From India to Bharat: A brief history of the many names of the country

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has often referred to India as Bharat in his many addresses to the people of the country. Now there’s buzz that the government wants to rename the country. Yes, change it to Bharat.

Reports in the media suggest that the Modi-led government has called the special session of Parliament to initiate the name change. The Centre has been emphasising liberating the nation from the “slavery mentality” and removing the word India from the Constitution is now part of the plan, say sources.

The buzz grew louder as invites for dinner to be hosted at Rashtrapati Bhavan by President Droupadi Murmu on 9 September for world leaders coming for the G20 Summit in New Delhi were sent out. The invites used the phrase “President of Bharat” instead of the usual “President of India”. This is the first change in India’s nomenclature for an official event, reports NDTV.

“Bharat” has also been used in a G20 booklet handed out to foreign delegates. Highlighting India’s rich democracy and its ethos, the document is titled “Bharat: The Mother of Democracy”.

As the controversy snowballs, we take a look at the history of the names, India and Bharat and what is written in the Constitution.

The origins of Bharat

“Bharat,” “Bharatvarsha” and “Bharata” are the earliest recorded names and their roots are traced to Mahabharata and the Puranic literature.

Bharatvarsha refers to the land of the sons of Bharat, the legendary emperor called Bharata Chakravarti. He is said to be the founder of the Bharata Dynasty and the ancestor of the Pandavas and Kauravas. A son of King Dushyanta of Hastinapur and Queen Shakuntala, he conquered all of Greater India, which was called Bharatvarsha.

According to Puranas, Bharata lies between the “sea in the south and the abode of the snow in the north”.

An article in The Indian Express quotes social scientist Catherine Clémentin-Ojha as writing that “Bharata” refers to the “supraregional and subcontinental territory where the Brahmanical system of society prevails”.

Over the years, Bharata became Bharat. During the freedom struggle, “Bharat Mata ki Jai” was a popular slogan. Those who speak Hindi often use Bharat instead of India.

Experts say that the word Bharat is an endonym, a name given to us by ourselves.

The etymology of India

India is used extensively today – in official correspondence and documents and even in popular parlance. The name, according to an article in Outlook, is an exonym, a name given to the country by outsiders.

Like Hind, the origin of the word India lies in the word “Sindhu”, referring to the mighty River Indus, which originates in the Himalayas and is the source of the three great northern river systems – Sindhu, Ganga, and Brahmaputra. Sindhu is the Sanskrit name of the river and its earliest mentions are in the Rig-Veda, one of the oldest sacred books of Hinduism which dates back to 1700-1100 BC.

As knowledge about ancient India spread, Persians found it difficult to pronounce the “S” of Sindhu. They pronounced it as “H” and hence the name Hindu was born. It came to represent not only the river but also the land and its people who lived across the Indus.

An inscription, dated to 528 BC, found in Iran’s Persepolis, which was the capital of the Persian or Achaemenid empire of Darius 1, mentions, “Hi(n)du” as one of his many domains, says the Outlook report. From the first century, the Persian suffix, ‘stan’ was applied and the name ‘Hindustan’ was formed.

Around the same time, from Persia, the word “Hindu” spread to Greece, where “H” is silent. That gave birth to the root “Ind”. The Greeks transliterated Hind as Indus.

In this form, it became part of Latin. India, as we now call it, can be traced back to Latin and its influence on the English language. In Old English, it is said to have appeared in King Alfred’s translation of Orosius. However, under the influence of the French language, ‘India’ was replaced by ‘Ynde’ or ‘Inde’, according to a report in News18.

The name India resurfaced in the late phase of Early Modern English, the latter half of the 15th Century to 1650 AD largely because of the growing influence of Latin, Spanish or Portuguese. “India” finds a mention in the first edition of the King James Bible and the works of renowned playwright William Shakespeare, the report says.

By the 16th Century, most South Asians described their homeland as Hindustan. It referred to territories of the Mughals, which comprised much of South Asia, in the mid to late 18th century, according to a report in The Indian Express, which refers to an article by historian Ian J Barrow. But from the late 18th century, British maps started using the term India and it stayed on.

“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,” Barrow writes in the article titled “From Hindustan to India: Naming change in changing names.”

The Constitution says…

In his book “The Discovery of India”, Jawaharlal Nehru mentioned the various names associated with the country. “Often, as I wandered from meeting to meeting, I spoke to my audiences of this India of ours, of Hindustan and of Bharata, the old Sanskrit name derived from the mythical founders of the race.”

The Constitution of India came into effect in 1951 and it chose to omit Hindustan. Article 1 of the Constitution states, “India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States.”

This means the Constitution recognises both “India” and “Bharat” as official names for the country.

In 2020, the then Chief Justice of India SA Bobde stated, “Bharat and India are both names given in the Constitution. India is already called ‘Bharat’ in the Constitution.” The Supreme Court refused to entertain a plea asking for a name change from India to Bharat. It suggested that the plea could be converted into a representation and forwarded to the Union government for an appropriate decision.

The BJP and Bharat

In recent years, the Modi government has been trying to rid India of colonial influences. Now reports say the Centre is planning to remove the word “India” from the Constitution. A preparation pertaining to the proposal is underway, reports News18.

In December 2022, Mitesh Patel, a BJP MP from Gujarat’s Anand, raised a question in the Lok Sabha about renaming India as “Bharat” or “Bharatvarsh” as deliberated by the Constituent Assembly in September 1949. A member of the Assembly, Hargovind Pant, who represented the hill districts of the United Provinces, had said back then that the people of Northern India, “wanted Bharatvarsha and nothing else”.

After the use of Bharat on the G20 dinner invite and booklets, Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma cheered the change. “REPUBLIC OF BHARAT – happy and proud that our civilisation is marching ahead boldly towards AMRIT KAAL,” he posted on X, formerly Twitter.

REPUBLIC OF BHARAT – happy and proud that our civilisation is marching ahead boldly towards AMRIT KAAL

— Himanta Biswa Sarma (@himantabiswa) September 5, 2023

As Congress criticised the move, saying the “Union of States” is under assault, BJP’s JP Nadda retorted, asking why does the party have “so much objection to every subject related to the honour and pride of the country?”

“Why do political yatras in the name of Bharat Jodo hate the proclamation of ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai?’ It is clear that the Congress has neither respect for the country, nor for the constitution of the country, nor for the constitutional institutions. He just means to praise a particular family. The whole country knows very well the anti-national and anti-constitutional intentions of the Congress,” he posted on X.

With inputs from agencies