这部纪录片的好处，在于其创作团队是怀着对于这个伟大国度的无比热爱、敬意和好奇拍的这套片子，凭着原生的创作热情，片子的解说、配乐、画面、内容和主持都融合得恰到好处，富于历史学家的浪漫情怀和人文学者的细腻洞察，力荐给要去印度旅行或工作的人！
推荐的原因并非是它能给人什么实用的旅行指导，而是这部片子会带你领略这个国家伟大感人的一面，有了先入为主的理解和敬意，就不会在亲身经历印度落后一面时产生太过严重的偏见，毕竟，在这个国家落后脏乱，低效民主，自傲懒散的表象背后，蕴藏着伟大的包容和佛陀的智慧。
所有的观点，都不可避免地出自特定的角度，带着自身的局限。这部片子的角度，正像Mike在花絮篇中说的：Being British of a certain age, I grew up reading school textbooks that had a rosy-tinted view of the British Empire in India. 这部片子，是英国前殖民者，满怀着对这片故土的玫瑰色眷恋，唱出的浓情赞歌～～～
＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝下面是冗长的六集摘录，那些感动我的美丽句子＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝
＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝非印度控请跳过＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝＝
【प्रकरण एक】。
Only India has preserved the unbroken thread of the human story that binds us all.
To find the origins of Indian civilisation, we need to come first of all to Pakistan, once part of India, but split to become a separate country in 1947.
Harappa/ Aryans/ Lakh 100,000
Like Latin, Sanskrit is no longer a spoken language. But here in the holy city of Varanasi, young Brahmin boys still learn it to recite their earliest scriptures, the Vedas. What you're listening to are the sounds and the words of the Bronze Age.
＃婆罗门的孩童们，仍用着源自铜器时代的音律，唱诵着梵语写成的吠陀经
The communal drinking (soma), the convivial feast, was that how some of this ancient poetry was composed by the bards in front of the Aryan kings?
＃！！！有时觉得，Mike很适合去央视工作，他活脱脱就是个灿烂笑容＋鸡皮疙瘩的煽情派
Mighty Indra, let your regal mounts bring you here to drink Soma, the juice which is swifter than thought.
Indra, wield your thunderbolt! Indra, bring rain! Grant all our desires.
Part the sky and make all things visible.
Part the sky and drink Soma, that opens our mind to the vastness of your skies.
＃Mahabharata (＃摩诃婆罗多 महाभारत):
For Indian people, the battle has always marked the divide between the time of myth and the beginning of real history. It's the last time when men and gods walked the Earth together. The story of the rival families, the Kurus and the Pandavas, would permeate Indian culture, in all Indian languages, a fundamental guide to how to live your life and do your duty.
It's really an epic that speaks to every age. It is an epic full of stories of human beings with feet of clay, with lust and lechery, and ambitions and fears, people who have committed acts of betrayal and sold each other down the river.
The tale was told and re-told to a point where it became a sort of national library of India, where every tale that had to be told was incorporated into a retelling of the Mahabharata. All sorts of things got tossed into this. Literally every single thing that people wanted to talk about their times was interpolated into a retelling of the epic. ＃So True！
So, for 800 years, the Mahabharata became the story of India. And stories, too, become part of a nation's identity.
＃对于这部巨作，帕拉查理概括得极好："一个人旅行了全印度，看到了一切东西，可是除非他读了《罗摩衍那》和《摩诃婆罗多》，他不能了解印度的生活方式"。
【प्रकरण दो】 。。
＃印度哲学中的人生四大目标：
＃ 1) Dharma: 宗教的庇佑（法/祭拜）
＃ 2) Artha: 追求财富（利/修行）
＃ 3) Kama: 爱与性的满足（欲/业报）
＃ 4) Moksa: 涅槃解脫
All the great ancient civilisations meditated on these big questions. How to live life, sharing the planet with other people. How to find happiness.
For Indian people, the traditional goal of life is to live with virtue, dharma; to gain wealth and success, artha; to find pleasure, kama; but in the end, to seek enlightenment, moksha.
Five elements: Fire, water, air, earth, ether.
Know your place in the order, perform the necessary rituals, fulfill your duty, whatever caste you're born into.
＃佛陀的故事
But the most influential of these thinkers, in the history of India and in the history of the world, was the Buddha.
Bodh Gaya is a magnet for thousands of people from all over the world, whether seeking truth or simply curious. And it's a luminous place, magical. And yet full of life. The Navel of the Earth.
By the morning, the Buddha had crystallised in his mind what he called the four noble truths. In essence, the idea was very simple. "The nature of the human condition," he thought, "is suffering." And suffering is caused, in the end, by human desire, by attachment, by covetousness, in the inner life and in the outside world. "Free yourself from those desires, “the Buddha thought, "and you can become a liberated human being.”But it can only come from within."
＃Reminded me of the beginning of “The Road Less travelled”.
