NARRAT0R: For almost a quarter of a century,
the French financier Albert Kahn
bankrolled one of the most ambitious projects in the history of photography.
Starting in 1908, Kahn recruited a team of photographers
and despatched them all over the world.
Their mission was to produce what Kahn called
''a photographic inventory of human life on Earth''.
His team travelled to more than 50 countries
and they carried with them the most advanced camera technology.
Called autochrome, it was the first user.friendly photographic system
capable of taking true colour pictures.
Kahn's photographers shot over 72,000 autochromes,
giving him the world's largest collection of early colour photos.
Among the first of these were taken in Kahn's presence
during an epic expedition around the world.
In November 1908, the steamship Hamburg America left Cherbourg
on a transatlantic voyage to New York.
Aboard was the millionaire banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn.
In the years before this trip,
Kahn had established himself as one of Europe's richest men,
mainly by speculating on overseas investments.
Now Kahn was embarking on a trip around the world.
The journey would be part business and part pleasure.
There would be opportunities to explore profitable ventures,
but Kahn also believed that to see the world is to expand the mind.
Kahn believed if you didn't leave Europe you couldn't understand it.
If you are stuck within the horizon of expectations,
then a country you inhabit will be a mystery to you.
To Kahn, the trip also offered a chance to test a state.of.the.art camera system
that was capable of taking real colour pictures.
(TRANSLATI0N) Albert Kahn experimented
by taking long journeys abroad himself.
They enabled him to try out
what means were available for recording the real world at that time.
Joining Kahn on the trip was his chauffeur, Alfred Dutertre.
Before leaving Paris, Kahn had sent Dutertre on a crash course in photography.
In his luggage he was carrying a cine camera, two stills cameras
and over 4,000 colour and black and white photographic plates.
Dutertre would be both Kahn's companion and cameraman.
MAN: The fact that he travelled alone with his chauffeur
seems of a piece with the slightly individualistic,
loner quality which characterised Albert Kahn.
Throughout the journey, Dutertre experimented with the cameras.
He described their adventures in his diary.
''I'm in Cabin 606 with three other passengers.
''An excellent first night, but on waking I felt a little sick.
''I took photos of the Cornish coast from the starboard side of the ship.
''A newspaper printed on board was given to the first.class passengers.
''During the afternoon, I took photographs in the Ritz dining room.''
At the time,
the 22,000.ton Hamburg America was the second.biggest ship in the world.
For first class passengers like Albert Kahn,
the liner offered elegant interiors
and sumptuous meals in luxurious settings.
But on the lower decks, it was a very different story.
''There are 2,500 passengers on board ship during this crossing,
''of whom 1,370 are emigrants.''
These emigrants spent the Atlantic crossing in the bowels of the boat.
The ship's records state
that most of them came from Russia and Eastern Europe.
Many were Jewish.
Carrying their possessions in bags rather than suitcases,
they were part of the early 20th.century exodus of people
hoping for a better life in America.
J0HN H0RNE: Albert Kahn on his trip to America
finds himself travelling alongside these immigrants in steerage.
Immigrants of the classic period of immigration into America.
The kind of people who would have gone through Ellis Island
and gone on to become part of the American population.
0n the 21st of November, the ship docked in New York
and Kahn and Dutertre spent their first day in Manhattan.
Their photographs give clues to their sightseeing itinerary
during a foggy day in New York.
They passed by the city library,
over a deserted Brooklyn Bridge,
joined people strolling down Fifth Avenue
and watched trams trundling down Broadway.
(TRANSLATI0N) Albert Kahn employed the most modern technology of his time.
Choosing that technology shows that what was important to him
was to faithfully reproduce life elsewhere.
It was in New York
that Dutertre tested out their colour autochrome plates for the first time.
His shot of the city
is one of the earliest known colour photographs ever taken in America.
The Plaza Hotel had been built just a year earlier.
Towering over the traditional brownstone houses of Fifth Avenue,
the 19.storey hotel was the tallest building on the block.
Today the Plaza appears low.rise amid Manhattan's soaring skyscrapers.
After four days in New York,
Kahn and Dutertre boarded a train to cross continental America.
