The Story of India 4: Ages of Gold (1 of 18)

The Story of India

All societies in human history, I suppose, have imagined a Golden Age, a past time when people lived in peace and plenty, when the rulers were just and when the division between sacred time and profane time had not yet happened.
But here in India, above all countries, that idea has been extraordinarily tenacious and powerful, right down to today.
But is there a history behind such dreams?
This is a journey back to the Golden Age, real and imagined.
WOOD: In The Story of India we've reached the year 400, the time of the fall of Rome and the Dark Ages in the West.
But here in India, great kingdoms rose then in the north and the south, and in modern times this has come to be seen as a Golden Age.

And if one story is at the centre of that idea, it's the tale of Rama, the god who came down to Earth as a king, who defeated evil and ruled with justice.
It 's a tale known and loved by all Indians.
There are said to be 300 versions of the Rama story in more than 20 different Indian languages.
In the days of the Raj, the British called the Rama stories and plays the 'Bible of India'.
If you didn't know them, they said, you couldn't know the people.
Nor would you understand the powerful driving idea behind the epic tale.
That whether king or commoner, you should live in virtue.: dharma.
It 's kind of wonderfully smoky and mysterious, isn't it?
Gods in glittering costumes standing among the trees and a vast audience all sitting round.
We're on the next to the last day of 31days of performance of the plays of the story of Rama.