The Story of India 1: Beginnings (1 of 22)

The Story of India

Sixty years ago, India threw off the chains of the British Empire and became a free nation.
And now, the world's largest democracy is rushing headlong into the future.
As the brief heyday of the West draws to a close, one of the greatest players in history is rising again.
India has seen the ebb and flow of huge events since the beginning of history.
Its tale is one of incredible drama and the biggest ideas.
It 's a place whose children will grow up in a global superpower, and yet still know what it means to belong to an ancient civilisation.
This is the story of a land where all human pasts are still alive, a 10,000 year epic that continues today.

The story of India.
In the tale of life on Earth, the human story is brief.
A few hundred generations cover humanity's attempts to create order, beauty and happiness on the face of the Earth.
The beginnings to most of us are lost in time, beyond memory.
Only India has preserved the unbroken thread of the human story that binds us all.
According to the oldest Indian myths, the first humans came from a golden egg laid by the king of the gods in the churning of the cosmic ocean.
Modern science, of course, works in a less poetic vein, but no less thrilling to the imagination.
For what science tells us is that our ancestors first walked out of Africa only 70 or 80,000 years ago, round the shores of the Arabian Sea and down into South India.