The achievements of the country’s golden age including how India discovered zero, calculated the circumference of the earth and wrote the world’s first sex guide the Kama Sutra. In the south the giant temple of Tanjore built by emperor Rajaraja Chola, and traditional bronze casters working as their ancestors did 1,000 years ago are shown Michael Wood calls Tamil Nadu, “the only surviving Classical Civilization in the world”.
In an interview to The Hindu Michel Wood said “One that’s 2,000 years old ancient Greece or Rome. Tamil is the last living classical Indian Language. The first surviving work in Tamil, a 300 BC book on linguistics refers to an already existing culture. Tamil is older than any modern European language. I wanted to remind Western centric audiences, who implicitly assume the superiority of Western modes of thought that Tamil is one of 23 official Indian languages with a literature comparable to any in the West. It makes viewers sit up and question their assumptions.
