It's home to the wettest places on the planet, bridges grown from living tree roots over the course of decades, and one of the few societies anywhere where property and surname pass down through women rather than men. Ray heads into Meghalaya for a chief who died resisting a British road, a coal-mining industry banned for a decade and still running anyway, and the self-declared rock capital of India, tucked into hills that rarely see a dry month.

A state smaller than most countries has produced more Olympic sporting medals per capita than anywhere else in India, invented the game the world turned into modern polo, and built its culture around a lake with islands that float. Ray heads into Manipur for the dancing Sangai deer, a two-thousand-year-old royal chronicle, and the honest, difficult story of an ethnic conflict that has shaped the state's last three years and is still not resolved.

In 1661, a king received Bombay as part of a wedding dowry and leased it out for ten pounds a year. The state that grew up around that city now produces roughly one-seventh of India's economy. Ray heads into Maharashtra for a lava plateau and a meteor crater, cave temples carved from solid rock, Shivaji's hill forts, India's first girls' school, and a political year unlike any other, including a border dispute with Karnataka that has not been resolved.