The logic of the Buddha's message is also atheistic. Belief in God itself is a form of attachment, of clinging, of desire, and in the land of 33 million gods or is it 330 million? That eventually would prove a step too far.
＃佛祖思想的本质是无神论的 What a thought ！ What a mockery ！
One of the Buddha's faithful disciples begged him to hold on a bit longer: "It's a miserable, wattle-and-daub little place stuck in the jungle, "in the middle of nowhere," he said. "Couldn't you die in a famous place "where they could give you a great funeral?"
And the Buddha said, "A small place is fitting." ＃A small place is fitting～～～
But all versions agree that his last words were these. "All created things must pass. Strive on diligently."
An extraordinary young general, the 25-year-old Alexander the Great, the man whose giant ego literally overwhelms the Persian divine king, Darius, and subdues history itself to his will.
＃阿育王的转变 (PS: 那部电影真销魂，虽然它对于阿育王历史功绩的描述几乎是空白)
20 years after Chandragupta's death, his grandson, Ashoka, would take those secular ideas, join them to the ethics of the Jains and the Buddhists and put that synthesis at the heart of politics.
"All we human beings, "says Ashoka, "whatever our station in life, "share the same human values. Love of parents, respect for elders, "kindness and attachment to friends and neighbours, "even to servants and slaves. From now on, "says Ashoka, "I desire non-violence for all creatures.”And I resolve to conquer by persuasion alone. "
Beneath the bodhi tree, the power of ideas and the power of the state came together in a uniquely Indian way. A rejection of the path of violence, indeed, of a whole way of understanding history.
＃ 阿育王之治 Ashoka's Edicts:
One of the great documents in the history of the world. One of the great ideas in the history of the world. The forerunner, the first forerunner, of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. This amazing outpouring of ideas all boils down to one idea, "All humans are one family." As Ashoka says, "All men are my children."
His edicts didn't just cover humans, his are the first animal rights laws in the world. He even had police to enforce them. As a result, India has the oldest animal hospitals in the world.
In history there have been many empires of the sword. But only India created an empire of the spirit.
"The message isn't from God." What Ashoka's doing is taking the ideas of the Buddhists, the Eightfold Path, truthfulness, compassion, right conduct and the teachings of the Jains on non-violence, and making them not only the core of personal morality but of politics. The social welfare legislation, the teachings on religious toleration, even the ecological measures on the conservation of species and plants, from the rhino to the Ganges porpoise, the conservation of forests, preservation from needless destruction, it's moving the sphere of politics away from the sanctions of religion and magic to the rule of reason and morality. What's on that pillar is an extraordinary product of an extraordinary time, the Axis Age.
【प्रकरण तीन】 。。。
But commerce is never just about commodities. It's the way civilisations adapt and grow, the way people learn about themselves and others, discover new ideas and new worlds.
And what Hippalus discovered was this. In June, the southwest monsoon begins to blow in this direction across the Indian Ocean. ''It's hard going'', says the Greek guide to the Indian Ocean, ''but you can get there really quickly.''
And then, this is the really great thing about it, in November, a couple of months after the heavy winds die down, the northeast monsoon blows you back the other way.
I wish you could smell the air. It really is spicy. You know that connotation, heady, dreamy, erotic even.
I'm a great believer in the living presence of the past. You've only got to spend an hour in a place like this and you can feel it all around you. This is what it would have felt like 2,000 years ago. The evening catches being unloaded, the stalls cooking food. A Greek or a Roman, standing on this spot, now would recognise this scene.
＃How beautiful ! "The living presence of the past" ! 这点一直是Mike的一个美丽信念
India was a great, classical civilisation whose centre of power lay over the mountains to the east. Over the Western Ghats, the spine of India.
These routes lead into the land Marco Polo called, ''The most splendid province on Earth.'' The place the British thought the most fertile part of their empire, Tamil Nadu. This is rice country, so fertile it gives three harvests a year.
And the capital of this southern civilisation was the city of Madurai. To arrive here is to enter one of those thrilling places on Earth where the ancient past still exists alongside the modern world. Just imagine if classical Athens was alive today and the goddess of the city still presiding over her citizens. That's Madurai. ''At dawn, ''says a Tamil poem of the Roman period, ''Madurai wakes to the sound of the Vedas ''and the air is perfumed with the scent of flowers. ''
＃黎明时分，圣城马杜赖在梵语传诵的声声吠陀经中醒来~~~
On their coins you get the Buddha, you get Athene, Hercules, Shiva, the gods of everywhere between the Mediterranean and India.
＃印度，真正的宗教大熔炉
Pepper on their tables, peacocks in their gardens, silk on their bodies. ''We must be mad, '' grumbled Pliny in Rome, ''bankrupting ourselves for India.''
＃Kanishka大帝的故事
Because Buddhism was the religion of peace, no war. And Buddhism is the vital clue to the story of Kanishka.
''Of all the stupas in the world, '' the Chinese said, ''not one could compare to this in solemn beauty and majestic grandeur.''
