India or Bharat?

 

 

India or Bharat?

Shrikant G. Talageri

 

Is India going to be exclusively renamed as "Bharat" to the exclusion of the name "India"? I stopped reading newspapers and news items in the last few years and only pay attention to some particular news item when it is brought to my notice. Someone brought to my notice a tweet by Devdutt Pattanaik on this "controversy", which made me aware that there was a "controversy" to this effect doing the rounds.

I do not know if this is actually true or whether this is just an assumption drawn by many people from certain incidental occurrences. A cursory search through the internet brought up an article by Al Jazeera which lists these occurrences:

"Controversy has gripped India after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government referred to the country as Bharat on official invitations, leaving many wondering whether the name will be changed.

In dinner invitations sent on Tuesday to guests attending this week’s Group of 20 (G20) summit, Droupadi Murmu is referred to as “President of Bharat” instead of the usual “President of India”.

On the same day, a tweet by a senior spokesman of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) said Modi was attending a summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Indonesia as the “prime minister of Bharat”."

 

As I said, I do not know if the inference drawn from a few occurrences is a valid one, and whether the Indian government is indeed thinking of changing the name exclusively to "Bharat" while eschewing the name "India". It may just be paranoia on the part of critics of Modi and the BJP government.

 

On the other hand, anything is possible in the run-up to elections: any purely symbolic gesture which can stir up controversies and polarize the Hindu voters behind the BJP, without actually giving any concrete benefits to Hindus or to Hindu culture, is possible. So we have the concept of  the UCC (uniform Civil Code) being bandied about − a spectre which will cause controversies and polarization and then, after having served its purpose, be abandoned like the lame-duck CCA (Citizenship Amendment Act 2020: see my article "Hinduism vs. Hindutva - Oxism vs. oxatva") − while everyone is silent on concrete measures like extending the scope of articles 25-30 of the constitution equally to all Indian citizens, which may not cause the desired controversy and resultant polarization of Hindu votes, while at the same time may prevent politicians (including BJP politicians) from misappropriating and looting Hindu temple funds and properties.

 

[Extending the scope of articles 25-30 will actually empower Hinduism, and prevent Hindu sects and groups from striving to prove that they are not Hindus in order to get the benefits of these articles, as the Ramakrishna Mission was once forced to try to do. But it will not stoke reactions from the "minorities" and consequently polarize Hindu voters, since the minorities have nothing to lose: after all, Syed Shahabuddin of the BMAC was the only MP to seriously try to introduce a bill in Parliament to this effect, which of course received no support at all from the BJP, since all the parties are united in preserving their right to loot the funds and properties of Hindu temples, while these articles prevent them from being able to similarly loot the funds and properties of Muslim and Christian religious bodies].

 

But to return to the question of India vs. Bharat, the same article in Al Jazeera correctly points out: "In its constitution, the world’s most populous country is known as India and Bharat. Hindustan (“land of the Hindus” in Urdu) is another word for the country. The three names are used interchangeably officially and by the public.

However, around the world, India is the most commonly used name."

 

Also, though I would not generally like to be on the same plane as Shashi Tharoor, what he says in this matter, as quoted by Al Jazeera, is also quite correct:

 

"“While there is no constitutional objection to calling India ‘Bharat’, which is one of the country’s two official names, I hope the government will not be so foolish as to completely dispense with ‘India’, which has incalculable brand value built up over centuries,” Shashi Tharoor, a lawmaker for the Indian National Congress party, posted on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.

“We should continue to use both words rather than relinquish our claim to a name redolent of history, a name that is recognised around the world,” he added."

 

This "debate" is raising up all kinds of foolish or plainly incorrect statements and comments, and is also raising all kinds of unnecessary controversies regarding the three names for our land. So let me clarify the subject as follows:

 

I. Incorrect Statements.

II. India, Hindustan and Bharat.

III. Which "Bharata"?

 

 

I. Incorrect Statements

 

The Al Jazeera article contains a few incorrect statements as well:

 

"The name is a Sanskrit term found in scriptures written about 2,000 years ago. It refers to an ambiguous territory, Bharatavarsa, which stretched beyond today’s borders of India and may have extended to include what is today Indonesia."

