The Story of India
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 17 @ 8:00PM & 11:00PM
Episode 6: Freedom
This last episode tells how a foreign multinational (the East India Company) thousands of miles away gradually and almost by chance took power over great swathes of the Indian subcontinent; how after the horrendous shock of the 1857 “Mutiny” the British state took over and turned this supremacy into the Raj, the jewel in the crown of the greatest empire the world had ever seen; and how the Freedom Movement delivered Independence to India in 1947, albeit a divided India.
The series ends by acknowledging the extraordinary achievements of Indian democracy over sixty years and flags India’s predicted rise to be the largest country and the second largest (or even the largest) economy in the world in the next three decades.
Map showing extent of British Raj
Our last episode takes us from the 11 miles of archives of the East India Company in the British Library in London, out to the Hooghly River and 18th century Calcutta (Kolkata), through the battlefields of Lucknow and Etawah in the First War of Independence in 1857 (“The Indian Mutiny” as the British saw it!). At a destroyed fort still marked by cannon fire, we meet the descendent of a rebel Maharaja who tells us how his ancestors fought the British twice – once in 1857 and then during the nationalist movement of the early 20th Century.
We chart the development of the Indian National Congress of Nehru and Gandhi and its unlikely founder member – a British civil servant called AO Hume. The Rebel in the Raj, Hume was a recent question in the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
The show looks at the rise of newspapers and education in Victorian India, goes to Kipling’s Allahabad and visits the amazing labyrinth of stacks in the National Archive in Delhi to look at the early British censuses.
Then Wood takes us on to the First War, the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, the move to Independence and the fateful Partition of 1947, one of the most crucial events in the history of modern India.
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