''It radiated brilliance. ''And when the breeze blew, the precious bells sounded in harmony.''
This intimate gift, a small, bronze casket, is a testimony to the open-mindedness of the rulers of this vast, multi-cultural empire. And outside, a series of images, those are just wonderfully typical of Kanishka's era. There's the Buddha on the top with his ''fear not'' gesture, but the figures by him, the devotees, are actually great Hindu gods. There's Indra with his flat crown and there with his long hair, Brahma, the creator god. If we move it round, there's Kanishka himself wearing the royal garb of the Kushan kings, the great big boots that have clod-hopped all the way across the Hindu Kush, the big coat that looks like a Tibetan chuba and the double crown. The king of kings, Maharaja Kanishka.
You can see why Kanishka and the Kushans chose this as their capital, looking towards the Khyber Pass and those routes into Central Asia, across westwards to the Mediterranean and eastwards above Tibet to their ancestral home on the edge of China. And yet they also ruled 1, 500 miles or more that way across the plains of India.
Architect of the great salvation, Kanishka the Kushan, the righteous, the just, the autocrat who obtained the kingship from all the gods, inaugurated Year 1 and proclaimed his edict to the whole of India. ''May the gods keep him ever fortunate. ''And may he rule all India for 1,000 years.''
Peshawar has played like a host, whether they were invader or they were travellers or they were writers. So this was the place where they say intermingle with the people over endless cup of the green teas.
So by AD 1 30, when the Emperor Hadrian ruled the Roman Empire in the West and the Han Chinese far to the East, the Kushans under Kanishka ruled the middle of the world from the Aral Sea to the Bay of Bengal.
＃天神之城马图拉
An early English traveller in India said that when you come down the Grand Trunk Road from Afghanistan, it's only when you reach Mathura, with its sacred turtles in the river, and monkeys scampering through the streets that you get the flavour of the real Hindustan.
The ancient Greeks called this city ''Madoura ton Theon, '' the city of the gods.
If you'd been here in the 2nd century AD, at the height of the Kushan Empire you would have seen Greeks, Romans, Bactrians, Persians, maybe even the odd Chinese. All the result of the opening up of the Silk Route and the contacts between the Mediterranean world and India and China. It was an incredibly exciting time and this city was at the centre of it. Dynamic economy, very diverse ethnically in its religious life. Just the place to be. And that explains why you have such tremendous achievements in ideas and in art here.
A great historian of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon, said this period, 2nd century AD, was the happiest time for humanity in the whole history of the world.
Ayurveda is the science of life.
In the early centuries AD, the Kushans had opened up India's horizons, creating a vast, multi-racial empire. They put India onto the international map, linking it to the trade systems of the world. They laid the foundations for what would follow in the Middle Ages, adding another layer to the story of India through peace, trade and tolerance. But above all is the simple, civilising influence of contact, exchange and dialogue.
And now, as the wheel of history turns full circle, that age looks like a precursor of our own.
【प्रकरण चार】 。。。。
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.
＃罗摩的故事: 印度的圣经
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.
＃多元融合的明君之治
The people are numerous and happy. ''The inhabitants of the cities, rich and prosperous, vie with each other ''in the practice of benevolence and righteousness. ''The king governs without capital punishment ''and throughout the country the people do not kill any living creature.'' Fa-hsien depicts India as a pluralist and tolerant country where Buddhism thrived along with the Hindu religions.
''Chandra, ''says the column, ''his face beautiful like the full moon ''who won the sovereignty of the earth and left the southern ocean ''perfumed by the breeze of his bravery.''
＃科学成就与思想自由
Gupta scientists pioneered the use of zero, the foundation of all modern mathematics. It was a Gupta astronomer in around 500 AD who proved the Earth went round the sun. His name was Aryabhatta. He came up with the concept of Pi.
Cosmos: And the ability to imagine like that has always been a mark of Indian civilisation. Unlike the West in the age of Galileo, India was not traumatised by the revelation that the universe is infinite and the human place in it tiny. That all things, the gods too, are subject to cycles of cosmic destruction, over aeons of time, and that human life is a pool of light in an infinite darkness.
＃和中国古代看法异曲同工
India has always been a guilt-free society as far as sex is concerned. Obviously we are 1 .2 billion people, so... The most famous product of the Gupta Age, at least in the West, is the Kama Sutra. The consciousness of being in an elevated situation when you're in love, or making love, is called Kama. The Kama Sutra, contrary to many perceptions in the Western world, is not just about sex or about sexual positions. It's more of a kind of book of life,
＃印度的人生目的: 四层面
All of Hindu philosophy talks of something called the purushartha, which is what a man needs to do, right? Which is dharma, the whole quality of being a righteous human being, you have artha which allows you to, which is gathering wealth, so it could be just business, it could be governance. Then you have kama, the idea of love. And the last of these that you need to do in life is seek moksha, which is liberation. Hinduism extols every human being to actually explore all these aspects of life.