 

Yes, the territory certainly stretched beyond "today's borders of India" because today's borders of India do not represent the traditional area of India but only the truncated land of India that the British left when they partitioned the country. But "Bharatavarsa" certainly did not extend all the way to Indonesia! If the fact that the names "Indonesia" and "East Indies" were based on any such idea entertained by the colonial people who gave them those names, that identification should not extend to the name "Bharatavarsa". In that case, we should also extend the meaning of the name "Bharatavarsa" to the Americas because the people of that land were called "Indians" by the European invaders.

 

Al Jazeera also writes:

"The BJP has already renamed cities and places that were linked to the Mughal and colonial periods. Last year, for instance, the Mughal Garden at the presidential palace in New Delhi was renamed Amrit Udyan.

Critics said the new names are an attempt to erase the Mughals, who were Muslims and ruled the subcontinent for almost 300 years, from Indian history."

 

I am also broadly in agreement with this. But not in the sweeping way that the article puts it. We cannot and should not erase history of any kind.  As Sita Ram Goel used to repeatedly point out, the need is not to ban or erase historical memories, but to keep them alive. History is history − whosoever's history it may be. Sita Ram Goel opposed the petition to ban the Quran as he wanted Hindus not to be made unaware of what the Quran said: he wanted people to read and understand exactly what it represented. Likewise, the whole of Indian history is Indian history: we have to know and remember what each historical phase represents, not wipe it out of records and memories.

 

But in the matter of changing place names, renaming is valid when replacing the names of cities and towns which originally had Indian names which were changed by others: e.g. Allahabad vs. Prayagraj. But it is not valid when renaming buildings, roads, railway stations, towns and cities, etc. which are named after their original founders or builders, whoever those founders or builders may be. That amounts to erasing and falsifying history and reeks of the Orwellian world of 1984.

 

I came upon this "debate" because someone sent me a tweet by Devdutt Pattanaik. While I do not want to go into the details of that particular controversy between two individuals, both of whom are partly right and partly wrong, the following statement in that tweet must be answered:'

 

"Sanyal says: Battle of Ten Kings happened on the banks of Purushni or Ravi in West Punjab (Pakistan) FACT: It did start on the banks of Ravi but later moved to Yamuna for the final phase in RV 7.19. The aftermath of this war was the establishment of Kuru Kingdom which does correspond with Kurukshetra.".

 

As on previous occasions when I referred to him, Pattanaik gets into issues (Linguistics, Rigveda, etc.) on subjects in which he is totally ignorant:

 

1. The Battle of Ten Kings did "happen"on the banks of Parushni or Ravi in West Punjab, but it did not "start" there and "later" move on to the Yamuna. The Battle of Ten Kings refers only to the battle on the Parushni, to the west. The battles on the Yamuna, to the east, were not connected with the Battle on the Parushni, although both were part of Sudās' campaign of expansion and conquest in all directions. The enemies on the western front (ancestors of the later Iranian, Armenian, Greek and Albanian speakers) moved further west, into Afghanistan, where they were again encountered by the descendants of Sudās (Sahadeva and Somaka) in the Vārṣāgira battle recorded in both the Rigveda and in Iranian texts and traditions. The enemies on the eastern front remained in India in Puranic and historical times.

 

2. The aftermath of this war was not the establishment of the Kuru kingdom "which does correspond with Kurukshetra". The battles of Sudās took place in the Early Rigvedic period, while the Kuru kingdom was established more than a thousand years later in the very latest part of the Late Rigvedic period (so late that there is no reference to the Kurus in the Rigveda). And, while both Sudās and the Kurus were Pūrus,  it is not clear from the available records whether they belonged to the same branch or subtribe of Pūrus.

 

And as for "Kurukshetra", it is the post-Kuru (and post-Rigvedic) name for the area known in Rigvedic times as Vara-ā-Pṛthivyā or Nābhā- Pṛthivyā. The word Kurukshetra is not found in the whole of the Rigveda or even in the the three following Veda Samhitas (Yajurveda, Samaveda and Atharvaveda). But the area, under the above names, and on the banks of the Sarasvatī  and its tributaries the Āpayā and Dṛṣadvatī , was already the Homeland of the  Pūrus and of the ancestors of Sudās, long before the Battle of Ten Kings. In fact, Sudās started out his campaign of conquest east and west after performing a yajña in this very area, with Viśvāmitra as his priest, even before he replaced  Viśvāmitra with Vasiṣṭha and attained success on all frontiers.    

