People of the great delta who gave Asia its first Nobel laureate and founded a country for their mother tongue, the Bengalis turned language into identity.

The Malayali people of Kerala, their Dravidian language, the ancient spice trade, religious coexistence, social reform, the Kerala model, Gulf migration, and a rich performing-arts heritage.

From Ebla and Palmyra to the Umayyad caliphate and the tragedy of the modern war, the story of one of the world’s oldest and most resilient peoples.

A people of the Caucasus with a language unrelated to any other, an alphabet of their own, an ancient faith, and the oldest winemaking tradition on earth. The story of the Georgians, their golden age, their dark centuries, and their unbreakable culture of hospitality.

Sustained for centuries by faith and the sacred memory of a battle lost at Kosovo, the Serbs rose from empire to subjugation to freedom, and their long memory became both their strength and their tragedy.

The Kashmiris of the Himalayan valley, their Dardic language, ancient Sanskrit and Buddhist learning, the ideal of Kashmiriyat, exquisite crafts, and the long tragedy of the Kashmir conflict.

Shaped by the largest land on earth, the Russians are a people of endurance, autocracy and revolution, and a cultural legacy, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, the conquest of space, that ranks among humanity greatest.

Speaking a language unlike any of their neighbors, the Hungarians arrived from the distant steppes, built a great kingdom, survived catastrophe after catastrophe, and never stopped being themselves.

A Turkic people who are Shia Muslims, divided between an independent republic and a larger community in Iran. The story of the Azerbaijanis, their land of fire, the oil of Baku, the wound of Karabakh, and a nation built at the crossroads of worlds.

From the grasslands of Central Asia to the seam of Europe and Asia, the story of the Turks, their Turkic language, the Ottoman Empire, the founding of the republic, and the arguments that still define them.