Different names of India

Many names, many sources

Over thousands of years, the land we call the Indian Subcontinent has been named both by its own inhabitants and by visitors from outside. These names come to us from ancient texts, from the accounts of travellers and pilgrims, and from inscriptions. Each name tells us something about who used it and how much of the land they meant.

Names given by Indians

• Sapta Sindhava: the Ṛig Veda, India’s most ancient text, gives this name, ‘the land of the seven rivers’, to the northwest region. Sindhava comes from Sindhu, the Indus River, or at times any river.
• Bhāratavarṣha: the Mahābhārata, written from a few centuries BCE onward, uses this name for the entire Subcontinent. It means ‘the country of the Bharatas’. In the Ṛig Veda, the Bharatas are one of the main Vedic groups of people, and later texts mention several kings named Bharata.
• Jambudvīpa: also in the Mahābhārata, it means ‘the island of the fruit of the jamun tree’, a common tree native to India, also called the jambul or Malabar plum tree. In about 250 BCE, the emperor Aśhoka 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 this became the usual name. The Viṣhṇu Purāṇa describes Bhārata as the country lying north of the ocean and south of the snowy mountains. Today it is generally Bharat in north India and Bharatam in south India.

A Tamil poem of about 2,000 years ago also pictures the land as one: it praises a king known from Kumari in the south to the great mountain in the north, and from the ocean in the east to the ocean in the west.

Names given by others

• Persians: the first foreigners to mention India. In the 6th century BCE, a Persian emperor took control of the Indus region, so in their records and stone inscriptions India became 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: using Persian sources, they called the region Indoi or Indike, leaving out the h, which did not exist in Greek.
• Chinese: their texts say Yintu or Yindu, which also came from Sindhu (Sindhu, Hindhu, Indu, Yindu). Another Chinese word, Tianzhu, came from Sindhu too, but could also be understood as ‘heavenly master’, showing their respect for India as the land of the Buddha.
• Hindustān: first used in a Persian inscription some 1,800 years ago, and later by most invaders of India.

One land, names in many languages

Language	Name for India
Persian	Hind, Hidu, Hindu
Greek	Indoi, Indike
Latin	India
Chinese	Yintu, Yindu, Tianzhu
Arabic and Persian	Hind, Hindustān
English	India
French	Inde

India, that is Bharat

The Constitution of India, which came into force in 1950 and was first written in English, begins its very first article with the words ‘India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States’. Its Hindi version says ‘Bhārat arthāth India’. So both the name used by India’s own people and the name that travelled the world through Sindhu stand side by side.

For the whole chapter, see the Chapter 5 notes; for the textbook’s questions, see the Chapter 5 NCERT solutions.