Bettany Hughes is back on her travels, relishing the pleasures — and challenges — of filming in India

 

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India sounds a bit more intense than the Mediterranean countries viewers are more used to seeing you in…

 

I honestly don’t find it challenging! I’m a lifelong vegetarian, so that helps on one front. 

 

Actually it’s amazing to be in a country where I don’t constantly have to explain that, because of course so many Hindus are vegetarian – that’s very relaxing. Honestly, I’ve only ever got ill in India once, with sunstroke when I was making a film about Buddha and I kept having to throw up between takes. In fact, the people you meet make India the opposite of challenging. We went up into the Nilgiri Mountains on this amazing railway line and met the Toda people, where the women have preserved their culture for thousands of years. And we bonded over hair frizz! With the humidity, your hair curls up and it’s a nightmare – but the women showed me how to use buffalo milk as a natural hair serum. Those moments are the opposite of challenging: they’re incredibly comforting.

 

 

 

You must have been dragged out of your comfort zone a bit?

 

Well, there was a small uprising at one point. We’d had this beautiful, peaceful day at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, which welcomes 100,000 pilgrims and visitors a day – they’ve had a real problem with Instagrammers, so I didn’t turn up in my bikini that day! Then after we left, we found out there had been this uprising just a few streets away. But being too scared to travel is dangerous, too. After all, there was an IRA bomb at the top of my road, in London, in 2001, so there’s danger everywhere if you’re looking for it.

 

 

 

Doesn’t travelling everywhere with a film crew in tow kill the “explorer” buzz?

 

Our filming days are incredibly tightly planned, minute by minute – but then we just tear them up and go with whatever we find interesting on the ground. So in Varanasi, for instance, we were there to learn about its sacred river and Hindu rituals, but I unexpectedly got invited to participate in a Pind Daan ceremony, where you honour your deceased ancestors. My mum had died recently, and it was incredibly moving because suddenly I was sitting there with somebody saying to me, in ancient Sanskrit, “Don’t worry, your mother and father have become divine now.” I wasn’t expecting that, and I was overwhelmed. So that’s an example of being open to whatever might happen when you travel: I went there as a historian, and ended up dealing with grief and having this deeply personal experience.

 

 

 

Do you have to go deep into India to find moments like that? 

 

Not at all. In even the most famous places, there’s usually something slightly unexpected you can discover. We went to the Taj Mahal – but instead of starting with that famous Princess Diana bench, where she was photographed, we went to the Taj Mahal’s back garden! There are these incredibly atmospheric, overgrown gardens, and they’re open to the public but you have to know where to find them: you actually have to go through a graveyard to get there.

 

 

Where did you visit that you’d want to return to? 

 

It would be brilliant to go back and explore more around Thanjavur. There’s this richness of landscape, but also an amazing ancient culture: the Brihadeshwara Temple there was one of the tallest structures in the world about a thousand years ago. It’s made out of granite and you can read and decode the scripts carved all the way around it – they talk about the gold and pearls being traded there, and the female conch shell players, and the 54,000 bananas given every year as an offering to the elephant god Ganesha. That’s a lot of bananas and really speaks to the natural abundance of the country back then. Then again, I returned from this trip with 22 new silk scarves, so I suppose it’s still pretty abundant…

 

ED GRENBY

 

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