The Soul of India

India defies every attempt at definition. You’d run out of ink or paint or videotape before you’d even begun to find her, let alone capture her. Take the landscape. There are jungles straight out of Rudyard Kipling, deserts to make Lawrence of Arabia weep with envy, the highest mountains in the world, tropical beaches, fading colonial hill stations, crowded cities. Indians are as varied as their landscapes–more than one billion people, thousands of languages, and almost every religion known to man. And somehow all of it has mixed into one vast, raucous, and unruly democracy.

To make The Soul of India, documentary filmmaker Rick Ray spent six months touring the country, from its low backwaters to heights over 18,000 feet, through its myriad of cultures, even weathering earthquakes and riots in order to patch together a unique and personal tapestry of this nearly indescribable country.

The film visits familiar sites like the Taj Mahal, the palaces and forts of Rajasthan, the Himalayas, and the River Ganges. But it also explores an India that few visitors see – a land of villages and inner cities, a country in which reside the hopes and dreams of one-sixth of the earth’s population.

Once you’ve glimpsed the kaleidoscope of color, the encyclopedia of experience that is India, you’ll probably agree that you have discovered the most colorful and fascinating country on earth.