Their train wound through the snow.covered Rocky Mountains towards California
and the final stop on theirjourney through mainland America .
San Francisco.
Kahn and Dutertre arrived in the city
two years after it had suffered
the biggest natural disaster in California's history.
The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 had killed 2,500 people.
It destroyed 28,000 buildings,
leaving 250,000 people homeless.
At San Francisco Harbour, the travellers boarded a Pacific Mail Steamship.
0n the 19th of December, 1908, Kahn's ship docked in Japan.
Kahn had always been captivated by Japan.
He had made many influential friends there
when he'd first visited in the late 1880s.
At that time,
he'd been one of the few Westerners
prepared to invest in Japanese enterprises.
He's actually quite unusual at this time in wanting to invest in Japan.
I think it was politically difficult
and he probably had to be quite careful about it.
Soon after their arrival,
Dutertre took his employer's film camera onto the streets of Tokyo.
In one scene,
his shadow gives away his presence as he hand.cranks the camera.
Dutertre recorded Tokyo's different modes of transport, old and new.
His camera observes a Western visitor catching a ride in a rickshaw.
Tokyo's new trams as they cut through the city streets.
And young pedestrians wearing kimonos and traditional wooden shoes.
PR0F JANET HUNTER: If you look at the pictures that were taken in Japan
by Kahn's chauffeur,
there's a lot of evidence of... continuity and change, if you like.
In many of the urban scenes,
you've got streets with very traditional Japanese houses.
A lot of people wearing conventional Japanese clothing.
But then you've got modern.looking telegraph poles.
Many of Dutertre's pictures capture the everyday bustle
of ordinary Japanese life,
but others shed light on a different side of Japan .
the rarefied world of the political and business elite
who entertained Kahn during the trip.
He has contact with some immensely influential Japanese figures,
in some ways the figures
who built the modern economy that was Japan at this point.
Kahn visited one of Japan's most important statesmen,
the former Prime Minister Count 0kuma,
who had become a close friend.
''We took a car to Count 0kuma's house.
''He's an energetic and patriotic old man.
''He walks with a limp as he has an injured leg.
''An anarchist blew him up with dynamite
''for having signed the first treaty of commerce with foreign powers.''
DR ANGUS L0CKYER: 0kuma is an enormously important figure,
one of the first generation of Japanese statesmen.
He becomes the founder of the first political party
and, in that position, maintains his influence
within the Japanese political establishment.
Count 0kuma was an internationalist
who sympathised
with the forward.thinking and outward.looking attitudes
of his friend from France.
(TRANSLATI0N) The two men were well.matched intellectually.
They both believed that the next generation was the key to the future.
And they wanted to teach that generation to appreciate the world
and be open to new technologies. That was a key aim that they shared.
Kahn demonstrated his interest in the development of the young
by visiting Tokyo's new women's college.
DR ANGUS L0CKYER: You see students over books.
They're learning how to read, write and do arithmetic.
But you also see feminine accomplishments.
You see flower arranging,
you see people at their koto lessons.
What you see is really a finishing school.
(TRANSLATI0N) Some of the images show women undertaking various activities
which normally no Western photographer would be allowed to photograph.
The close personal relationships Kahn had with the Japanese elite
helped make it possible for these pictures to be taken.
Throughout,
Dutertre made several studies of the wives, daughters and mothers
of some of Japan's most distinguished families.
These images, together with his pictures of landmarks and landscapes,
are the very first colour pictures ever taken in Japan.
0n the 12th January, 1909,
Kahn and Dutertre left Japan and boarded a boat to China.
Just six weeks before Kahn's arrival, China had acquired a new Imperial ruler.
At the age ofjust two years and ten months,
Puyi had been crowned Emperor of China,
but the infant sovereign had arrived on the throne at a moment of crisis.
The empire was facing a twin menace.
Predatory manoeuvres by the colonial powers of Europe
and challenges to its authority from its own people.
PR0F JAY WINTER: 0ne of the greatest Imperial powers in the world
had lost its hold on its own population.
It had lost its legitimacy.
Anyone who had an interest in war and peace had an interest in China
being picked over by the vultures of every European state
who came there to suck the lifeblood out of this dying empire.
