Arthur C. Clarke’s Treasure Ship

In the treacherous Great Basses Reef in Sri Lanka, renowned author Arthur C. Clarke finds a submerged treasure ship with a hoard of silver coins

Rerun: Nature's Voice - Tuvan Throat Singing

Ayurveda to Big Pharma: the Wonder of Healing Plants

In a windswept mountain pass, more than a hundred years ago, a towering Afghan man hacks a Scottish trader to death. Then the killer disappears. A Bri...

A Gripping Saga of Indian Indentured Labour

When the British Empire abolished slavery in 1833, it found that African slaves would much rather not work on its colonial plantations -- even for a s...

Pandemics & Borders

The world’s borders are clamping down for un-vaccinated people, most of whom are poor and/or from the Global South. This echoes events following a 19t...

The Curse of the Kohinoor

The ‘Curse of the Kohinoor’ is this: Any man who wears the diamond will suffer a terrible fate. But is this true? Or was this simply a story that conv...

The Jewels of the Maharajas

The Jewels of the Maharajas symbolized power and a connection with the divine. Anyone who wanted to be a greater ruler would want them as a symbol of...

The Lost Port of Muziris

For more than a decade, archaeologists have been searching for the lost port of Muziris on the southwest coast of India. Incredible finds point to mar...

Season 1: Trade Winds Trailer

Not many people know of histories from the majority world, where 80% of all people live. We will tell you some of these stories in Season 1, Trade Win...

3 Ways Indigenous Knowledge Saves Biodiversity

Rerun: An Ancient Pandemic Story -- an Ayurveda Text Warns of Environmental Degradation

Bonus Episode: The Shameful Legacy of Indigenous Residential Schools

Rerun: Crooked Cats - Why is there Human Animal Conflict?

Rerun: Sir Ronald Ross learns about cholera, mosquitoes in Bangalore

British scientist Sir Ronald Ross tries to stops a deadly cholera outbreak in 1895 Bangalore. He applies learnings from the new field of epidemiology

Rerun: Ayurveda & Science

Can the great divide between Ayurveda and modern science ever be bridged? We talk to biologist Annamma Spudich who's studied traditional medicine.

We're Going on a Brief Hiatus

Chatroom 18: Drawing Famine, History of Science

Cartoonist Arghya Manna is one of the few people who portray the history of Indian science using comics. We talk to him about creating art during Covi...

Chatroom 17: Nature's Voice - Tuvan Throat Singing

From the mountains of Central Asia comes a musical form that borrows extensively from Nature. In this episode, we talk to Tuvan vocalist and composer,...

Chatroom 16: Decolonizing a Maharaja

Friederike Voigt , the curator of South Asia at the National Museum of Scotland, has been on a decade-long quest to investigate and restore the histor...

Chatroom 15: New World Coins Flows to Mughal India

From the deep mines of South America, tons of silver travel to Mughal India to fill the coffers of Emperors with precious coins

Chatroom 14: The Rise of Desi Hip Hop

South Asian immigrants in the U.S. adopted a predominantly Black and Puerto Rican form of music in the late 1990s to express their identity. It moved...

Chatroom 13: The Case of the Severed Breasts on the Windowsill

On July 1, 1800, the appearance of a pair of severed breasts on Don Cayetano’s windowsill leads to a twisting journey into the history of crime and po...

Chatroom 12: The Evolution of Indian Blues, or Bidesia

At the turn of the 20th century, the British took Indian indentured labourers to sugar plantations in Fiji. There, Indian women would sing “bidesia” -...

Chatroom 11: When Technology Meets Ayurveda

The "epic clash" of traditional medicine vs. Western medicine is really anything but when it comes to treatment. In reality, medical systems have alwa...

Chatroom 10: Encounters with India's Maneaters

We are increasingly sharing space with predators and wild animals, with deadly consequences... for the animals, that is... not so much the humans.. or...

Chatroom 9: Disease Goddesses and Scapegoats

When your village, city or the world are affected by disease, medical treatment is just one intervention. Another is rituals and spiritual practices....

Chatroom 8: A disease sleuth in Bangalore

We follow British scientist Ronald Ross as he tries to stop a cholera outbreak. At first he's stumped. The disease shows up in one place and then jump...

Chatroom 7: An Ancient Pandemic Story

Atreya, the renowned teacher of Ayurveda, is walking with his pupils on the banks of the river Ganga in Kampilya. Ominous signs of an epidemic shadow...

Chatroom 6: You're being tracked: Pandemic Capitalism

Disaster brings change. We discuss surveillance and public health during Covid-19. These days, it’s not only governments capturing raw data about us;...

Chatroom 5: Ayurveda & Science

Can the great divide between traditional and allopathic medicines ever be bridged? We talk with Annamma Spudich, a cell and molecular biologist who ha...

Chatroom 4: The water carriers of Calcutta and other matters

Why do so many colonial cities in the developing world not have piped water? Many parts of old cities in India still employ bhistis, or water carriers...

The Most Ancient Medicine (Chatroom #3)

Folk healing is the most ancient form of medicine. It sprung from common kitchen ingredients — when humans realized that spices, herbs, and foods not...

When Plague Hit Bombay (Chatroom 2)

We visit Bombay Presidency at the turn of the 20th century. The port city was a major economic hub, so, when rats onboard ships from Hong Kong carried...

Medicine at the Border (Chatroom #1)

Historically, border control arose out of a combination of infectious disease and the global color line. But this frame of understanding a disease out...

Trailer

Visit Muziris, a port on the Malabar coast, described by ancient poets and captured in a trade document called the Muziris Papyrus. Then, hear the co-...