From Bollywood movies to the sublime passion of religious poetry, the transcendent moment of human love in Indian culture is a mirror of our relation with the gods. And for all our failures to achieve the ideal, in love, so India teaches, we human beings are still touched by the divine.
＃Cholan: 印度的雅典
Cholans reshaped the medieval world of the South. Their capital still stands today, Tanjore, in Tamil Nadu. At its heart, the temple of the creator of the empire, Rajaraja, the King of Kings. Brilliant statesmen, builders and artists, the Cholans have been called the Athenians of India. And what's so extraordinary is that their civilisation is still alive today.
The temple, though, really is a monument to Rajaraja himself. It's named after him and the inscriptions all round the walls extol his deeds as king of kings, lion of the solar race, lord of the world.
Rajaraja, when we just think about him, our blood shoots up. He's such a great man. And, you know, it makes you to feel very proud and also it makes you to feel very small. If your ego shoots up, it makes it come down.
In modern times Rajaraja's reign has come to be seen as a Tamil Golden Age, celebrated in novels, plays and in movies.
But Rajaraja himself deserves better to be remembered as great ruler and patron and an even more assiduous record keeper.
＃❤婆罗多舞❤婆罗多舞❤婆罗多舞❤婆罗多舞❤
＃好吧，我承认我折腾，为了加上这些表达我对印度舞痴恋的小爱心，这帖被人工审核了不下五次，请大家用力欣赏❤
This style of dancing, Bharatnatyam, is another of the artistic traditions of South India that's come down to us in an unbroken line from the Cholan era a thousand years ago. Back in Rajaraja the Great's time, it was a religious dance, those girls in the temple were dancing for God. And the poses of the dance still today are the 108 classic poses that Shiva himself is said to have danced in his cosmic dance.
The king made an official collection of the hundreds of popular songs to the god Shiva, and these are still sung today. When the King first heard them he said they'd made his hair stand on end. In this and many other ways, the ritual and psychological order established in the Middle Ages defined the forms of Hinduism still practised today in the south.
This art was at its height a thousand years ago, in the hands of masters whose work has never been surpassed. But today's craftsmen still work in their line, crafting images in the 21st century that go back to the deepest layers of the Indian tradition.
＃ What a ceremony ！！！生育崇拜 重生仪式
The ceremony was called the ceremony of the golden egg or of the golden womb, a kind of renewal ceremony. The Queen was passed through the mouth of the cow and then the cow was broken to pieces and the gold given to the priests.
But in that moment, the king was celebrating a long reign of great prosperity, as his inscriptions say, when the Goddess of Victory, the Goddess of Fortune and the matchless Goddess of Fame had all become his wives.
Like all their community, they believe in killing no living thing, even insects, and are strictly vegetarian.
Vegetarian cooking, 'the food of Shiva', as they call it here, is the great tradition in the south.
Pilgrimage is another living legacy of the Middle Ages. It's one of those things that gave Indian people a sense of cultural identity long before India achieved political unity, a sense of India as a holy land from the Himalayas to the deep south.
As for the idea of the Golden Age, it seems to me that golden ages can only ever exist in the past. For they are the products of our imaginations and we humans, after all, can only ever exist here, in the present.
In a world where the identities and traditions of the ancient civilisations have been wiped away in a few generations, here in India alone they've kept touch with their deep past and, indeed, one might say, with the past of all humanity. And that part is the key to the story of India.
【प्रकरण पांच】 。。。。。
There are moments in history when civilisations aspire to greatness. India had done so in ancient times, and at the end of the Middle Ages it did so again. And it was the coming of Islam that inspired the next great phase of Indian history. Today the subcontinent is home to half of all the world's Muslims. The ebb and flow of its history has been shaped by the encounter of the two civilisations of India and Islam. And in all of history, there is no more dramatic tale.
＃做这部纪录片的，是一小撮极其浪漫的历史学家，而Mike自写自演的这些解说，更是浪漫之致
The great historian Al Biruni, who was no fan of Mahmud, went with him to India, says that the 12 great plundering expeditions engendered a hatred among Hindus for the Muslims, but, as always in history, and especially in the history of India, there's another story, and what appears to begin here as a clash of civilisations will become over time one of the most remarkable cultural crossovers in the history of civilisation, what a great Indian Muslim prince will later call the meeting of two oceans.
And it's Al Biruni, a Muslim scholar who learnt Sanskrit, who gives us the first signpost. ''You must bear in mind, ''he says, ''that the Hindus entirely differ from us in almost everything. ''And the barriers separating us are many, ''language, manners, customs, rules of purity. ''And India is such a diverse land, ''from Kashmir in the north, to the southern cultures, ''Telugu, Kannada and Tamil. ''In religion, the Indians totally differ from us ''as we believe in nothing in which they believe and vice versa. ''India's hard to understand, though I have a great liking for it, ''and our apparent differences would be perfectly transparent ''if there were more contact between us.''
