Why Indians should be called Bharati

Both India and Bharat are the official name of the country in our constitution. The name Bharat is straightforward. It is the original name of the country in most of the Indian languages and our religious texts. Despite some rumours going around that the name India is an invention of the British during colonisation, it is not true. ‘India’ was the international name of our region as far back as the times after the Indus valley civilisation. The name is derived form the name of the Indus or the Sindhu river. To give an example, the Greek ambassador in the court of Chandragupta Maurya wrote a book about the country around 300 BC titled ‘Indika’ after the country.

‘Hindustan’ is a name most encountered after the medieval periods after and during the Islamic conquests. It is mostly a North Indian word found derived from Farsi and then later absorbed into Urdu and Hindi. The name does not really represent the whole country, but only the Hindi belt. India is not the only country to have dual names. A lot of countries around the world have an International name and a local/ cultural name. To give a few examples, Germany/Deutschland, Japan/ Nippon, China/Zhōngguó, Spain/ Espa?a.

Ofcourse, India was originally named as Bharat as it was named after King named Bharat (from famous Shakuntala story). He was a very strong and powerful kshatriya and that is how India was known as Bharat. Later on when Mughals invaded India, they addressed India as Hindustan as the country was majorly inhabited by Hindus. It is the Britishers who came to India and found that India has been holding legendry history of the world “Indus Valley Civilisation”. They had difficulty in pronouncing Indus so name this land as India originating from Indus. Well altogether India shall be named back as Bharat. Our ancestral name should be given back to us.

This is like surrendering to their idea. Bharat has an idea of life called Consciousness. Which went into all over the world and it was very well acclaimed and adopted by all. But when the name is changed to an English name INDIA under the guidance of Nehru, people of Bharat also started imitating English people. And we are missing our life. Now It is very important to rename our country as Bharat to keep the practice of living life efficiently and the culture of meditation and enlightenment alive in us.

And also when our land's name was Bharat, we have enjoyed a lot of wealth, health and joyfulness. When Mughals came they named the land as Hindustan our wealth was robbed.And when the English men came here and named as India, we lost everything including the joy. When we got independence, we were able to prosper again for some extent in wealth, but the name always addresses us as we are under some English shadow. That resulted in discouraging the life of our land.

The country’s name in Hindi (which is a co-official language with English) is Bharat. This is from the Sanskrit name Bharata for the land that is now South Asia. Hindi as a highly simplified great-granddaughter of Sanskrit (via Prakrit, then merging with Farsi and Arabic to form Hindustani then splitting with Urdu..) took the same word for the land. In English it is India, which is derived from Hindu (as the Persians called it) which is derived from Indu/Sindhu. Hindu-”Stan” is a Persian suffix. We’re not the only countries with different names in the native language(s) and different ones in English. Even on our passports it is written as Bharat Ganarajya (Republic of India).

But why was it named India because the Achaemenid Empire conquered land up to the Sindhu/Indus river and called it Hind/hindu and all those who lived to the east of the Indus were Hindus. This, in Greek had the “h” dropped to Indie and to the English India. to Muthu Raman “Why a Persian suffix , Why not pure Indian ? Is there any dearth of languages in our country ?” — that’s in the name HinduSTAN - which isn’t an official name of the country. The Stan is from Farsi and is a legacy of the time (under the Turco-Mongol rulers) when Farsi was the language of the elite.

The beginnings of settled life in India have been definitely traced to the Indus valley civilization. The river Indus, or Sindhu as was called by the Indus valley residents, was the source of their existence and identity. When the age of mahajanapadas was underway in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent (internally called as Bharat or Aryavarta) around 600 BC, there was a cultural cousin, namely, the Iranians or the Persians, forming a political entity (the Achaemenid Empire) west of the subcontinent. The ancient Iranian language was pretty similar to Sanskrit as both belonged to the Indo-Iranian languages family (eg: both languages had the word 'staan', meaning abode, and Armenia was then and is still called Hayastan). However they differed slightly in the sense that the 'S' of Sanskrit became 'H' in Old Persian, resulting in the Sindhu river being known as Hindu river throughout Persia.

The Archaic Greece civilization lay to the west of Persia and knew the peoples and the land beyond the river Hindu as Indu or Indus, simply because Greek language did not contain the sound 'H'. Thus the name India and the suffix Indi- or Indo- were introduced by the Greeks via the Persians to Europe. What was internally called as Bharat or Aryavarta, was for more than a millennium called 'Indis' or 'Indos' in Greek and Roman Empires and 'Hind' in the Middle East.

By the time the Turks invaded India and established the Delhi Sultanate, they had already absorbed many elements of Persian culture. When the Mughals ascended the throne of Delhi three centuries later, the Persian culture and language had been firmly established. They began to use the word Hindustan as a political entity in addition to a cultural entity. This is why India has three names: Bharat, which is officially used; India, which is how the Western world knows it; and Hindustan, which was once a Persian term for the Indo-Gangetic Plain. This third term has been hijacked since the last century to sow discord amongst the two biggest religious groups residing there. Bharat Mata Ki Jay