The Story of India 4: Ages of Gold (2 of 18)

The Story of India

WOOD: And for most Indian people, it's simply the best story in the world.
Like the tale of Troy, it begins with the abduction of a beautiful queen.
The wicked demon king seizes Sita, the faithful wife of Rama, the exiled king of Ayodhya.
The demon king takes Sita back to his island fortress while the distraught Rama sets out to find her, helped by the faithful monkey Hanuman.
Eventually, with Hanuman's help, Rama crosses the sea and rescues Sita after a heroic battle.
After his triumph, Rama returns to reign in the city of Ayodhya and brings in the Golden Age.
The story has bequeathed to Indian culture the ideal of a just rule.
In the modern freedom struggle against the British, Mahatma Gandhi himself invoked the return of the rule of Rama.

In around the year 400, the epic tale told by the poets became fixed in a real place and the myth became history.
It was back in the early 5th century AD, the time of the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, that a powerful North Indian dynasty took the story of Rama and made it their own.
They were called the Guptas.
And the Guptas took a conscious decision to locate the golden city of Rama in a real place, from where they would rule and create their own golden time.
So the old town of Saketa was given a new name and identity.: Ayodhya.
That story is still told by the pilgrim guides on the river bank with a few mythic embellishments! (MAN SPEAKING HINDI) WOOD: So myth became fact.