Incredible India Travel | Social Impact & Culture Tours

In 1666 Isaac Newton invented calculus. This is what most of the world was taught and what most of the world still believes. There is a problem with this version of events. A mathematician in Kerala had already done it. In the 14th century. And the Cambridge University Professor of Mathematics George Gheverghese Joseph has stated that the priority of Kerala developments in the calculus over that o...

Why does Punjab celebrate its new year in April with bonfires and a festival built around cut wheat, while Tamil Nadu celebrates its harvest festival in January, watching a pot of rice boil over with milk and jaggery. Why do the temples of the south rise in towering gopurams visible from a distance, while many temples of the north sit smaller and more intimately set into a riverbank or hillside. W...

In 1905, a young Sanskrit scholar named Rudrapatna Shamasastry was working through a heap of palm leaf manuscripts in the Mysore Oriental Library, doing the kind of routine cataloguing work a librarian does every day. Then he opened one written in the Grantha script, and the words stopped being routine. He was holding the Arthashastra. Chanakya's lost political treatise, written for the Mauryan Em...

In 1959 a computer scientist named John Backus invented a notation for describing the grammar of programming languages. It is called Backus Naur Form, and it is one of the foundational tools of modern computer science. Every programming language you have ever used was at some point defined using a descendant of this notation. In 1967 a researcher reading an old Sanskrit grammar wrote a letter to t...

There is a building on College Street in Kolkata. It was built in 1875. Its architecture is the confident Victorian Gothic of a colonial institution that expected to last. Tall windows. High ceilings. A sweeping central staircase. A laboratory called the Baker Laboratory that became one of the most productive scientific research spaces in Asia. Its name is Presidency College. And the list of peopl...

In 1854 a British engineer looked up at the Western Ghats and proposed building a railway through them. His superiors said no. He proposed it again. No. Again. No. For decades the answer was always some version of the same thing. The gradients were too steep. The terrain was too difficult. The engineering was impossible. The Western Ghats rose over 1800 feet in sixteen miles between the Konkan coa...

On the afternoon of October 4 1929 a 28-year-old German physicist arrived at the house of a 68-year-old Indian poet in Kolkata. The physicist had two years earlier published the uncertainty principle, one of the most philosophically disturbing discoveries in the history of science. It had shaken the foundations of physics so completely that he himself could not fully make peace with what he had fo...

Europe discovered calculus in the 17th century. A mathematician from Bijapur in Karnataka had described its foundational concepts five hundred years earlier. Europe developed modern algebra in the Renaissance. A Jain mathematician working under a Rashtrakuta king in Karnataka had already written the most comprehensive algebra textbook in the ancient world. Europe credits the decimal system to the...

In 1854 a British engineer looked up at the Nilgiri Hills and proposed building a railway to the top. His superiors said no. He proposed it again. No. A third time. No. A fourth time. No. For forty-five years, through multiple proposals, multiple engineers, multiple committees and multiple rejections, the answer was always some version of no. The gradients were too steep. The terrain was too diffi...

There are twelve Jyotirlingas in India. There are fifty-one Shakti Peethas. And there is only one place in the entire world where both exist simultaneously within the same sacred complex. That place is Deoghar in Jharkhand. And the story of how it came to hold both of these extraordinary designations begins not with a god but with a demon. The most devoted demon who ever lived. A demon whose love...

In 1498 Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope, crossed the Indian Ocean and arrived at the port of Calicut on the Kerala coast. Western history calls this the discovery of India. There is a 2000-year-old document that destroys this claim completely. It was written in approximately 60 CE by a Greek-speaking Egyptian merchant who had almost certainly made the journey himself. It is calle...

In the last decade of the 18th century, the most formidable military adversary the British East India Company ever faced in South India looked at a small town 60 kilometres from his capital and made a decision that would outlast his empire, his wars and his death in battle by over two centuries. Tipu Sultan decided to make Channapatna the toy capital of India. He created an international export ma...

In the year 528 BCE, on the banks of a river in what is now the state of Bihar in India, a prince from Nepal sat beneath a fig tree and refused to move until he understood the nature of suffering. He sat for 49 days. On the 49th day, as the last star faded from the morning sky, Siddhartha Gautama attained enlightenment and became the Buddha. The fig tree still stands. Not the same tree but a direc...

