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British historian digs deep into ‘Story of India’

Ask yourself: What did you know about Mumbai before terrorists attacked in November?

What Americans don’t know about India could fill a six-part series on PBS. That’s why British historian Michael Wood’s “The Story of India” couldn’t be more timely.

After what is being called “India’s 9/11” attacks, which killed and injured hundreds, and as India and Pakistan edge closer to another war (their fourth), Americans are realizing they ought to be paying more attention to the subcontinent.

And not just because it’s the place they get when they call their credit-card companies. India is the world’s largest democracy, with the second-largest population, and a growing global economic power.

“There is real urge to know more,” Wood says by phone from London. He first began talking up India with PBS about 15 years ago. But, he says, India has always been “phenomenally interesting.”

It also has been phenomenally complicated. Its history extends as far back as 10,000 years, and its cultural, linguistic, religious, political and even culinary mix over the millennia can be bewildering. Sixty years after independence from the British, India is both fantastically rich and terribly poor. Myth and spiritualism co-exist with science, technology and industrial might. Its middle class is huge, highly educated and upwardly mobile, while millions still live under the constraints of caste.

Wood is openly enamored of this exotic jumble. An avatar of the historian-as-television-star school, he has demonstrated his storytelling skills in a slew of PBS documentaries, leading viewers on historical searches for Shakespeare, Troy and the Conquistadors, among others. “You’re the link between the ‘dear, ordinary viewer’ and the mass of scholarship for the specialists,” he says.

Wood, 60, has an infectious enthusiasm and a boyish energy. He is shown clambering over ruins, crossing the Hindu Kush, getting swept up in crowds, sitting cross-legged at meals, observing public rituals up close, all the while examining, admiring, chatting, questioning, sampling and exclaiming, “That’s fantastic!”

“I’ve always been curious about the world,” he says.

In India, he says, history is a living thing; contemporary culture resonates with the past. “Almost every phase of human interest is still alive. Things survive, (including) the DNA of the people who first walked out of Africa. Even the sounds people made before language. You stand there, listening, and your jaw drops.”