Michael Wood’s “10,000-year epic” reaches the time of the British occupation of India — the Raj — and India’s struggle for freedom.

Michael Wood's "10,000-year epic" reaches the time of the British occupation of India - the Raj - and India's struggle for freedom. Wood begins in South India, where viewers learn how the forerunner of modern multinational corporations, the British East India Company, used private armies to control much of the Indian subcontinent. In Calcutta, he traces the beginnings of a world economy and describes an 18th-century British general who "went native" and adopted Hinduism. He samples the magical culture - and food - of the city of Lucknow and outlines its terrible fate in India's great rebellion against the British in 1857. He recounts the story of the enigmatic Briton, "the rebel in the Raj," who helped found the Indian freedom movement. After the First World War, the Amritsar massacre helped speed the rise of Gandhi and Nehru and the fateful events that led to the partition of India in 1947 - an episode whose repercussions are felt to this day. The series ends as India rises again to be the global giant she has been for most of her amazing history.