But, as I said above, beyond replying to this very incorrect statement, I have no interest in participating in the Pattanaik-Sanyal dispute. So let me move to the main issue of the three names for our land.

 

 

 

II. India, Hindustan and Bharat

 

As I pointed out earlier above, all the three names are equally valid. But let me go into each of them:

 

 

INDIA:

 

The Al Jazeera article (to which I am mainly restricting my response), also tells us:

 

"Naresh Bansal, a BJP member of parliament, said the name “India” is a symbol of “colonial slavery” and “should be removed from the constitution”.

“The British changed Bharat’s name to India,” Bansal said in a parliamentary session. “Our country has been known by the name ‘Bharat’ for thousands of years. … The name ‘India’ was given by the colonial Raj and is thus a symbol of slavery.”"

 

This extremely foolish statement represents a kind of "cancel culture" present, strangely enough, among a section of staunch Hindus. Some people even go to the utterly fatuous extent of insisting that the word "Hindu" is likewise originally given by outsiders and should therefore be completely eschewed and replaced by some word like "Sanātana". Lokmanya Tilak had likewise, defined "Hindu" as, among other things, one who believes in "the ultimate authority of the Vedas". None of these Abrahamic-inspired self-appointed re-namers or re-definers of Hinduism and the word "Hindu" would be able to explain whether it would still be possible to retain within the Hindu fold Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, and followers of so many Pagan tribal belief-systems and even many sects, sub-sects and communities who are definitely within the fold of the term "Hindu": many of them do not believe in "the ultimate authority of the Vedas", and most of them would not even be aware of the exact contents of the Vedas. And there is no logical reason why "Sanātana" (eternal) should be taken as representing Hindu sects like Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism and Pagan tribal belief-systems (certainly no text defines all these various belief-systems with this word).

 

But even if we assume (wrongly) that the "British changed Bharat’s name to India", it must be noted that most of the peoples, religions and nations of the world are known by names given to them by outsiders. As per Muslim traditional records, the name "Muslim" itself (original meaning akin to "one who has surrendered") was originally a name derisively used by Pagan Arabs in reference to Arabs who became the followers of Mohammed, to indicate that they were people who had "surrendered" to him under pressure, but Mohammed turned this on its head by accepting the name and interpreting it as "one who has surrendered to Allah".

 

Germans call their nation "Deutschland" in German, and Japanese call their nation "Nippon" in Japanese, but I don't think any sensible German or Japanese thinker would want to erase massive parts of world history and historical data by insisting that the names "Germany" and "Japan" should be erased from records and memories and completely replaced by their indigenous names. Nor do I think any sensible German or Japanese, while speaking in English, would make a fetish out of referring to his own country by its own indigenous name rather than by the one normally used in English. I myself would feel foolish if I were to say "Bharat" instead of "India" on a regular basis while speaking in English. And I do not care what interpretation any chauvinist pseudo-Hindu puts on this: it is those who insist on such verbal chauvinism and politically correct phraseology who should realize that this is an Abrahamic tendency. To a Muslim, the Ultimate Creator has an Arabic name Allah (almost as if he were an Arab) and all those who believe in an Ultimate Creator but call him by any other name are sinners who are fated to suffer eternal tortures in hell! It is like a person who insists that "water" or some other single word is the Only True Name for water, and people should use this word alone to refer to that liquid element  in whichever language they may be speaking!

 

But the very idea that the "British changed Bharat’s name to India" is wrong. I give below a quotation from an unpublished/un-uploaded article on Ancient Indian History  that I am writing since a month or so (though I do not know when it will become completed and uploaded):

 

"The idea of India was so universal and ubiquitous that no foreigner was in any doubt as to what he meant when he referred to India by any name: the ancient Iranians (and through them the countries of West Asia) knew this country as "Hind" and its people as "Hindu". The Greeks pronounced the word "Hind" as "Indus" and the word "Hindu" as "Indoi". The Chinese referred to India and Indians as "Shin-Tu" among other variations of the word and other names. The medieval Arabs, Turks, and Europeans were also fully conscious of India being one distinct entity. The latter-day references to India as a "subcontinent" in no way detracts from this awareness: it just expresses this in a different way. No-one was in any doubt that he had reached "India", whether he landed up in Gandhara in the northwest, or on the southern coast of India, or came across the Himalayas further east.

