Hindustan and Bharat, Sanatan Dharma and Hindu Dharma: How Savarkar defined them

The row over Bharat and India comes at a time another controversy, over DMK leader Udhayanidhi Stalin’s remarks on Sanatan Dharma, is yet to die down. Hindutva ideologue Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, in his seminal work Essentials of Hindutva, has dealt with all these topics — the names Hindustan and Bharat, and the difference between Sanatan Dharma, Hinduism, and Hindutva. Here’s what he said.

Aryans and the Sapta Sindhu

Savarkar says that the word Hindu and Hindustan best describe the people who lived between Sindhu and Sindhu — the river Indus or Sindhu in the north and the Indian Ocean in the south. He says that while the name ‘Sindhu’ was given by the Aryans, and S is replaced by H in both Persian and Prakrit, the Aryans could have possibly picked the name already being used by the local tribes living in the region — thus seeking to establish the word as firmly indigenous.

He says that while it is difficult to state when the first band of Aryans made the banks of the Indus their home, “yet certain it is that long before the ancient Egyptians, and Babylonians had built their magnificent civilization, the holy waters of the Indus were daily witnessing the lucid and curling columns of the scented sacrificial smokes and the valleys resounding with the chants of Vedic hymns — the spiritual fervour that animated their souls.”

The Indus river in Ladakh. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Savarkar says the Aryans called themselves the Sapta Sindhus after the seven rivers “presided over by the Sindhu”. “Out of their gratitude to the genial and perennial network of waterways that run through the land like a system of nerve-threads and wove them into a Being, they very naturally took to themselves the name of Sapta Sindhus, an epithet that was applied to the whole of Vedic India in the oldest records of the world, the Rigveda itself.”

He says that the word ‘Hapta Hindu’ can be found in the Avesta, the ancient collection of Zoroastrian religious texts, and the name soon spread beyond Persia.

He then goes on to argue that the name Sindhu could be older than the Aryans, who borrowed it from the friendlier of the tribes who inhabited this land before their arrival. “…it is quite probable that the great Indus was known as Hindu to the original inhabitants of our land and owing to vocal peculiarity of the Aryans it got changed into Sindhu when they adopted it by the operation of the same rule that S is the Sanskritised equivalent of H. Thus Hindu would be the name that this land and the people that inhabited it bore from time so immemorial that even the Vedic name Sindhu is but a later and secondary form of it.”

Hindustan and Bharat

Savarkar says the word Bharat came about when the “centre of gravity” shifted from Sapta Sindhu to the Gangetic delta. “The terms Aryawarta or Bramhawarta were not so suitable as to express the vast synthesis that embraced the whole continent from the Indus to the sea and aimed to weld it into a nation. Aryawarta as defined by the ancient writers was the land that lay between the Himalayas and the Vindhya…. it could not serve as a common name to a people that had welded Aryans and non-Aryans into a common race…This necessity of finding a suitable term to express the expansive thought of an Indian Nation was more or less effectively met when the House of Bharat came to exercise its sway over the entire world.”

Savarkar says that without “entering into speculation as to who this Bharat was, the Vedic Bharat or the Jain one or what was the exact period at which he ruled”, it is enough to know that “his name had been not only the accepted but the cherished epithet by which the people of Aryawarta and Daxinapatha delighted to call their common motherland and their common cultural empire.”

However, he goes on to argue, “But this new word Bharatavarsha could not altogether suppress our cradle name Sindhus or Hindus nor could it make us forget the love we bore to that River of rivers.” Foreigners, too, he says, continued to identify the land with Sindhu.

He cites a more defined description given by Shalivahan, the grandson of King Vikramaditya. “The best country of the Aryans is known as Sindhusthan whereas the Mlecch country lies beyond the Indus.”

He then argues that while Emperor Bharat is gone, the Sindhu lives on forever. “The most ancient of the names of our country of which we have a record is Saptasindhu or Sindhu. Even Bharatvarsha is and must necessarily be a latter designation besides being personal in its appeal… The name that associates and identifies our nation with a river like that, enlists nature on our side and bases our national life on a foundation, that is, so far as human calculation are concerned, as lasting as eternity.”

Savarkar On Sanatan Dharma, Hindu dharma, and Hindutva

Savarkar describes the followers of Sanatan Dharma as those who recognise the authority of Shruti, Smriti and Puranas. Shruti and Smriti both refer to Vedic literature, Shruti is first-hand knowledge, that which was heard (Vedas, Upanishads, etc.), while Smriti is that which is written down from memory (Upvedas, Tantras, etc.)

“The majority of the Hindus subscribes to that system of religion which could fitly be described by the attribute that constitutes its special feature, as told by Shruti, Smriti and Puranas or Sanatan Dharma. They would not object if it even be called Vaidik Dharma. But besides these there are other Hindus who reject either partly or wholly, the authority—some of the Puranas, some of the Smritis and some of the Shrutis themselves. But if you identify the religion of the Hindus with the religion of the majority only and call it orthodox Hinduism, then the different heterodox communities being Hindus themselves rightly resent this usurpation of Hindutva by the majority as well as their unjustifiable exclusion,” he writes.

He makes the distinction clearer by saying: “The religion of the majority of the Hindus could be best denoted by the ancient accepted appellation, the Sanatan dharma or the Shruti-smriti-puranokta Dharma or the Vaidik Dharma; while the religion of the remaining Hindus would continue to be denoted by their respective and accepted names Sikha Dharma or Arya Dharma or Jain Dharma or Buddha Dharma. Therefore the Vaidik or the Sanatan Dharma itself is merely a sect of Hinduism or Hindu Dharma, however overwhelming be the majority that contributes to its tenets.”

About Hindutva, he says, “Hindutva is not a word but a history. Not only the spiritual or religious history of our people as at times it is mistaken to be by being confounded with the other cognate term Hinduism, but a history in full. Hinduism is only a derivative, a fraction, a part of Hindutva.”