By the time of Kahn's visit,
China had been forced to give trading concessions to the Western powers.
This meant large sections of China's major cities
were under European and American control.
These districts had their own military
to protect the trading interests of the Western presence.
MAN: People like Albert Kahn, who was a millionaire in his own right,
may have had the feeling that China was a limitless land of opportunities.
Millions and millions of consumers who,
if they could just be awakened to the opportunities
that Western business was bringing to them,
could be made into a never.ending stream of profit.
But Kahn's interest in China wasn't primarily financial.
Pictures of the trip suggest
he was more fascinated by China's landscapes, architecture and people.
Kahn arrived in the capital during one of the bitterest winters on record.
Its residents sledged along the frozen moat
running outside Beijing's historic city walls.
In 1909, Albert Kahn had taken photographs
of what then would've been one of the single most imposing aspects
of the traditional Chinese capital in Beijing .
the city walls that surrounded the whole centre of the Imperial capital.
Kahn couldn't know at that stage, and nor could the Chinese,
that within a few years
not only the walls themselves but also the Emperor who they protected
would both be swept away.
Built in the 15th century, Beijing's walls ran 24 kilometres around the city.
Dutertre's footage shows these impenetrable defences
before they were demolished following the People's Revolution of 1949.
Today a ring road runs where the immense walls once stood.
Four of the original portals remain, including the imposing Chongwenmen Gate.
DR RANA MITTER: The gate in this picture marks an entry way
which traditionally would only have been used by the emperor and his entourage.
And in some ways it symbolises the increasing disconnection
of the Imperial Court from the wider society
in which China found itself.
The middle lane of the busy Beggars Bridge
was also built for the exclusive use of the Emperor.
But Dutertre's films, shot from a vantage point on the city walls,
show many people trespassing on the Imperial thoroughfare.
In the busy commercial district,
Dutertre filmed scenes of a China that has now vanished forever.
DR RANA MITTER: For a historian who wants to understand
the reality of everyday life,
the kind of photographs that Albert Kahn had commissioned are invaluable.
We see the ordinary people going about their everyday business
in a way that's become lost to us in the China of today.
Dutertre's observations of the lives of the porters
who ferried water from wells into the city
and the vendors selling paper butterflies
outside the Taoist monasteries
capture the vibrant street life of Imperial China.
This is really a rich historical... gold mine.
In this sequence,
a man shoos an urchin away from the steps of his Beijing home
before saluting some acquaintances who pass by.
PR0F D0R0THY K0: I have never seen men greeting each other.
There's a deep bow, a more formal bow,
and there's a...a slight gesture of greeting your old friends.
These are bodily gestures, the history of manners,
a lingering sense of the body, living in real time
in real space.
As the travellers moved through China, people were celebrating New Year.
At a monastery,
they watched men with shaven foreheads and traditional waist.length pigtails
burning incense for good luck.
0n the streets they encountered some of the women of the Manchu aristocracy,
the class that controlled Chinese society.
PR0F D0R0THY K0: All of these black and white photos
show the Manchu women riding on carriages
or parading on the streets in a group.
We can see the very elaborate make.up
in a conventional Manchu style.
Essentially, a lot of white lead powder
and very, very elaborate and deliberate painted lips.
Dutertre filmed an early adopter of a new technology .
one of Beijing's first cyclists,
riding the vehicle
that would become China's main mode of transport in the years ahead.
Kahn and Dutertre also rode the railways
that were connecting the furthest reaches of this vast empire,
an experience which might have inspired Kahn's vision to document the world.
During that round.the.world trip,
he devised the plan for an archive of the planet,
which would be a recording of the contemporary world as it existed,
those elements of it
which were doomed to disappear or those which were changing.
A kind of record of the world as it was.
For 23 days he'd witnessed a nation in transition, a people of proud traditions
living in an empire on the verge of disintegration.
Towards the end of his journey,
Kahn was filmed playing with a dog at a railway station.
0n the long journey home, Kahn would visit Singapore and Sri Lanka...
...before passing through the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean
and Italy's Amalfi coast.
But his desire to see the world hadn't abated.
Within weeks, Kahn was on his travels again.