＃大多元，大不同，大印度
240 feet high, it's one of the wonders of the world, the Qutab Minar: the might of Islam.
It was as much a political as a religious statement. Since its first spread in the 7th century, the Islamic world had encountered many other religions but nowhere as big and diverse as India. The fact was, as the Delhi Sultans soon realised, they couldn't possibly convert India, co-existence had to follow.
The tale of the Moghuls is a family story. One of the most remarkable and gifted dynasties in history, they ruled India for 330 years before they were deposed by the British, but immediately after Babur's death, his son Humayun was driven into exile, where his wife gave birth to a son who would become one of the greatest of all Indian rulers, Akbar.
Akbar was proclaimed king here at Kalanaur by generals loyal to his father. You have to remember he's only a 13-year-old boy. He played truant from school, preferred outdoor sports and games and remained illiterate all his life.
Maybe because the intellectuals and the scholars and the mullahs had never got their intellectual straightjacket on him, he retained a wonderful capacity to make unexpected, unconventional connections. As we would put it, to think outside the box.
＃很有意思的提法，不经正统课堂教育，终身保持文盲状态，可能正是Akbar大帝创造力和伟大远见的来源？同意的人推荐看下老克勒Ken Robinson爵士的演讲："School kills Creativity”.
The Sikhs were one of the radical religious groups who'd sprung up out of the interaction of Hinduism and Islam in the 16th century. Their first guru, Nanak, who died in 1539, asserted, ''There is no Hindu or Muslim,'' and laid stress on the worship of one god and works of charity. His legacy today is a world faith, singled out by the turban that all men must wear to enter their holy shrines. And it was Akbar who gifted them land here in Amritsar to built the Golden Temple, the most famous landmark of Sikhism today.
It would be under the later Moghuls that the Sikhs became a military sect, bearing the symbol still carried by all Sikh men today, what they call the five K's. The first K is the Kesh, which is unshorn hair. Hence, therefore the appearance, the beard. You don't cut your hair. And second one is Kanga, which is a wooden comb.We keep that in the hair here. And third one is bracelet, it is called Kara, starts with K. Fourth K is your Kaccha, which is baggy shorts. Briefs. And the fifth one, is Kirpan. This is not a sword, and it's not a knife, either... It is called Kirpan. It is to defend your respect, to stand against the tyranny of the time so that we could defend the faith. ＃锡克男的最后那一K貌似不好惹，当今的印度总理也是个锡克族的说
''Now it has become clear to me, ''said Akbar, ''that it cannot be wisdom to assert the truth of one faith over another. ''In our troubled world, so full of contradictions, ''the wise person makes justice his guide and learns from all. ''Perhaps in this way the door may be opened again whose key has been lost.''
This is the great gate of Akbar's city at Fatehpur Sikri. The inscription reads this: ''Jesus, peace be upon him, said this, '''The world is a bridge, cross it but build no house upon it '''for the world endures but a moment, and the rest is unknown.''' ＃！！！
＃政治，终于找到了一种印度式的与宗教共生的方式
And how to justify sovereignty, to create an allegiance in a nation of such diversity? That was the question. Akbar's big idea was very simple. No one religion can claim absolute knowledge, absolute authority.
Now he summoned leaders of all the religions of the world, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Parsees, Jains to find the common ground of all religion. And in those weekly seminars here at Fatehpur, perhaps for the first time in human history, the absolute claims of religion itself were put under scrutiny.
Every religion is wrong, but all differences have to be tolerated. He says, in India, there are so many religions, and therefore the sovereign should not identify with one. Just as God can't identify himself with one religion, so the sovereign can't identify, as sovereign.
＃印度宗教诸多，种种宗教皆谬，当权者不应归属某一宗教，正像神灵不会皈依某一宗教一样
(当然，这一法则只适用于宗教繁多的印度，美国的总统们在可预见的将来都不会更改经典的演讲结尾词："God bless America！")
It's right to talk about Akbar's humanity still. It's what makes him one of the most engaging figures in the history of the world. But it's not the whole story. The other side is his rationality. Don't think for a moment that his dream of one religion was some New Age whim. It was conceived as rationally as all his other great policies. His drastic overhaul of the land revenue and taxation system of his great empire, his overhaul of the Moghul civil service, his effort to make his Hindu subjects more equal under the law. These were all big ideas, the sort of big ideas that would become part of the mainstream in Europe in the 18th century Enlightenment, but in 16th century Europe, no Renaissance prince, not even the brilliant Elizabeth Tudor, tried so consistently as Akbar to bring in the Age of Reason.
Akbar had laid the foundations, administrative, fiscal and moral, for Moghul India's future greatness. At his death, India had the largest GDP in the world. Before it lay the possibility of an Indo-Islamic enlightenment.
So what went wrong? Why did it fail after Akbar's death? Why did the Age of Reason not come?
