Class 6 Social Science Chapter 5: India, That Is Bharat Notes

India over time

The chapter opens with words of Sri Aurobindo about the spiritual and cultural unity of the people living between the Himalayas and the two seas. Today India is a modern nation with defined borders, defined states and a known population, but 500, 2,000 or 5,000 years ago things were very different. The region we call the Indian Subcontinent has had many names and shifting boundaries. Its natural boundaries are easy to see on a physical map: the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush in the north, the Arabian Sea in the west and the Bay of Bengal in the east.

India’s names have come down to us from ancient texts, from the accounts of travellers and pilgrims, and from inscriptions, both from its own inhabitants and from visitors.

How Indians named India

The Ṛig Veda, India’s most ancient text, gives the northwest region the name Sapta Sindhava, ‘the land of the seven rivers’. Sindhava comes from Sindhu, the Indus River, or at times any river.

Later, the Mahābhārata lists many regions, such as Kāshmīra, Kurukṣhetra, Vanga, Prāgjyotiṣha, Kaccha and Kerala. Together they cover the whole Subcontinent.

For the entire Subcontinent, the Mahābhārata, written from a few centuries BCE onward, uses two names. Bhāratavarṣha means ‘the country of the Bharatas’; Bharata first appears in the Ṛig Veda as one of the main Vedic groups, and later texts mention several kings named Bharata. Jambudvīpa means ‘the island of the fruit of the jamun tree’, a common tree native to India. The emperor Aśhoka, in about 250 BCE, used Jambudvīpa in an inscription for the whole of India, which then included today’s Bangladesh, Pakistan and parts of Afghanistan.

Bhārata

A few centuries later, Bhārata became the usual name for the Subcontinent. The Viṣhṇu Purāṇa describes Bhārata as the country north of the ocean and south of the snowy mountains, the Himalayas. A Tamil poem of about 2,000 years ago praises a king known from Kumari (Kanyakumari) in the south to the great mountain in the north, and from ocean to ocean. Ancient Indians clearly knew their geography well.

The name is still in use: generally Bharat in north India and Bharatam in south India. The Constitution of India, which came into force in 1950, says in its first article: ‘India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States.’ The Hindi version says ‘Bhārat arthāth India’.

How foreigners named India

• Persians: in the 6th century BCE, a Persian emperor took control of the Indus region, so the Persians called India Hind, Hidu or Hindu, their way of saying Sindhu. In ancient Persian, ‘Hindu’ was a purely geographical word, not the name of a religion.
• Greeks: borrowing from the Persians, they said Indoi or Indike, dropping the h because Greek had no such letter.
• Chinese: they said Yintu or Yindu, also from Sindhu, and Tianzhu, which could also mean ‘heavenly master’, a sign of respect for India as the land of the Buddha. The Chinese scholar Xuanzang came to India in the 7th century CE, stayed 17 years and took Buddhist texts home to translate.
• Hindustān was first used in a Persian inscription some 1,800 years ago, and later by most invaders of India.

So the names given by India’s own people, especially Bhārata, live on in most Indian languages, while the names used abroad, from Sindhu, led to ‘India’. Read more in different names of India. Answers to every question are in the NCERT solutions for Chapter 5.