This time he boarded a steamer heading for South America.
0nce again, the lower decks of the ship were filled with migrants,
mostly Italians seeking a new life
in South America's richest country, Argentina.
Kahn was joined on the journey by Auguste Leon,
the first professional photographer he'd employed.
When they reached South America,
they passed by Uruguay on their way to Argentina.
In Argentina's capital, Buenos Aires,
their black and whites show urban landscapes
and a glimpse of what was one of the country's main sources of wealth .
livestock.
Their ship then sailed on to Rio de Janeiro,
at the time still the capital of Brazil.
Here Leon shot the earliest known colour pictures of this famous city.
Today Rio is an exciting metropolis of more than six million people,
but when Kahn arrived in 1909, it looked like a sleepy colonial ghost town.
In the mountains above the city, there's no trace of the favelas,
the poor neighbourhoods that are home to more than a million people today.
In 1909,just a few isolated clusters of people were visible in the mountains.
After his two.month.long voyage to South America, Kahn returned to Paris
where he accelerated his plan to create a monumental archive of the planet.
He recruited another professional photographer.
37.year.old Stephane Passet had been a senior sergeant in the French army.
(TRANSLATI0N) Stephane Passet is a very interesting photographer
who has a distinctive photographic approach.
He has a strong sense of documentary accuracy,
but will make interventions to get what he wants.
Passet was an intrepid traveller. Kahn wanted him to undertake
one of the Archive of The Planet's most arduous expeditions
and return to the Far East.
Unlike Kahn and Dutertre,
Passet went overland on the Trans.Siberian Express.
The railway had been completed a decade earlier
and could now take him all the way to China.
But at the Russian border, Passet immediately ran into trouble.
(TRANSLATI0N) It was a time of political unrest.
The Russian customs officers were afraid of revolutionaries
and they insisted on the cases being opened in quite an aggressive way.
''The customs officer ordered men to break open my trunks.
''I had to physically force them to stop their vandalism.''
After freeing himself from the clutches of Russian Customs,
in June, 1912, Passet eventually reached Beijing.
In the three years since Kahn's visit, China had undergone a revolution.
The boy emperor had been removed from the throne
and on 1st January, 1912, a new republic had been declared.
Passet's shots contain evidence
of subtle but important shifts in Chinese culture and society.
DR RANA MITTER: It was, in fact, in the streets where people lived every day
that the major change could be seen
both in terms of clothes and also hairstyles.
Under Imperial rule,
the Manchus had forced men to wear a hairstyle known as a queue .
a long plait with a shaven forehead.
But in the new republic, the queue was forbidden.
Many resisted the change, but officials often severed the plaits by force.
At the same time,
China's women were also confronted with new rules governing their dress.
The binding of feet had been known in China since the 1Oth century.
0nce the preserve of the aristocracy,
by 1900 the custom had become commonplace
among women at all levels of Chinese society.
PR0F D0R0THY K0: The majority of the people
still held on to what they had known for hundreds of years
and they still found it beautiful, desirable, a sign of social standards.
And they just kept on binding.
The woman to the left,
you can see the extreme pointiness, the triangular shape of her shoe.
This is an incredible shot.
There is this sadness on her face, which is a big contrast
with the beauty of her feet.
The red lacing on her arch,
this is also up.to.the.minute 1910s fashion.
This is a wonderful piece of footage, really rare, that shows actually
how agile a woman with bound feet can actually walk.
I have never, never seen women with bound feet
walking in real time.
And the ease and the grace of it is striking.
Passet's cameras recorded continuity as well as change.
Many of his pictures are timeless scenes
from the working lives of China's craftsmen.
There are masons cutting stone columns by hand.
Rope makers working at their looms.
And farm hands using horses to draw water from their wells.
DR RANA MITTER: Amongst the most fascinating pictures
that Kahn had commissioned were of the Chinese countryside
and the life of the rural farmers living out there.
In many ways, when we look at the pictures of these people,
selling pancakes in one case,
it seems as if not much they were doing had changed.
But in the cities, some of the world's latest technologies
were already on their way.
The French engineer Rene Caudron had taken a G.2 biplane to Beijing.