Well, it wouldn't be the first time in history, and it certainly wouldn't be the last, that an empire lost its way because of over-consumption, extravagance, bad leadership and unwise foreign wars.
＃泰姬陵背后的秘密！去泰姬陵的人勿忘到对岸的神秘花园看全景
And at home, they engaged in vast building projects. The most famous was the Taj Mahal.
The Taj is told in all the tourist guides as a monument to love. The tomb of Shah Jahan's favourite wife, Mumtaz, and later of Jahan himself, a teardrop on the face of time. But new discoveries suggest the design may go back to the Moghuls' beloved Sufi saints, that the key to the Taj may be a mystic map of a Sufi's dream. It's a map of the Day of Judgement. The cosmos is seen as a rectangle. On one side, the fields of paradise,
on the other side, the path, a serat, the way, the bridge over which the righteous must pass and be judged on Judgement Day. In the middle, a pool, and the congregation grounds for the faithful on that day of judgement. And in the centre, the throne of God himself.
When you walk through the Taj, you come finally to the great platform on which the tomb chamber stands, underneath which Shah Jahan and Mumtaz are buried. But that's not the last point in the journey. To see the full plan unfold, we've got to cross the river and see what's on the other side.
Now you begin to see what the architect of the Taj is doing. He's including the sacred river Jamuna, the Hindu sacred river, in the architecture
of his own sacred space. Legend says that Jahan planned a black Taj as a mirror image on the other side, but archaeologists have found something more haunting still. Across the river was a walled paradise garden. In it were night scented trees and flowers, red cedars and magnolias. There were fruits and nuts, jujubes, mangoes, sugar palms, chiraunjis, whose sweet kernel tastes like pistachio. Here the great Moghul could sit in his pavilion in the moonlight and look at his creation.
So the Taj is a product of the Hindu-Muslim synthesis that took place over much of India in the 17th century,
British visitors give graphic accounts of the shocking poverty of the rural workforce in Jahangir's day, even though the cities were still wealthy.
But more than 20% of the national income was spent on the court elite, on an upper class who lived at a higher level of consumption than any European aristocracy.
Dara's project was bold in his own time, but now, in the age of wars on terror, almost inconceivable. He took his lead from the Sufi idea of the unity of being and the Koran's revelation that God had sent messengers to Earth before the Prophet Mohammed, and he argued for the unity of religion. Islam and Hinduism were twins, he said, hairs of the same head. He tells us, ''I talked to the Hindu holy men, ''people who had attained ''the highest level of spiritual enlightenment ''and in our conversations that were free and open, ''I detected, although there were verbal differences, ''no essential disagreement on our understanding of God, ''and so I decided to write a book about that, ''about the religions of the two communities, ''and I called it The Meeting Place of the Two Oceans.'' It was a project that was heroic, quixotic even, and it would cost him his life and his crown.
＃这是一个我一直在思考的问题：各种宗教，在其本质上，是全部相同的还是各有差异的？
Can we judge the past by the standards of the 21 st century? Should we judge our time by theirs?
The Moghul Empire began and ended with war. In a few decades, they created a civilisational wonderland here in India, a kind of Indo-Islamic synthesis. Their rulers were not only practical men but visionaries, Babur's imperial dreams, Akbar's utopian visions, but waiting in the wings with ominous patience were the British, who had a very different idea of what bringing in the Age of Reason could mean.
＃这段话是别处来的，谈的是类似的话题，说得极妙：
你唯一需要同意的是表达不同意见的方式，你唯一需要达成一致的政见是如何在政见不一致的情况下协同共存（如果你觉得这句话很绕，实在是我中文烂，不关作者的事）
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# Related footnotes from Shashi Tharoor:
India is the nationalism of an idea. It's the idea of an ever-ever-land, emerging from an ancient civilization, united by a shared history, but sustained, above all, by pluralist democracy. That is a 21st-century story as well as an ancient one.
And it's the nationalism of an idea that essentially says you can endure differences of caste, creed, color, culture, cuisine, custom and costume, consonant, for that matter, and still rally around a consensus. And the consensus is of a very simple principle, that in a diverse plural democracy like India you don't really have to agree on everything all the time, so long as you agree on the ground rules of how you will disagree.
The great success story of India, a country that so many learned scholars and journalists assumed would disintegrate, in the '50s and '60s, is that it managed to maintain consensus on how to survive without consensus.
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【प्रकरण छह】 。。。。。。
There are times in the life of a civilisation when history seems to burst with possibilities. That's India in the 21st century. This is the tale of the British occupation of India, the winning of freedom and the establishment of democracy, and with them all the possibilities of a hitherto undreamed of future.
The tale of India's last invader, the British, is a chain of accidents. As so often in history, events that need never have happened except perhaps for some destiny written deep in India's own past.
''Seringapatam I shall retain in full sovereignty for the company, ''being a tower of strength from which we may at any time ''strike Hindustan to its centre.''
