On a full moon night in winter, the Great Rann of Kutch turns the ground to silver. A flat white salt desert stretching 27,000 square kilometres, reflecting the moonlight so completely that sky and earth become one. Come monsoon, it floods. Come summer, it evaporates. Come winter — the flamingos arrive in their tens of thousands.

Gujarat is a state of extremes. The longest coastline of any Indian state. The only place on Earth where Asiatic lions still roam wild. Home to two of the most significant Harappan cities in existence — Lothal, with the world's oldest known dockyard, and Dholavira, a UNESCO World Heritage city that managed water in an arid desert 4,500 years ago. And the state that gave India Gandhi, Sardar Patel, and the Dandi March.

Ray takes you through the full sweep — from the Bronze Age port of Lothal to the golden age of the Solanki dynasty and the exquisite Rani ki Vav stepwell; from Champaner's pre-Mughal mosques to Surat's role as the Mughal empire's greatest port; from the Bhuj earthquake of 2001 to Gujarat's rapid reinvention as India's most industrialised state. We meet Vikram Sarabhai, who imagined India in space and made it happen. We meet Dhirubhai Ambani, who left Gujarat as a teenager and built one of Asia's largest conglomerates. We meet Narsinh Mehta, whose 550-year-old devotional poem was Gandhi's favourite song.

We eat dhokla, thepla, undhiyu, and fafda with jalebi. We watch Navratri Garba fill a stadium with thousands of dancers for nine straight nights. We stand at Somnath Temple above the Arabian Sea. And we learn that in Gujarat, commerce and culture have never been in conflict — they have always been the same impulse.

New episodes every Tuesday at 7pm. Next week — Haryana.

There is a word in Konkani — borrowed from Portuguese, worn smooth by four centuries of use — that captures something no other Indian language has quite managed to name. Susegad. Quiet. Contented. Unhurried. It is the philosophy of a place that spent 451 years negotiating between the world that arrived and the world that was already here.

Goa is India's smallest state by area. It was also the last to be liberated — not in 1947 when the rest of India became free, but in December 1961, when Operation Vijay ended Portuguese rule in 36 hours of air, sea, and land strikes. Before that came 450 years of colonial history: the grandeur of Old Goa as the "Rome of the East," the Goan Inquisition that demolished temples and forced conversions, and a Catholic community whose Konkani is laced with Portuguese words to this day.

Ray takes you through the full sweep — from the ancient Kadamba dynasty and the Usgalimal rock engravings to Albuquerque's conquest, Saint Francis Xavier's body in the Basilica of Bom Jesus, and the freedom fighters who waited decades for liberation. We meet Lata Mangeshkar, whose family roots in the Mangeshi village gave India its Nightingale. We meet Charles Correa, whose architecture recovered the Indian spatial tradition. We meet Leander Paes — eighteen Grand Slam titles from a state of 1.6 million people.

We eat vindaloo made the proper way — not the mild restaurant version, but the fierce, vinegar-sharp pork preparation that bears the name of the Portuguese vinho e alhos. We eat sorpotel, xacuti, cafreal, and bebinca. We drink feni. We walk through Fontainhas. We stand before Dudhsagar Falls. We find the 12th-century Tambdi Surla temple hidden in the forest.

And we learn what susegad actually means.

New episodes every Tuesday at 7pm. Next week — Gujarat.

India's 26th state was born in November 2000. But its history goes back thousands of years — to the ancient kingdom of Dakshina Kosala, birthplace of Rama's mother Kausalya, site of the oldest known paintings in India, and home to forest communities who have lived in relationship with this land since before recorded history.

Chhattisgarh is the rice bowl of central India, the land of thirty-six forts, and the state with the third-largest forest cover in the country. It holds 15 percent of India's iron ore reserves. It contains Bastar — one of the most biodiverse, culturally extraordinary, and politically contested landscapes in all of India.

Ray takes you through it all. The Kalachuri dynasty and the ancient Buddhist city of Sirpur. The tribal rebellions against British rule that resisted colonial authority for decades. The Bhilai Steel Plant and the Soviet-Indian industrial partnership that created a city from nothing.

We meet Guru Ghasidas, who walked village to village telling the most marginalised people of Chhattisgarh that they were equal to everyone else. We meet Teejan Bai — expelled by her community for singing, married at 12 — who became the world's greatest exponent of Pandavani and took the Mahabharata to stages in Japan and Europe. We eat Aamat — the wild, sour, forest-flavoured soup of Bastar. We stand at Chitrakote, the widest waterfall in India. And we watch the Bastar Dussehra — 75 days of ritual, the longest festival in India.

New episodes every Tuesday at 7pm. Next week — Goa.