in Cendamangalam,

Hindu, Christian, Muslim
and Jew live side by side.

All these people of different
faiths, says Krishna in the Gita,

whatever form of worship they
choose to fulfill their desires,

ultimately their worship
comes back to the same source.

In the north, the impact of Islam
was very different.

India is full of riches, wrote
the Muslim historian Al-Biruni,

entirely beautiful and delightful.

And as its people are
mainly infidels and idolaters,

it is right by order of God
for us to conquer them.

Within a few decades
of the Prophet's death,

Islam had swept westwards to Spain
and eastwards to the Indus Valley.

Eventually Muslim attacks shattered
the old Hindu kingdoms of the north.

Vanaras itself fell in 1194,

and in the heart of the city
you can still see

what results from asserting by force
the unique truth of one faith over another.

Mosques built out of
the ruins of Hindu temples

smashed Hindu walls sticking out
of the back of a Muslim prayer hall.

Religion itself is outraged,
said Mahatma Gandhi,

when outrage is done in its name.

These tragedies initiated
a long and tortuous relationship

between Hindu and Muslim,

which both enriched India

and even in our own time
has threatened to tear it apart.

In Vanaras, the Muslims became the
mainstay of the city's economy.

The thousands of silkweavers,
like Subhan Ali and his sons

with their tiny shops and
hand looms, are all Muslim.

It was here in the 15th century
that the poor weaver Kabir

preached the brotherhood
of Hindu and Muslim.

But in 1991, a rising tide
of Hindu fundamentalism

saw their looms smashed, saris
burned, and livelihoods ruined.

As India's ideal of unity and diversity

went through a new ordeal of fire.

A mixed Hindu and Muslim culture
arose in the north.

And in the 16th century,

there was yet another brilliant flowering
of Indian civilization, the Mughals.

The Mughal Empire created
an art and architecture

which still defines our
popular image of India today,

in its flamboyant mixture of
Hindu, Persian and Muslim.

This is Fatipur Sikri, founded in 1569
near Agra by Akbar the Great.

Akbar commissioned a great translation
of the Mahabharata into Persian,

along with these exquisite paintings.

He came to understand
that the only way to rule India,

indeed any civilization,
is with tolerance and pluralism,

and increasingly he was drawn to
the deepest currents in Indian thought.

The most fascinating
aspect of Akbar's career,

and surely the one that's
most relevant to us today,

was his attempt to find a synthesis
of all the religions in his empire.

It could only ever have
happened, one imagines,

in a heady religious
climate of India.

And it's all the more remarkable,
because Akbar

was brought up a devout Muslim,
and he was illiterate.

His tutors unanimously
condemned him as a bad pupil.

But, impressed by the terrible evils

which were unleashed
by religious intolerance,

and perhaps motivated
by political considerations,

Akbar summoned holy men
from the Hindus and the Jains,

the Christians and the Jews,
the Zoroastrians,

even Mandians from Persia,
along with Sunni and Shia Muslims.

And out of their discussions,

he attempted to formulate
a simple belief in God,

a doctrine of right conduct
which strangely echoes Ashoka,

even though Akbar knew nothing
of him, nor it seems of Buddhism.

Akbar was even prepared to acknowledge

the rightness of the
case for vegetarianism.

Although it was a good meat-eating mogul,

that was one aspect that
he couldn't fulfill in his personal life.

One of his friends at court said
that Akbar had the one quality

which makes a ruler truly great,

namely the capacity to meet people
of whatever rank or whatever religion,

with the same eye of favour.

His tolerance would be remarkable
even today, I think.

But in the 16th century,
Western Europe, for example,

was torn apart by religious wars,

with unspeakable cruelties being
done to people in the name of God.

Akbar's noble ideals were, of course,
doomed to failure.

But his insight into the Indian
predicament was not lost

on Pandit Nehru in the 1940s,
nor on Mahatma Gandhi,

who insisted that all religions are true.

Here, in Fatibul Sikri,
at the gate of victory,

this great son of a great Muslim
dynasty left as this epitaph.

Jesus, peace beyond him, said this,

the world is a bridge, cross it,
but build no house upon it.

The world endures for but an hour,
spend it in devotion, the rest is unseen.

Akbar's city of dreams was deserted
because of lack of water.

Today, Fatibul Sikri lies high and dry
on its ridge near Agrae.

His empire had created a unified state,

giving the same rights to Muslim and Hindu.

An empire of the sword had succumbed
to the empire of the spirit.

Now it has become clear to me,
Akbar wrote.

But in our troubled world,
so full of contradictions,

it cannot be wisdom to assert the
unique truth of one faith over another.

The wise person makes justice his guide
and learns from all.

Perhaps in this way,
the door may be opened again,

whose key has been lost.

In the far south of India, a verdant
and fecund land of temples,

the Tamils escaped the full Muslim impact,

and here the ancient
Hindu vision of unity survived.

From ancient times, the Tamil shore was
frequented by Greek and Roman traders.

Here, said their poets, beautiful
great ships of the Greeks,

bearing gold, came splashing on the
white foam to return laden with spices.

And in their turn, the Tamils
would later spread Hindu culture

as far as Java and Cambodia.

The Tamils left brilliant legacies
in poetry, painting and sculpture,

but their finest creations were in bronze.

