Episode list

Hola Mohalla is a grand opera of human emotions. Where faith meets love. Honour meets glory. And the past meets the present in timeless ways... At this annual spring festival in Punjab's Anandpur Sahib, over 2 million battle-ready Sikhs, especially the fearless warrior sect of Nihangs, mark a tradition started by their tenth Guru, Guru Gobind Singh, nearly 350 years ago. Even today, when the swords are crossed, when the horses gallop, and brave young men and women display incredible daredevilry and valour, their spirits soar like a battle flag in the wind. But can this spirit, this invisible, electric energy be captured in a lens? Magnum photographer, Raghu Rai, and filmmaker Bharatbala join the faithful at Hola Mohalla to find out.

Kali. Kali. Kali. She walks the earth as Goddess Kali. With a hooked sword in her hand. Bells jangling on her waist. Eyes wild in a frenzied trance. And each vein in her body, throbbing with the rage of red. Like the River Periyar that flows into the Arabian Sea, blood streams down her face and temple, freely and hysterically. She is a komaram, an oracle, and through her devotion and complete surrender to the goddess Kali, she redeems us all. As an illuminator of the truth, a velichappadu, she breaks every barrier of caste, gender, religious norms and sexual propriety, and restores balance once again in all the three worlds. At the Bharani Festival in Kodungallur, on the Malabar coast of Kerala, faith and frenzy fuse like a fevered dream every year in the harvest season of March and April. Red wave upon wave of Komarams flood the Sree Kurumba Bhagavati temple as they always have. Century after century. Generation after generation.

Early in the morning, Ravindran Nair takes a ritual dip in the temple pond, its reverberating chants punctuating the sounds of dawn. He then gets to work, milking his cow, setting up his woodfire stove and loading a giant boiler.

Mountaineer Devyani Semwal is on a mission to scale the world's highest peaks. Raised in Mukhba, a quaint Himalayan village at the foothills of the Gangotri, her ambitions rival the formidable mountains that surround her.

For centuries in Haridwar, a unique record-keeping tradition thrives-handwritten scrolls of thumbprints and signatures maintained by Teerth Purohits, mapping births, deaths, and ancestral lineages. Centered around the sacred Ganga and its rituals, these Bahis connect families to their roots, enabling rituals for ancestors and preserving family histories. Today, this ancient practice faces challenges as younger Purohits grapple with their heritage, the flow of time, and the pull of a digital future, striving to keep this legacy alive.