0ne of the first planes to be manufactured in Europe,
the G.2 was the forerunner of those used in the First World War.
Western inventions made little impact on the lives of China's Buddhist monks.
Passet's pictures preserve them before their ways of life were obliterated
by the Maoist Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.
Passet returned with almost 500 autochromes,
a superb portfolio of the first.ever colour pictures of China
to add to Kahn's collection.
Stephane Passet headed east again,
this time to one of the most inaccessible countries on Earth .
Mongolia.
In 1911, two years before Passet arrived,
Mongolia had broken away from the crumbling Chinese empire
and declared itself independent.
Today, Mongolia is one of the most sparsely populated countries,
with few cities and even fewer roads.
In Passet's time, reaching the country was a major undertaking.
Bounded in the north by Russia and in the south by China,
Mongolia lay trapped between two superpowers.
To get there, Passet decided to take a train from China into Russia
and then through Siberia towards Mongolia.
Next he took a steamboat down the Selenga River
to the wild frontier town of Kyakhta.
Blonde children in Siberian outfits were on hand to greet him.
(TRANSLATI0N) We see the villagers
and all the people who have come to see the steamboat.
It's probably quite an event for them. We see children running and as it docks,
we see the shadow of the smoke from the steamboat.
In Kyakhta,
Passet shot autochromes of people
living at the outermost fringe of Tsarist Russia.
0nce over the Mongolian border, Passet's expedition moved south.
Pictures of his convoy suggest that back home
Kahn had pulled strings to smooth his way.
(TRANSLATI0N) What's interesting is that they have two flags .
the French flag and the Russian flag.
It proves that Stephane Passet
is travelling under double diplomatic protection.
The logistical difficulties shouldn't be underestimated.
These are very remote regions.
Crossing rivers by raft must have been pretty difficult.
The expedition went deeper into the Mongolian interior,
and Passet shot the first.known colour photographs of the country.
DR DAVID SNEATH: The hunter that we can see here,
he's wearing a rosary of beads that mendicant monks would wear
or other wanderers or people who took religious vows.
He has this remarkable old matchlock rifle
which he would use for hunting game.
With few facilities available for travellers,
Passet's entourage was forced to camp out at night.
(TRANSLATI0N) These images of Stephane Passet's convoy
are extremely interesting.
It makes us realise the difficulties faced
by the photographers during their missions.
As the countryside broke out into wide open steppes,
they met Mongolians living as they had for centuries.
Their homes were round tents, known as yurts,
made from felt stretched over a wooden lattice.
0ut on the plains,
the Mongolians were happy to demonstrate a centuries.old pastime.
Wrestling has been a national sport for almost 2,500 years.
Bouts are highly competitive.
Combatants struggle to force their opponents to the ground.
The winner celebrates victory with what they call the eagle dance.
Eventually Passet arrived in Mongolia's capital, Ulan Bator,
the national centre for commerce and exchange.
Ulan Bator was the hub of a vast trade network.
There would be horses, sheep, cattle and other livestock,
but also hides, wool, and a whole set of animal products.
Down from Russia would come timber for construction
and, in the opposite direction,
came manufactured products that Mongols wanted.
Here we get a real slice of Mongolian life
at this extraordinary historical moment.
All sorts of people pass in front of the camera.
We can see a woman, noblewoman probably with her maid passing.
We can see an official lounging on the side of the bridge
with his very distinctive conical summer hat with a button on top
and his stick which is part of the accoutrements of his office.
At one point we can see a Russian officer staring into the camera.
This shows what's happening in Ulan Bator at that time.
The Russian military are beginning to move in
as a result of political manoeuvrings of the newly independent Mongol state.
Women appear throughout Passet's pictures.
In Mongolia they enjoyed greater freedom
than in the rest of Asia.
Passet's autochromes reveal the beauty and extravagance
of their national costume.
DR DAVID SNEATH: I found it really fascinating, as a specialist,
to look at these photographs.
They're packed with all sorts of details of everyday life,
particularly things that have disappeared.
This woman looks to be a noblewoman, I think.
She's got this very distinctive headdress
and it was the headdress of a married woman.
And this characteristic style with the two horns was said to be
reminiscent of cattle,
reflecting the great importance of livestock in the culture.