And he adds, ''I shall not at present enlarge upon the advantages ''which are likely to be derived to the British interests from this, ''for they are too obvious to require any detailed explanation.''
＃当今印度人对英国这个前殖民者究竟是抱着怎样的复杂心态呢？文化的崇拜？屈辱的过去？还夹杂着一丝莫名的感恩？
The British also gave us a complete map of India. And that map was not only physical but mental, an idea of India. For it was the British who began the recovery of the ancient Indian past. Orientalists like James Prinsep and William Jones learned India's languages. ''I love India more than my own country, ''said Warren Hastings. They founded the Asiatic Society here, conscious that India was a far older and richer civilisation than their own. And as one of them said, ''Wealth is not the only ''or the most valuable commodity India has to offer Britain ''and the world.''
''The sari, '' wrote Stuart, ''is the most alluring dress in the world ''and the women of Hindustan enchanting in their beauty.
In his book, The Vindication of the Hindoos, Stuart spoke of the greatness of Indian civilisation and the need for the British to understand it. ''Hinduism, ''said Stuart, ''little needs the ameliorating hand of Christianity to render its votaries ''a correct and moral people in a civilised society.'' ''On the contrary, ''he said, ''the glorious scriptures of the Hindus ''were written when our own ancestors were savages in the forests.''
People talk about the culture of Lucknow, especially the 18th-century period, as being an extraordinary period in Indian history. It is called the renaissance of the India culture, a mixture of india and muslin culture.
＃印度的文艺复兴时期
Through the sweltering summer of 1857, the edifice of British power tottered in what the British called the Indian Mutiny. It was the greatest war of resistance ever fought against a colonial power in the whole age of European imperialism. And new discoveries in the archives in Delhi reveal the story from the rebels' side and their anger at the attitude of the new breed of British officials.
They are denigrating traditional forms of performance, they're denigrating traditional texts, they're denigrating traditional poetry. So there is a hectoring, interrogating machine that has been set in motion 20, 25 years before the uprising happens. Otherwise we just can't make sense of the rage that bursts forth. And what's interesting about 1857 is that, certainly in Delhi, in the documents we've been studying here over the last three years, is that the expression of resistance in Delhi is done in religious terms. The British are the people who destroy all religions.
In real history, things do not have sharp endings. Normally periods flood into each other. But 1857 is a very clear open-and-shut case. 1857 the East India Company ends, the Moghuls end. The two principle forces that have guided Indian history for the past 300 years come to an abrupt end. And immediately, you get the British Government imposing direct rule from London. Very soon after this, Disraeli goes to Queen Victoria and says, ''Will you be Empress of India?''
AO Hume fought here against the rebels but then began to speak out for Indian self-determination. He believed in the power of imperialism to do good, a cultural imperialist. Hume helped start the independence movement by bringing together the best young Indians to form the Indian National Congress.
Hume is one of the great untold Indian stories. In fact, Sriram thinks that Hume is almost as important as Gandhi. It was Hume's personality, his organising skill and his devotion to the cause of India.
It was their (the British's) duty as trustees of the Indian Empire to prepare the people of this country to take the destiny of their country in their own hands. So that's what Hume thought the British should work towards. And when they are ready for self-government, to hand over their trust to them and to retire from this country, because if they retire after doing this much, they would have done two things. First, you have trained a people in self-government, and second, to have ensured that their own commerce and culture would continue.
＃远见与胸怀！如果没有印度的演练与先例，香港回归或许会是个不同的故事
The British Raj was one of the most ingenious and adaptive Empires in history. An immense patchwork embracing nearly a quarter of the people of the planet with 675 princely states, two them the size of large European countries. An arrangement so extraordinary that it's scarcely believable that it existed on the ground.
By the middle of the 19th century, the nature of colonialism in India is changing. From a relatively benign, what we call orientalist phase of colonialism, this is now an arrogant Britain, the first country of the Industrial Revolution ruling the world. And then from the 1850s, the competition worldwide for colonies. Other countries are coming up and competing for colonies. So, therefore, there's a great need to have a very systematic ordering of people's lives. The information and everything related to them.
Apart from just enumerating the population, I think the crucial issue is how you enumerate, what are the categories you employ? And I think it's extremely important to remember that right from the beginning, religion was the one dominant category which entered all other categories.
Once you begin counting people according to their religious origin, then when politics comes in, religion then becomes a religious community.
Similarly, the Muslims. When they took their first delegation, out of which the Muslim League was formed, and they went to see the Viceroy, they said, ''We number so much, we are outnumbered by the Hindus. ''If you are going to have a representative system ''which is based on majorities principle of election, ''we are never going to be there.'' Because ''we'' now means Muslims.
The implication of that seems to be that by defining an Indian people in this way, the British set a path for the way that Indians would construe their path to independence.
Absolutely right. And we are still living with that legacy, we're struggling with it, we fall victim to it, we resist it, but it is still with us.
