NCERT panel suggests replacing ‘India’ with ‘Bharat’: A brief history of the nation’s names

Since then, speculation has been rife about a “name-change” from ‘India’ to ‘Bharat’.

But where does the name ‘Bharat’ come from, in the first place?

The roots of “Bharat”, “Bharata”, or “Bharatvarsha” are traced back to Puranic literature, and to the epic Mahabharata. The Puranas describe Bharata as the land between the “sea in the south and the abode of snow in the north”.

Bharata is also the name of the ancient king of legend who was the ancestor of the Rig Vedic tribe of the Bharatas, and by extension, the progenitor of all peoples of the subcontinent.

Writing in January 1927, Jawaharlal Nehru alluded to the “fundamental unity of India” that has endured from “the remote past”: “a unity of a common faith and culture. India was Bharata, the holy land of the Hindus.” (Selected Works Vol. 2)

And what about ‘India’ and ‘Hindustan’?

The name Hindustan is thought to have derived from ‘Hindu’, the Persian cognate form of the Sanskrit ‘Sindhu’, which came into currency with the Achaemenid Persian conquest of the Indus valley that began in the 6th century BCE. The Achaemenids used the term to identify the lower Indus basin, and from around the first century CE, the suffix “stan” came to be used with the name to create “Hindustan”.

The Greeks, who had acquired knowledge of ‘Hind’ from the Achaemenids, transliterated the name as ‘Indus’. By the time the Macedonian king Alexander invaded India in the 3rd century BC, ‘India’ had come to be identified as the region beyond the Indus.

By the time of the early Mughals (16th century), the name ‘Hindustan’ was used to describe the entire Indo-Gangetic plain — Hindustan referred to the territories of the Mughal emperor, across South Asia.

From the late 18th century onwards, British maps increasingly began to use the name ‘India’, and ‘Hindustan’ started to lose its association with all of South Asia. “The adoption of India suggests how colonial nomenclature signalled changes in perspectives and helped to usher in an understanding of the subcontinent as a single, bounded and British political territory,” Historian Ian J Barrow wrote in his article, ‘From Hindustan to India: Naming Change in Changing Names’ (2003).

What did the Constituent Assembly decide?

“India, that is, Bharat, shall be a Union of States.” Thus goes the first line of Article 1 of the Constitution of India. But this was not adopted without debate.

Some insisted on underlining ‘Bharat’ as the primary name for the country. Citing the example of the Irish Constitution, Hari Vishnu Kamath argued that ‘India’ was only an English translation of ‘Bharat’.

“The Constitution of the Irish Free State reads: “The name of the State is Eire, or, in the English language, Ireland,”” Kamath said.

Others, such as Hargovind Pant, “wanted Bharatvarsha and nothing else”. “We must know that this name was given to our country by foreigners who, having heard of the riches of this land, were tempted towards it and had robbed us of our freedom in order to acquire the wealth of our country. If we, even then, cling to the word ‘India’, it would only show that we are not ashamed of having this insulting word which has been imposed on us by alien rulers,” Pant argued.

There were also eloquent arguments made about the civilisational connotations ‘Bharat’ carried.

“By naming our country as Bharat we are not doing anything which will prevent us from marching forward. We should indeed give such a name to our country as may be befitting our history and our culture,” Seth Govind Das argued, another proponent of ‘Bharat’, argued.

But ultimately, ‘India, that is, Bharat,’ was adopted by the committee. The likes of Dr BR Ambedkar, Chairman of the Constituent Assembly’s Drafting Committee, rejected the civilisational debates and invocations of India’s past glory.

“There is a lot of work to be done,” Dr Ambedkar said before the motion was adopted.

This piece combines two pieces on the subject — one on the history of the nation’s names and the other on the Constituent Assembly debates around it — published earlier this year.