The final episode relates how a foreign multinational (the East India Company) thousands of miles away gradually and almost by chance took power over great swaths 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 60 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. This epic journey "over 10, 000 years and 10,000 miles," as Wood puts it, ends overlooking the seven ancient cities of Delhi. India has been shaped and sustained by the deep-rooted equilibrium of its past, but do the ideas of the Buddha, Ashoka, Akbar, Gandhi and the rest still have lessons for India and the world today? On that question may depend not only India's future, but that of the rest of the world as well.