On such moments, history can turn. The Amritsar massacre gave an irresistible impetuous to the freedom movement. The main players were all British-educated lawyers. The canny Mohandas KGandhi, the brilliant Mohammed Jinnah of the Muslim League and Jawaharlal Nehru, the austere star of Congress. Together, they were to plan one of history's greatest revolutions, driven by the ancient Indian idea of non-violence. ＃！！！
Nehru and Gandhi and their colleagues were engaged in the greatest liberation struggle that had ever taken place in history. The question for them was which way would India go? What India did they imagine? What was India?
If the path forward was going to be democracy, then how was that to be squared with the inequities of the caste system?
With the oppressions of the hereditary landlords in the feudal cow belt? With the inequality of women? And how would a single, united India encompass all its diverse religious traditions whose voices were becoming more and more insistent?
＃印度的分裂和巴基斯坦的诞生 (血腥故事)
By 1940, Jinnah had come to believe that Hindu and Muslim were two separate nations that cannot live together. And talk began of partition. The British attitude towards the partition of India was slightly ambivalent. On the one hand, they had created this unity where there was none. They gloried in the fact that they had created a united India. And they also knew that if India became divided, all sorts of defence problems would arise. And they were also very conscious of the great divide between the Hindus and the Muslims.
Jinnah finally pushed for a separate state for Muslims, Pakistan. Jinnah had moved towards the idea of Pakistan. What he used to say, ''After we have divided, ''then we can come together, then we can cooperate.'' This is what Mohandas said, ''This is divorce before marriage.'' ＃先离婚再结婚的乌托邦想法
So finally in the summer of 1 947, the British washed their hands of the problem. And with great pride, and yet profound disappointment, Nehru accepted India's destiny.
NEHRU: Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. ＃！！！
But a partitioned India, with Muslim Pakistan itself divided by 2,000 miles from east to west. On the two sides of India, in the Punjab and Bengal, the dividing line between Muslim and Hindu had been drawn up by a British civil servant in six weeks using information gathered from the censuses. The line ran through fields and communities, across railways, roads and irrigation schemes. It went through villages, and even through individual houses, and it cut through the deepest layers of the history of the subcontinent.
To make matters worse, the British kept the line secret till after independence on the 15th of August, and they were ulpably negligent in failing to provide troops to protect the people in the ethnic cleansing that followed when Hindu, Sikh and Muslim began to kill each other.
In the summer of 1 947, that story was repeated across the Punjab as great floods of people fled in fear. Hindus and Sikhs eastwards into India, Muslims westwards into the new Pakistan. Fourteen million people, the largest migration in history, and up to a million died. We console ourselves by talking of common human feeling, but there are times in history when there is no such thing.
History sometimes happens in a way which is not willed by the main participants. Nehru and Gandhi saw themselves as the great idealists, but in the end, failed to grasp the biggest prize.
Jinnah was a convinced secular nationalist, who only at the very end took an independent Pakistan. And as for the British, they were tried and found wanting.
＃Mike又无法克制自己的浪漫冲动了
So that's how India and Pakistan got freedom 60 years ago. It's not been plain sailing since. There's been three wars, nuclear bombs, they're still at loggerheads over Kashmir. In 197 1, East Pakistan, with India's help, broke away and became Bangladesh. And India and Pakistan have not yet become the friends after the divorce that Jinnah hoped.
But when the dust settles on 1 94 7, that surely will come. And as for India, the tale of the last 60 years is above all the triumph of democracy.
THAROOR: Indians are filled with a sense of the possible. There is a tremendous degree of optimism about the future, which I think is all the more interesting for coming from a people who, in so many other ways, are anchored in the past.
＃话说Tharoor的上镜率真高，我到处都看到他
We've come on a journey of thousands of years and thousand of miles. A tale that began with the first migration of human beings out of Africa and ends at this point with India as a global power. Great civilisations over time develop responses, habits, cultural immune systems that enable them to absorb the shocks and wounds of history and also to use the gifts of history. Those are the habits of successful civilisations. And India has always done that, always renewing its gene pool, always being receptive to new ideas and yet tenaciously holding on to that essential vision, that way of seeing the world which is Indian.
''At the dawn of history, '' Nehru said 60 years ago, ''India started on her unending quest and trackless centuries ''are filled with her striving and the grandeur of her success ''and her failures. ''Through good and ill fortune alike she has never lost sight of that quest ''or forgotten the ideals which gave her strength. ''And today India discovers herself again. ''India, the ancient, the eternal and the ever-new. '' ＃！！！
【हाइलाइट्स】
It says this, ''The Residency is the spot ''which all Englishmen will wish to visit first in Lucknow.'' ''A place in the midst of which one can think, thankfully and proudly, ''of the events and deeds of that summer in 1857. ''On the tower over the Residency Building, ''the banner of England floated during the siege in tribute to the dead.
And that's India for you. Incomparable, endearing, forever surprising. The land of wonders.