 

This strong awareness or consciousness led to even greater extensions of the name: a large part of South-east Asia, considered as sandwiched between the two great civilizations of India and China, was known as "Indo-China", and the islands of South-east Asia were collectively called the East Indies. When the European colonialists reached America, they thought that they had reached India, and the local natives were Indians: hence the names Red Indians, American Indians, West Indies. When the apocryphal text "The Gospel of Saint Thomas" reported that an apostle had reached and been "martyred" in India, it becomes clear from the contents that the text is describing Persia under the impression that the eastward movement had already landed the "apostle" of the apocryphal tale in the fabled land of India!"

 

So the word "India" and the word "Hindu" have a pedigree which goes back to at least as long ago as the Persian and Greek invasions, and at least the word on which this name is based, the name of the river Indus/Sindhu, goes back to the Rigveda beyond 3000 BCE. And, both these words, given by outsiders, are much more complete and all-inclusive (encompassing our entire civilization, land, and joint-family of native people and religious beliefs and systems) than any word used by any single native writer or tradition to refer to any particular community or people from a more restricted point of view.

 

Further, what these Hindu advocates, of the complete rejection of the word "India", do not seem to realize is that what they are actually  doing is striking at the very concept of our great civilizational identity. If the truncated India that we have today should be called "Bharat" and not "India", then does this mean that all the foreign literature of centuries, and perhaps millennia, which talk about the greatness of Indian civilization are talking about something which is not our heritage? When a portion of our land officially broke away in 1947, calling itself "Pakistan", we called ourselves "India that is Bharat" to make it clear that we represent the original civilization: were we wrong in that? If our truncated land represents "Bharat" (and not "India") and the land which broke away represents "Pakistan" ("India" only being a fake construct created by the British, or at least by earlier "outsiders"), then indeed Harappa and Moenjodaro are not parts of "Bharatiya" culture but of "Pakistani" culture: is that the message?

 

I think Hindus should start looking before they leap into graves dug by themselves. India is definitely a completely valid name for our nation, as valid as the other two names, and originally just as deeply based on indigenous sources as the other two.

 

 

HINDUSTAN:

 

This is another of the three equally valid names for our land which is objected to by many Hindus, on the ground that this name was given by Muslims or earlier Persian sources, and is more generally used in Urdu and in Pakistan.

 

But can there be a more appropriate name for our land? Like the name India and the name Bharat, this name Hindustan was also earlier applied to the whole of our civilization (encompassing our entire civilization, land, and joint-family of native people and religious beliefs and systems), and it has the additional advantage of showing awareness (even if this may not have been the original sense of the name) that our nation is the "Land of Hindus". If anything, it should have been non-Hindus objecting to this name: Hindus should embrace it with gusto.

 

 

BHARAT:    

 

Again, let me quote from my unpublished/un-uploaded article on Ancient Indian History  that I am writing since a month or so (though I do not know when it will become completed and uploaded):

 

"Jinnah, when he launched his Partition movement, tried to justify it by saying that India was not really one nation: "It only looks that way on a map". What did he mean? Well, look at the following map of the core-area of India. The very contours of the physical geography depicted by Mother Nature shout out that it is one entity ─ and one that clearly and emphatically stands out as an entity distinct from the rest of the world in general. [But then, according to geologists, India was originally separate from the rest of Asia, and part of a different continent. This continent, in the course of millions of years, slowly broke apart; perhaps parts of it got sunk in the ocean; and the part that today constitutes India moved northwards and got joined to Asia. This means that India has been geographically one unit, distinct from the rest of Asia, and the world, for millions of years]:

 

 

The above picture is not just one based on a satellite photograph of modern times: the ancient Vishnu Purana II.3.1 (even the western estimates of its date, always ultra-conservative, place the Purana, as per Wikipedia, at 400 BCE to 900 CE) clearly gives us our self-identity:

 

uttaram yat samudrasya, himādreścaiva dakṣiṇam,

varṣam tad bhāratam nāma, bhāratī yatra santatih.

 

"To the north of the oceans and south of the snowy-mountains lies the land of Bharata, inhabited by Bharatis".

 

This is not an inch-to-inch description of the area of Indian civilization any more than the above map is an inch-to-inch depiction of the borders of Indian civilization, but both are equally representative of true "in-a-nutshell" descriptions of the core area of the entity that we call Bharat or India (or Hindustan): the civilization spilt outside this core area in all directions.

