‘Bharat’ is perfect, but ‘India’ is hardly wrong

Due to some recent communiques from the government mentioning “President of Bharat” and “Prime Minister of Bharat”, the opposition howling in protest and representatives and supporters of the BJP not helping with their counter-protests either, speculations are rife that there would be a motion in the parliament to drop “India” officially as one of the names of this country. While the opposition is gloating with an unfounded belief that it has scared the government, a section of the ruling BJP mistakenly holds that the English-sounding name was a colonial imposition. It’s a widely held misconception here that our country alone has been subjected to a variety of names, which some people now wish to ‘correct’. There are separate names for any given ancient or mediaeval nation in different languages. In fact, being referred to by various names is an indicator of a nation’s antiquity and hence a matter of pride. If your country does not have more than one name, maybe yours is a relatively new country, formed in the modern era. Consider what the French call different countries: Bharat/India is l’Inde; England is l’Angleterre; Germany is l’Allemagne; Spain is l’Espagne; Russia is la Russie; China is la Chine, Japan is le Japon, etc. In Arabic, our country is Hind, Egypt is Misr, England is Eenkiltira, China is al Siyn etc. Our civilisation was such a rage in the ancient era that the Book of Esther part of the Jewish Tanakh and Christian Old Testament mention our nation as הֹדּוּ (Hodû) in Biblical Hebrew. If one says we do not care how foreigners treat themselves, it would not behove an ancient civilisation, which is not supposed to react impulsively to suggestions that the world has an ulterior motive to demean us with a descriptor that has nothing demeaning about it. Now consider countries that did not exist before the 20th century. None has more than one name, whatever be the language. Pakistan is nothing but “Pakistan” in all languages of the world. For, with the passage of time, languages lost their ability to name newly coined words in their respective native ways without translating. This is why while Sanskrit-speaking Mauryas referred to Alexander as Alakshendra (अलक्षेंद्र) and Persians called him Sikandar (سکندر), if today a certain Alexander introduces himself in India or Iran, Hindi speakers would call him nothing but Alexander and so would Persian speakers. This is why, these days, people speaking any language refer to a given invention by one internationally accepted word; while the rest of the sentence is in the native parlance, the terminology is what the scientist says it is. For example, people may try translating “computer” in their respective classical-era languages, but no translation will gain more currency than “computer”. Further consider how nations that are old like ours are cool about having multiple names. The Chinese call their country Zhōngguó. Every Chinese does. But while communicating to the world in English, their foreign ministers, ambassadors and other diplomats use the term “China” rather than boycotting the ‘foreign’ name of their country. In fact, it’s we who gave our northern neighbour their most popular name. Sanskrit word “China” (pronounced chee-na) travelled through at least three speech communities — Portuguese, Malay and Persian — to finally reach the English in the 16th century when Richard Eden translated the 1516 journal of Portuguese explorer Duarte Barbosa in 1555. Another ancient nation Egypt is referred to as Misr by Arabs and Mɑsˤr by Egyptian Arabs. But while they talk to the world in English, they have no problem using the ‘foreign’ word “Egypt” — from Ancient Greek “Aígyptos” — to refer to their country. They appreciate the fact that “Aígyptos” came from their own language Amarna’s “Hikuptah” (like our Sindhu became Hindu and Indus). Imagine the Chinese parliament adopting a resolution it can no longer be referred to as “China” or the Egyptian Parliament condemning the name “Egypt”! If that’s unthinkable, so would be any institutionalised attempt to expunge “India” from records of this country. The most ironic part in the bid to drop “India” is the fact that the word has the same origin as that of “Hindu”, a term that we are so culturally, religiously and emotionally invested in. ‘Our country will no longer be India’ sounds like ‘we will no longer be Hindu’! What follows is how the word evolved. One will see that “India” is not only pre-colonial and pre-invasion, it is even pre-Christian and pre-Islam. Sometime between 850 and 600 years before Christ, when the ancestors of present-day Iranians spoke Proto-Iranian, the phone of ’s’ changed to ‘h’. Thus, in the inscription of Darius I, 600 years before Christ, River Sindhu was mentioned as “Hindu” as a geographical term to describe people who lived beyond (to the east of) the river that the Greeks had already described as Indós (Romanised Ἰνδός, written in English nowadays as “Indus”) due to their own phonetic interpretation of “Sindhu”, from where Megasthenes (who lived 350 to 290 years before Christ) titled his travelogue Indica. It is possible that the Greeks hadn’t directly interpreted Sindhu as Indós. Rather, Sindhu became Hindūš first in Old Persian, from which it turned into Indós in Greek. Remember, Darius I (550 to 486 years before Christ) came generations before Megasthenes. Now, where exactly was the change of the phone of ’s’ registered? It was “heptahindu” in Avesta, the holy text of Parsis who interpreted the Rigvedic “SaptaSindhu” (the seven tributaries and distributaries of the Indus) in their peculiar way. Around this time, the Arabs began referring to this land as “ال ہند”(al Hind), based on their learning of pre-Islamic Persian. A subsequent kingdom of the Sasanids turned it “hndstn”, a word without vowels, and pronounced it Hindustan, roughly 300 years after Christ. However, none of these descriptors — from 600 BC to AD 300 — would cover the whole map of India as we know today, let alone the geographical extent to which Maurya Emperor Ashoka’s territory, Hinduism or Buddhism spread (present-day Afghanistan to Cambodia) in the ancient world. “… some of the Eastern Greek dialects of Anatolia, for instance Herodotus’ Ionic Greek (5th century BC), had lost word-initial ‘h’ — a process called ‘psilosis’ in Greek — even before they were first written down. So, it is very likely that Ionians of Anatolia