Most people who visit Goa think its history began in 1510. That was the year the Portuguese arrived, defeated the Bijapur Sultanate and established the colony that would last 451 years. They left behind extraordinary churches, elegant colonial architecture and a cultural legacy that defines the Goa the world knows today. But Goa's history did not begin in 1510. It began two thousand years before t...

In 1500 AD Hampi was the second largest city in the world. Only Beijing was bigger. Its markets stretched for kilometres in every direction. Its temples were sheathed in gold. Its streets were thronged with merchants from Portugal, Persia, Arabia and China who had come to trade with the most powerful empire in South India. The Tungabhadra River flowed through its heart, its banks lined with ghats...

Ask any wildlife enthusiast in India to name the country's tiger reserves and you will hear the same answers every time. Ranthambore. Kanha. Corbett. Bandhavgarh. Pench. Tadoba. Nobody mentions Amrabad. This is extraordinary. Because Amrabad Tiger Reserve in Telangana is one of the largest tiger reserves in India, covering approximately 2611 square kilometres of the Nallamala Hills in a landscape...

There is only one place on earth outside Africa where you can see lions in the wild. Not Kenya. Not Tanzania. Not Botswana or Zimbabwe or any of the African landscapes the world associates with the word lion. One forest. In Gujarat, India. The Sasan Gir National Park and Wildlife Sanctuary in the Saurashtra peninsula is the last home on earth of the Asiatic lion. Approximately 700 individuals. One...

Six hundred years ago a sultan stood on the banks of the Sabarmati River and built a city. Not just any city. A city of extraordinary ambition and extraordinary intelligence, planned around a system of residential clusters called pols that would prove so well-designed, so socially sophisticated and so architecturally brilliant that UNESCO would recognise them six centuries later as an outstanding...

There is a city in India that has been continuously inhabited for over three thousand years. Not ruins. Not archaeological remains. Not a restored heritage precinct with ticketed entry and an audio guide. A living, breathing, working city. Where the same families have been performing the same rituals on the same stone steps beside the same river for dozens of generations. Where Sanskrit scholars s...

Just before dawn in a forest surrounded by tea gardens in Assam, something extraordinary happens. A sound rises from the canopy that has no equivalent anywhere else in India. It begins as a series of low tentative calls, a male finding his voice in the dark before the light arrives. Then a female answers from a neighbouring tree. And then the two voices weave together into a duet of such power and...

Nobody told you about Dinesh Soni. He is not in the guidebooks. His lassi bar does not have a website. He was a professional wrestler for years, competing in the circuits of North India with the kind of physical ferocity that professional wrestling demands. And then one day he stopped wrestling, walked to a corner of Mint Street in a Chennai neighbourhood called Sowcarpet, set up a lassi bar and h...

There is a city in India where people book flights specifically to eat. Not to see monuments. Not to visit museums. Not to tick sights off a bucket list. To eat. Hyderabad has become one of the most powerful food travel destinations on earth, a city where the biryani alone is worth the journey, where a cup of tea paired with a single biscuit has become a cultural institution, where royal palace ki...

Close your eyes for a moment and imagine a lane so narrow that two people can barely pass each other. The walls on either side are blackened by centuries of cooking smoke. The air is thick with cardamom, saffron and slow-cooked meat. A man stands at a griddle that his great-great-great-grandfather stood at before him, rolling out stuffed parathas using a recipe that has not changed in seventeen ge...

A thousand years ago the most powerful maritime empire in Asian history ruled from a river delta in Tamil Nadu. It launched a naval campaign that crossed the Bay of Bengal and defeated empires in what is now Malaysia and Indonesia. It built temples whose towers were the tallest buildings in India. It perfected a tradition of bronze casting whose finest works now stand in the Metropolitan Museum of...

In a small village in Andhra Pradesh, 120 kilometres from Bangalore, there is a 500-year-old stone pillar that does not touch the ground. It is not an optical illusion. It is not a recent accident. It is not a structural flaw. It is a 20-ton granite column that has hung suspended above the floor of the Veerabhadra Temple at Lepakshi since 1530 CE, supporting part of the roof above it without any c...