In 1913, the population was predominantly nomadic,
tending cattle and sheep herds across the steppes
through the short, hot summers and long, bitter winters.
In a remarkable series of pictures,
Passet records one of the harshest aspects of Mongolian life .
the treatment of prisoners.
DR DAVID SNEATH: 0ne of the most disturbing images
is this poor woman in a box.
This was quite a common punishment at the time in Mongolia.
People would be put into a box and left.
They would be dependent on others to be fed.
You can see she can't quite reach the bowl that's placed nearby.
She seems to be desperately trying to fiddle with the locks,
but there's no chance for her to get out.
Passet has remarked
that this is punishment for a woman who committed adultery.
That seems rather peculiar.
The Mongols weren't particularly prudish,
so it's more likely she was in the box for something else.
These punishments were designed
to allow the nomads to move their prisoners with them if necessary.
You can see strips of paper on either side of his head.
That probably carries a description of his crime
so that others would know why he was being publicly punished in this way.
The writing used at the time is now extinct in 0uter Mongolia.
This script once made important announcements,
which were posted on monastery gates.
DR DAVID SNEATH: It says, in the old script,
''All those beneath the rank of the Red Prince Ruling Noble should dismount.''
Unless they were very senior noblemen,
they had to get off their horses at this point
and walk into the residence of the sovereign of Mongolia.
In Mongolia in 1913,
the head of the Buddhist monastic order was also head of state.
In Ulan Bator alone,
there were more than 20,000 monks living in around 100 monasteries.
They were led by lamas, who held great power.
DR DAVID SNEATH: He has a distinctive hat, which marks him out
as a senior official in a monastery, probably the abbot of a large monastery.
And he's wearing these beautiful golden robes.
At that time, the monks were distinguished in their rank
by the colour of clothes they wore.
Here we can see people spilling out of the monastery, all those monks.
First come the young bandi, the first initiates.
Many monasteries were crowded places.
Every young man was required to spend part of his life there.
In most, there was little privacy.
Even their bodily functions were carried out in public.
To expect them all to be saintly figures is quite unrealistic,
so the atmosphere in these monasteries
would have been more like a rumbustious boys' boarding school in some cases.
The monks of Mongolia didn't enjoy their power and prestige for much longer.
DR DAVID SNEATH: A whole lifestyle,
this incredibly rich culture of the monasteries,
was about to disappear. Within a couple of decades, nothing remained really
of the extremely rich culture
that had been so important to Mongolia for such a long time.
In the 1930s when Communists gained power, religion was outlawed
and up to 30,000 monks were killed.
Many of the monasteries were closed and the monks had to disrobe
and many of them would have been tortured and persecuted.
DR DAVID SNEATH: Who knows how many of these people survived
over the next few decades?
The eyes we see in those photographs looking back on us,
many of these people will have met their deaths
in the next 20 years or so.
Passet's images fulfilled Kahn's ambitious intent
to document the richness of world culture
before it vanished for ever.
Stephane Passet left Mongolia in the summer of 1913,
but within three months he'd returned to the East
to record a very different aspect of Asian life.
In India, he visited Varanasi,
one of the holiest places for the country's Hindu majority.
From a Hindu perspective,
Varanasi can be considered to be the centre of the world.
It's one of the most ancient cities in India.
In fact, one of the most ancient cities in the entire world.
Passet watched life unfurl before him
on the shoreline of Hinduism's most sacred river, the Ganges.
W0MAN: If you leave the camera running,
then you can begin to observe the texture of everyday life.
In that sense, the films are very valuable.
In Varanasi, the riverbank is lined with stepped wharfs known as ghats.
Each ghat has its own function.
There's the laundry ghat.
A burning ghat for the cremation of the dead.
And the pilgrimage ghat.
Many Hindus consider life to be incomplete
unless a visit is made to Varanasi at least once.
MAN: The ghats are dotted, as one can see, with many bamboo umbrellas,
beneath which are seated the pandas, or pilgrimage priests,
whose business was to welcome people who'd travelled from all parts of India.