took Old Persian Hinduš and adapted it as Indós and spread it to the rest of ‘Greece’, for example, by the works of Herodotus. That Ionians funtioned as the gateway to ‘Greece’ for both Persians and Indians is also seen in their respective words for Greece/Greek — yūnān and yavana/yona,” linguist Dibyajyoti Jana commented on my related post on Facebook. The Delhi Sultanate in the 13th century began calling this nation “Hindustan”, meaning “the land of Hindus” (not religion-wise), and the Mughals who succeeded them popularised the term even further. It’s important to note here that even as late as Bahadur Shah Zafar in the 19th century, Persian derivatives from Sanskrit “Hind”, “Hindu” and “Hindustan” in official communication hardly referred to the indigenous religion (or conglomerate of religions). But as Persian lost currency in the Indian populace, and they switched to the homemade Urdu, it acquired an added connotation of religion, as can be seen in letters written in personal capacity by poets of the era such as Mirza Asadullah Khan Baig ‘Ghalib’. However, these men of the 19th century were hardly the first or the only people to suggest “Hindu” was a follower of a certain religion. Centuries ago, Record of the Western Regions, a Chinese text by Xuanzang, had said it in the 7th century. Late Mughals were not even the first Muslims to say “Hindu” was a religion. ‘Abd al Malik Isami had done that in the 14th century in his Persian text Futuhu’s-salatin. And Hindus themselves did it too! “Hindu” in Gaudiya Vaishnava texts written between the 16th and 18th century in Bengali (aka Bangla) was a religious demography; the descriptor meant “not a mlechchha”. Then Christians did it. In the 18th century, English, French, Dutch and Portuguese traders began to refer to the followers of Indian religions collectively as Hindus. Specifically in the written form of the English language, Raja Rammohun Roy was the first to use it in the years 1816 and 17. But then, there was a section of Hindus for whom “Hindu” was neither a geographical term nor a marker of religion. They were rulers and subjects of princely states that began opposing British colonialism as a collective force by 1840 while maintaining that they were not Muslims or Christians. Finally, the British classified communities by religion. Until then, Indians never cared to define themselves exclusively as followers of a religion, but the consciousness of sampradaya (sect) was strong as was that of varna (vocational proclivity) and jāti (birth-based occupational identity). The reader must have noticed how reading about “India” leads one to reading about “Hindu”! Now, let’s study the etymology of “Bharat” too. Sanskrit Bhārata or Bhāratavarsha never covered the whole of today’s or Maurya period’s India either. Vedic India consisted only of present-day North India and a part of Pakistan. In the Dāśarājñá Yuddhá chapter of the seventh Mandala of the RgVeda, there were no Gujarat and Maharashtra in the west, no states of Bihar, Bengal and Northeast in the east, and no Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala in the south. The Mahābhārata — the Kurukshetra War in which was inspired by the RgVedic Dāśarājñá Yuddhá, say historians — does cover the landmass between present-day Iran/Afghanistan and present-day Cambodia, but was that a nation? One can’t be sure. It was a civilisation, no doubt. Since they were all parts of the same civilisation, they came from these faraway lands to participate in the Kurukshetra War (Shalya Parva). At the same time, there are indications that we did not consider every culture to be our own. A certain Kaliya had attacked Mathura, in search of Krishna, empowered by the boon that Krishna couldn’t slay him. Now why was this character called Kaliya Yavana? “Yavana” in Sanskrit referred not only to Greeks and Arabs of the time, it essentially translated to “aliens”, which means those were separate cultures, civilisations or peoples. Eventually, as we draw close to the present times from ancient to mediaeval to modern history, or from Sanskrit to Prakrit to branches thereof, “Bharat” gradually begins to include all the princely states where some sect of Hindus live, in several instances co-habiting with Muslims and Christians. Finally, a practical problem of orthography, which may appear merely academic but is not. In a country of diverse languages — and hence diverse phonologies and even diverse ways of spelling a given word in the Roman script — Bharat may turn “Bharath” in Tamil Nadu and districts of Kerala, Karnataka, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh that border Tamil Nadu. In speech, there are Indians who would struggle as much to articulate the bilabial plosive aspirate ‘bh’ as Anglophones of Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia etc. Then, to east Indians, Bharat is Bharot. And here’s why the orthographic and phonetic variations are not trivial or merely of academic interest. There is precedent in our parliamentary democracy that such variations are not appreciated. On 26 July 2018, the West Bengal assembly passed a resolution to change the state’s name to “Bangla” from West Bengal. The resolution was sent to the Union Ministry of Home Affairs for approval. Almost a full year later, on 3 July 2019, the Centre rejected the name change because the state had proposed three names in three different languages — “Bangla” (বাংলা) in Bengali, “Bengal” in English and “Bangal” (बंगाल) in Hindi. If variations in the name of a given place are not acceptable, why should south Indians accept the spelling “Bharat” and why should north Indians accept “Bharath”? Why should Bengalis accept either, as they pronounce the second vowel as ‘o’? Why must puritans of Sanskrit accept the absence of an ‘a’ in the end? Nevertheless, there would be no problem today in getting a nationwide consensus on the name Bharat. Even in 1949 when the Constituent Assembly was debating the name of this country, “Bharat” got more support than “Hindustan” as the synonym of “India”. This article is not about the validity of Bharat at all. To me, “Bharat” is undebatable. This piece is my reaction to the suggestion that “India” will be dropped. It should not be. Denying any part of our history may limit our geography too, mind you. The author is a senior journalist and writer. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views. 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