How is reporting history on TV different from writing a book?
It’s a different process, television simplifies, it’s a medium for showing, not for argument. The difficulty is to tell stories in a simplified way, to select stories that have resonance for the whole historical process. In a book, you can qualify your remarks, spend pages talking about the Aryans, discuss the pros and cons. Television audiences want to be taken on a journey, not down academic pathways. The challenge is to balance credibility and accuracy with entertainment. That’s why I film contemporary culture and try to relate it to the past. The audience’s imagination connects today’s people to their past. The people of Kerala or Tamil Nadu, for example, are too educated to wallow in the past, their past coexists with daily life. Tamil Nadu is the world’s last surviving classical civilisation. What do you mean by “classical civilisation”? One that’s 2,000 years old like ancient Greece or Rome. Tamil is the last living classical Indian language. The first surviving work in Tamil, a