The typical forms of practice that a pilgrim would make
upon reaching the river
would be to immerse himself or herself in the waters,
to cup his hands
and make an offering of the holy water to his ancestors and to the gods.
DR MARIA MISRA: To bathe in the Ganges at Varanasi is very auspicious.
The confluence of the waters there is supposed to be particularly sacred.
MAN: 0ne of the most important religious aspects of life in Varanasi
is that the city is considered to be an extremely auspicious place
for a Hindu person to die.
We can see a woman pouring ashes, perhaps mixed with milk,
into the waters of the Ganges.
And she will be assured that there can be
no better resting place for those ashes than in the waters of the river.
Among the distinctive people
Passet encountered were the Sadhus, India's holy men,
who rejected worldly materialism
and relinquished their homes and possessions.
MAN: This is a very striking image of Indian religious practitioners.
They are very typical of the kind of religious devotee
that you still see in India to this day.
He would be a man who has deliberately cut all ties with ordinary worldly life,
and, in fact, emphasised this division in an incredibly strong way
by smearing his body with the ash from a cremation pyre.
He wears the typical dreadlocks of the renunciate practitioner.
And other aspects of his religious lifestyle
also deliberately embrace the flouting of taboo.
Maybe religious practices involving ritual sex,
which would ordinarily be considered very scandalous.
He may take his food from a bowl made out of a skull.
As part of his initiation into this religious brotherhood,
he may even have had to eat some of the flesh from a corpse.
At this point, Hindu nationalism
was beginning to emerge as a significant political force.
Soon India's wandering holy men
would play a role in shaping their nation's destiny.
DR MARIA MISRA: These kinds of religious mendicants
often get drawn into politics,
particularly probably with the rise of Gandhi,
because Gandhi himself projects himself as a religious mendicant
and he projects the essentially political message he has
as a religious and moral message.
Just as Hindus were coming together, so were India's Muslims,
often in dramatic numbers.
DR MARIA MISRA: The presence of thousands and thousands of Muslims all in one place,
like the Friday mosque,
was something that Hindus really did find worrying
because there was no equivalent in Hindu culture.
Capable of holding 25,000 people,
the Jama Masjid mosque in Delhi is India's largest and most elaborate.
It was the final extravagance of the builder of the Taj Mahal,
the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan.
Passet filmed one of the huge gatherings
that were becoming increasingly common by 1914.
''Yesterday, Friday, I went to the Jama Masjid,
''the largest mosque in Asia.
''I filmed 8,000 Muslims at prayer.
''I took colour photographs
''from different angles throughout the ceremony.
''The crowd carried out synchronised prostrations
''lasting several seconds,
''so I now have colour images
''the like of which you will never have seen before.''
From Delhi, Passet headed north towards the frontier with Afghanistan.
He had in his sights the Afridi Muslims, who lived in the mountains.
But en route to the Khyber Pass,
there were some considerable obstructions.
''This caravan was enormous,
''more than 500 camels, as many donkeys
''and the star attractions were 20 formidable wagons
''pulled by huge elephants.''
An even more formidable obstacle
was the heavy British military presence in the area.
The Khyber Pass is the great communications route
for trade but also for military
and is regarded with extreme anxiety by the British
as the Achilles heel of Empire.
This is probably the most strategically sensitive part of the Raj,
particularly at this time.
The British administrators of the region had no intention of allowing Passet
to go where he pleased.
His request to cross the border into Afghanistan was denied.
''The English really are savages.
''The first impression I had of them in Bombay has been confirmed here.
''If I were a spy or a criminal,
''I could hardly be regarded with greater suspicion.''
Passet turned back and arrived at the city of Peshawar,
where he filmed the children of the Afridi.
A few decades later, after India's independence and partition,
these Muslim children would find themselves living in Pakistan.
MISRA: The films really bring to life
the way...the sad way, I suppose,
in which a very rich culture, a vibrant and a mixed culture,
was ruptured by the politics of nationalism.
The global journeys undertaken by both Albert Kahn and Stephane Passet
produced some of the very first films and colour photographs
of the world's most inaccessible communities.
In the years ahead, Passet would go on many more missions,
documenting lives,
recording historical events and producing unforgettable images
for Albert Kahn's Archive of The Planet.