Around India in Half an Hour

It's home to the wettest places on the planet, bridges grown from living tree roots over the course of decades, and one of the few societies anywhere where property and surname pass down through women rather than men. Ray heads into Meghalaya for a chief who died resisting a British road, a coal-mining industry banned for a decade and still running anyway, and the self-declared rock capital of...

A state smaller than most countries has produced more Olympic sporting medals per capita than anywhere else in India, invented the game the world turned into modern polo , and built its culture around a lake with islands that float. Ray heads into Manipur for the dancing Sangai deer, a two-thousand-year-old royal chronicle, and the honest, difficult story of an ethnic conflict that has shaped the...

In 1661 , a king received Bombay as part of a wedding dowry and leased it out for ten pounds a year. The state that grew up around that city now produces roughly one-seventh of India's economy. Ray heads into Maharashtra for a lava plateau and a meteor crater, cave temples carved from solid rock, Shivaji 's hill forts, India's first girls' school, and a political year unlike any ot...

It's India's second-largest state, named simply for sitting in the middle of the map — and it somehow ended up with more wild tigers than anywhere else on Earth, ten-thousand-year-old rock paintings , a river that flows the wrong way, and the birthplaces of Lata Mangeshkar , Kishore Kumar , and Rahul Dravid . Ray heads into the geographic heart of India for Khajuraho 's temples, a Gond...

Forty-four rivers, a 590-kilometre coastline, and one of the odder footnotes in democratic history: in 1957, Kerala elected the second communist government anywhere in the world to ever win power at the ballot box. Ray heads down the Malabar Coast for backwater houseboats, a banana-leaf Onam feast, a Neelakurinji bloom that only happens once every twelve years, and the story of how the state just...

A bonus episode, sitting outside the normal alphabetical run: Bengaluru gets its own full hour because a city responsible for roughly 40% of India's IT exports deserves more than a few paragraphs inside the main Karnataka episode. We start with Kempe Gowda's 1537 mud fort and the interconnected lake system he built to manage monsoon water, through the British cantonment era, J.N. Tata's 1909 endow...

This is a special, extended episode — Karnataka is home turf for the host, and it gets the long-form treatment as a result. We trace the state from the Kadamba dynasty in the 4th century through the Chalukyas' temple-building at Badami and Pattadakal, the Hoysalas' astonishing soapstone carving at Belur and Halebidu, and the Vijayanagara Empire's golden age at Hampi before its abrupt f...

Ask any Indian cricket fan where MS Dhoni is from, and they'll say Ranchi instantly. Ask what state that's in, and you'll get a lot more hesitation — which sums up Jharkhand's whole situation: it produces roughly forty percent of India's mineral wealth and the country's most successful cricket captain, and still has one of the lowest name-recognition rates of any Indian sta...

In March 1959, a young man crossed some of the highest mountain passes on Earth on foot, fleeing an army he had no way of fighting, and was eventually given shelter in a half-forgotten former British hill station in northern India. He's still there. This episode uses that story — the Dalai Lama's arrival in Dharamshala, and the Tibetan government-in-exile it produced — as one entry point i...

Five thousand years ago, on a battlefield in northern India, a warrior lost his nerve and God explained why he must fight anyway. That conversation became the Bhagavad Gita. That battlefield is Kurukshetra. And Kurukshetra is in Haryana — forty minutes from Gurugram's glass towers, where employees close billion-dollar deals with Fortune 500 companies before driving home past village wrestling...

On a full moon night in winter, the Great Rann of Kutch turns the ground to silver. A flat white salt desert stretching 27,000 square kilometres, reflecting the moonlight so completely that sky and earth become one. Come monsoon, it floods. Come summer, it evaporates. Come winter — the flamingos arrive in their tens of thousands. Gujarat is a state of extremes. The longest coastline of any Indian...

There is a word in Konkani — borrowed from Portuguese, worn smooth by four centuries of use — that captures something no other Indian language has quite managed to name. Susegad. Quiet. Contented. Unhurried. It is the philosophy of a place that spent 451 years negotiating between the world that arrived and the world that was already here. Goa is India's smallest state by area. It was also the...

India's 26th state was born in November 2000. But its history goes back thousands of years — to the ancient kingdom of Dakshina Kosala, birthplace of Rama's mother Kausalya, site of the oldest known paintings in India, and home to forest communities who have lived in relationship with this land since before recorded history. Chhattisgarh is the rice bowl of central India, the land of thirt...

Before Rome was a city, there was Pataliputra. The Greek ambassador Megasthenes visited it in the 3rd century BCE and declared it the largest, most magnificent city on Earth. It was the capital of the Mauryan Empire — the first to unite the Indian subcontinent — governed by Ashoka the Great, whose Chakra sits at the centre of India's flag to this day. Bihar is where the Buddha attained enlight...

A river so wide you cannot see the other bank. Tea gardens stretching to the horizon. A one-horned rhinoceros moving through the morning mist. And a 600-year-old kingdom that repelled 17 Mughal invasions and never once surrendered. This is Assam — the gateway to India's Northeast, threaded through by the mighty Brahmaputra, and home to some of the most extraordinary stories this country has to...

India's first light falls here. Before Mumbai wakes, before Delhi stirs, the sun touches the Himalayan peaks of Arunachal Pradesh — the Land of the Dawn-Lit Mountains — and India's day begins. The largest state in the Northeast, Arunachal Pradesh stretches from the subtropical forests of the Brahmaputra plains to the permanent snowfields of the high Himalayas. It is home to over 26 major tribes an...

We begin our journey through India in the southeast — on the shores of the Bay of Bengal, in a state that will feed you, surprise you, and leave a mark you weren't expecting. Andhra Pradesh is the rice bowl of South India. Two of the subcontinent's mightiest rivers — the Godavari and the Krishna — pour through its fertile delta plains before meeting the sea. It is also home to the spiciest...

Every great yatra needs a starting point. This is ours. Before Ray takes you through the states and union territories of the world's largest democracy, he sits down to tell you everything — what Around India in Half an Hour really is, how it works, why it exists, and what you can expect every single Tuesday at 7pm when a new episode lands. This is not a show about the India you already know fr...