 

It is not just the Vishnu Purana which, well over two thousand years ago, categorically declares the identity of this land and civilization. This consciousness oozes out from every pore of the entire gamut of ancient Indian literature, especially the Puranas and the Epics which repeatedly provide detailed lists of or references to the people, kingdoms and geographical features of every corner of India. As Sita Ram Goel points out: "Even a dry compendium on grammar, the Astadhyayi of Parini, provides a nearly complete count of all the Janapadas in Ancient India"."

 

Devdutt Pattanaik, in his tweet, takes the latest possible date for the Vishnu Purana: "People also speak of Vishnu Purana but that is a much later text and has been dated to no earlier than 300 AD." That is, 300 AD (CE) instead of the Wikipedia range from "400 BCE to 900 CE". But: (a) this is still very old, and (b) certainly shows that the compiler of the Purana is describing an established traditional viewpoint much earlier to himself, and not inventing a new name and concept, and (c) is very much older than the names of most of the countries and nations in existence today.

Therefore, this does not reject the name Bharat (or Bhāratvarṣa) in itself, and it is merely an argument to counter the "cancel India" outcry. So I will leave it at that here.

 

 

 

III. Which "Bharata"?

 

All this leaves one point, apparently repeatedly raised in this "debate": who is the "Bharata" after whom India is named Bhārat(a) or Bhāratvarṣa? Since all kinds of theories and speculations have been bandied around on the internet, I will simply lay out the facts: There are three distinct Bharatas in Indian tradition:

 

The first is the Bharata of the Rigveda. He is mentioned in the oldest book of the Rigveda, Book 6, (in VI.16.4, which refers to a Bharata in the singular: Griffith takes it as a reference to the ancestral Bharata, "Bharata of old", while most other translators take it as a reference to Divodāsa as a descendant of Bharata, i.e. as a member of the Bharata clan). The Bharatas of the clan of Divodāsa and Sudās and their ancestors and descendants are the Pūru subtribe who are the First Person People of the Book in the Old Rigveda (Books 6,3,7,4,2). In the New Rigveda (Books 5,8,1,9,10), the Rigveda becomes a more broadly Pūru book, but the Bharata sub-tribe is still the core of the Rigveda. Also, their family deity, Bhāratī (practically a Rigvedic predecessor of Bhāratmātā) is one of the Three Great Goddesses of the Rigveda revered in all the ten Āprī-Sūktas (Family Hymns). In post-Rigvedic times, all the different tribes and sub-tribes of Pūrus claim Bharata as their ancestor.

 

As Vedic culture spread all over the rest of northern India and into the south as well, the tradition of an ancestral Bharata became a central idea; and the Great Epic, the Mahābhārata, centered around the conflicts between the Pāṇḍavas an Kauravas, both also Pūrus claiming descent from the ancestral Bharata, further strengthened this tradition. So that by Mauryan times, when the traditional accounts came to be set down in writing, Bharata as an ancestral figure and Vedic culture as the central umbrella culture of India led to the name Bhārata or Bhāratvarṣa as a traditionally accepted native name for the entire geographical expanse of Indian civilization.

 

The second Bharata is the son of Duṣyanta and Śakuntalā, the central figures in a story found in the Mahābhārata and the epics. The story is one of the most well-known episodes in Sanskrit Drama (Kalidasa's Abhijñānaśākuntalam) and later literature and Drama culture in India (e.g. the first Sangeet Natak in Maharashtra in 1880). Many people mistakenly take this Bharata to be the ancestral Bharata.

 

However, this is unlikely, because Duṣyanta is supposed to be the Pūru king of Hastinapura, which is totally unknown to the Vedic literature (to all the four Samhitas, as well as to the Brahmanas, Aranyakas and principal Upanisads). So he is clearly not an ancestral king of the pre-Old-Rigveda era. And Śakuntalā is supposed to be the daughter of Viśvāmitra, who is the priest of Sudās in the Old Rigveda. So clearly, whatever elements in the story may be based on facts, the identification of this Bharata with the ancestral Bharata is totally out of the question.

 

The third Bharata is an Ikṣvāku king in Jain literature who is supposed to be the son of the pre-Mahavir Tīrthaṅkara Rishabhdev. He is traditionally held in Jain texts to be the first Emperor or Chakravartin of ancient India. But whatever else may or may not be correct about these traditions, one claim made by many people, that he is the ancestral Bharata after whom the nation is named, is certainly wrong.