Among their masterpieces
is this image of Shiva.

The wild god of prehistory is here
transformed by the Tamil sensibility

into a sinuous and sensuous
cowherd with a turban of snakes.

This was cast in one piece in 1011,



There'd been nothing like it
since the ancient Greeks.

But perhaps the most
beautiful of all Tamil bronzes

is this portrayal of the dual nature of
divinity, male and female, in one body.

This is the soft girl,
said the Tamil poet,

his body the colour of sea coral,

and hers the glow of fire,
united in their essence.

The cultural centre of the Tamils
from ancient Greek times was Madare,

the splendid temple with its tall towers,
as their poets sang.

The city where no temple stands,
they thought, was no city

but a mere wilderness.

And as if to prove their point,

they created some of the most

extraordinary religious buildings
on the planet.

The Tamils exemplify India's search
for unity and diversity.

They're separate from the north
by race and language.

Their temples strongholds of loyalty

to their own region and
culture and local deities.

Even their architecture is a testimony

to teeming multiplicity of gods,
of imagination itself.

And yet, Tamil culture
is united to Mother India

through the search for the eternal Dharma,

the law of human righteousness,

and the universal vision
of human existence,

which the great tradition
of India has always sought.

The Tamils have also remained loyal to
India's primordial maternal roots.

The chief deity here in Madare
is the great goddess,

the female principal in creation,

long supplanted in the west
by the male gods of monotheism.

And here, perhaps, lies the solution to
the unsolved mystery of Mahenjo-daro

and the Indus cities.

For it may be that
the dark-skinned Tamils

are the distant descendants
of that civilization.

And in their ancient rituals,
at however great a distance,

there is a still living connection.

Once a year, the image of the goddess
is taken to the banks of a sacred lake

to celebrate her marriage to Shiva.

There, she and her consort are serenaded
with haunting hymns in Tamil.

Perhaps the living descendant
of the language of the Indus cities.

The great goddess, the Indians say,
is the cause of all.

She is peace, all forms of faith,
ever in all things,

and pervading all creation.

And now, the last and perhaps most
fateful invasion of India took place.

Soon, she could be depicted
as a naked black female,

submissively offering
her riches to Britannia.

India entered the cataclysmic
epoch which has left

few native cultures of the world intact.

The era of colonialism.

The natural resources of India
were plundered.

Her trees and animals, which Ashoka
had protected two thousand years before,

were thoughtlessly consumed.

The Indians, bearers of
the world's oldest civilization,

were treated like children

by people who saw themselves
as the superior race.

In fantastical costumes
and invented ceremonies,

the rulers of a small island
five thousand miles away

glorified themselves.

How easy it is to forget that there was
an India before the British came,

which is still there now they've gone.

And for all the
achievements of the British,

their most fateful legacy was
to open up India

irrevocably to a wider world.

Our search has brought us back
finally to Allahabad

and to the family house of the Nehru's.

In this room, Indian Democrats met

to discuss what India's
future paths should be.

Their hopes and fears have been echoed
time and again in our modern world.

How far should
the Western model be followed?

Capitalism, democracy, Western science.

How far can indigenous traditions work
as the basis of a modern state?

Nehru, the first prime minister, thought
European models were the way forward

and came to believe in
a complete break with the ancient past.

His friend Mahatma Gandhi,
whose bedroom this is,

had faith in India's own path,

in self-cultivation, in local economies
and village democracy.

In Ashoka's principle of non-violence.

For him, the greatest legacy
any civilization has

is simply itself.

The modern state of India
conceived and argued over

only half a century ago
in this house.

In fact, rests on a great tradition
extending back thousands of years

with an amazing cultural continuity

which has reasserted itself
time and time again.

And which brings the ideals of
the Buddha and Ashoka and Akbar

converging on this house
like thought lines.

India has been prodigiously
gifted and creative

in every field of human endeavour.

If we were to choose
one characteristic legacy,

and it would be a Western choice,
then perhaps

it is that India placed the spiritual quest

at the centre of life in the way
that no other civilization did.

But India also had a
deep-rooted secular tradition

extending back
as far as the time of Ashoka.

And this tradition deeply impressed
Nehru and his friends

as they attempted to frame a new
constitution for their new secular state.

They were also inspired, as we can
see from the books on Nehru's shelves,

by the egalitarian tradition
developed in the West

through the revolutions in England
and America and France and Russia.

Although some of those ideals
were at odds with the great tradition,

both those great currents went
into the modern state of India.

Which way the great tradition will go in
the 21st century, history cannot tell us.

But it's worth recording that
in the 1990s,

the greatest audiences on television
in India still came to watch the Gita,

the most ancient and most
authentic tradition of life in India,

with its assertion
that moral enlightenment

is the goal of every citizen in life.

And here too, in the
Nehru house in Allahabad,

a thumbed, boyhood copy of the Gita

lay at Nehru's bedside
from childhood to old age.

So perhaps it is still true,

at the end of the 20th century,
true for nations as well as people,

that we may know our
ends by our beginnings.

Outside the Nehru house,
the cl*max of the Kumbh Mela has arrived.

The greatest gathering of people
ever seen on earth

are waiting for dawn.

When led by the naked renancers of this
world, they will bathe in the sacred river.

In Mother Ganges, the symbol
of India's age-long civilization.