Michael Wood is the writer and presenter of many acclaimed TV series. His The Story of India has been a hit worldwide and is now on Discovery India. In an email interview, he talks of his travels and his idea of India
Michael wood is a historian. It’s just that he is a historian who is hopelessly in love with India. So when a stranger on a slow train to Ajmer told him—after regaling him with tales of Rajputs and Mughals, sieges and battles—that if he really wanted to see something, “you should go south, to Madurai”, he did exactly that. Two decades later, Wood is glad he took the stranger seriously. His The Story of India, which is into its rerun on Discovery India, tells the story of a 10,000 year-old country we barely knew.

Wood tells us history as if it were a story, a seamless narrative of the oldest and most influential civilisation on earth. The story of the first human migration out of Africa, the story of how climate change wiped out the Indus Valley civilisation, the story of Buddha and his ideas, emperor Asoka as India’s earliest known secularist and environmentalist, the forgotten port city of Muziris in Kerala, the Silk Route, the coming of Islam, ending with the freedom struggle and Nehru’s last testament. It’s a story he lived with his wife Rebecca—who produced the series—and their two children as they lived in a tent during the Kumbh mela in Allahabad, took a “Murugan videobus pilgrimage” down to Kanyakumari (the subject of his book A Smile of Murugan, now reissued as A South Indian Journey by Penguin) and went back to such great cities as Pataliputra, on which Patna now stands.

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