Would this country be known as India if the British hadn’t ruled us, and would it be called Hindustan if the Muslims hadn’t? Without invasions and foreign rule, the name would have been Bharat. But would this name have seen a revival, howsoever shy and hesitant, in Article 1 of the Constitution that reads “India, that is Bharat” if swaraj hadn’t come and the soul of the nation, long suppressed, had not found utterance? Would the country “awake to life and freedom” without the clarion call of Bharat Mata ki Jai? And would the faith in the country’s manifest destiny as Vishwaguru find an articulation without the soaring cadence of Bharat Bhagya Vidhata?
Our country’s name, its identity, is Bharat. India and Hindustan are labels pasted by foreigners for their convenience. These are their names for us; encapsulating their view of us. With these names, we will continue to look upon ourselves with their eyes. The decolonisation of mind is not possible without the reclamation of self and identity. So far, Bharat has been one of the names for the country, confined to Hindi and other Indian languages; a name by which the rural and the poor knew the country in the past. For the rich and the powerful, the Anglophone gentry, the country has been India.
Making Bharat the primary name of the county, and relegating India to the secondary, symbolises the triumph of democracy and the coming of age of the common man. No wonder the heirs of the colonial rulers — those who called it India and those who called it Hindustan — are resentful of the rise of ‘Bharat’. It’s not a mere change of name. It’s a change of worldview, a shift in paradigm that heralds the dethronement of the postcolonial ruling class, the Left-liberal coalition, and their pseudo-secular clients.
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‘Bharat, that is India’
This country has been Bharat since the dawn of history — from its mythological origins and legends of kings that have passed on in generational memory, millennia upon millennia. The eponymous Bharata clan finds mention in the most ancient extant text, the Rig Veda. Sudas was a Bharata king who defeated a confederacy of 10 kings in the Dasharajnya Yudh, the War of Ten Kings. The greatest ever war of the ancient age is narrated in the epic known as Mahabharata. Bharatvarsh is mentioned in the Hathigumpha inscription of the Jain king Kharavela from the 2nd century BC in modern-day Odisha. King Bharata, as the primal ancestor of the people of this land, is mentioned as the son of Dushyant and Shakuntala in the Brahmanical tradition, and as the son of the first Tirthankar Rishabhadeva in the Jaina texts.
In the Constituent Assembly, the founding fathers invoked the living past to make Bharat the official name of the country. On 18 September 1949, Seth Govind Das suggested that instead of “India, that is Bharat”, Article 1 should read “Bharat known as India also in foreign countries”. He and Kallur Subbarao cited the Vedas, Upanishads, Brahmanas, Mahabharata (Bhishma Parva), Vishnu Purana, Brahma Purana, Vayu Purana, and the travelogue of Chinese traveller Hiuen Tsang as proof that Bharat has been the country’s name since time immemorial. Kamalapati Tripathi wanted the phrase to be altered to “Bharat, that is India” and made a moving speech, the lingering poignance of which is resurfacing after three quarters of a century now.
This dirge of a wounded civilisation should be quoted in extenso:
“When a country is in bondage, it loses its soul. During its slavery for one thousand years, our country too lost its everything. We lost our culture, we lost our history, we lost our prestige, we lost our humanity, we lost our self respect, we lost our soul and indeed we lost our form and name. Today after remaining in bondage for a thousand years, this free country will regain its name and we do hope that after regaining its lost name it will regain its inner consciousness and external form and will begin to act under the inspiration of its soul which had been so far in a sort of sleep. I am enamoured of the historic name of “Bharat”. Even the mere uttering of this word, conjures before us by a stroke of magic the picture of cultured life of the centuries that have gone by. In my opinion there is no other country in the world which has such a history, such a culture, and such a name, whose age is counted in milleniums as our country has. There is no country in the world which has been able to preserve its name and its genius even after undergoing the amount of repression, the insults and prolonged slavery which our country had to pass through. Even after thousands of years our country is still known as ‘Bharat’.”
Also read: We were India since Alexander’s time. Why drag the British into it?
The foreignness of ‘Hindustan’
In this debate between India and Bharat, it is surprising that Hindustan, the third most popular name, has been missing. A Persian-origin compound word made of ‘Hindu’ and ‘stan’, meaning the ‘land of Hindus’, it has been the Muslim name for India and is used in Urdu. Allama Iqbal’s patriotic song Sare Jahan Se Achha Hindustan Hamara is the most iconic use of the name. It’s bewildering that Muslims called the country ‘Hindustan’ till one understands the nature of the Muslim State in India. To the Muslim rulers, it was the land of Hindus that they ruled — their relation with the country was exclusively political, not cultural, emotional, or devotional. No wonder the word ‘Hindustan’ never struck them as incongruous.
In the cultural complex that historian Marshall Hodgson calls Islamicate and Persianate — the lands where Islamic religion and Persian culture dominated — it’s been the practice to name a country after its main ethnic group by conjoining the ethnicity with the word stan (place; same as the Sanskrit sthan). Thus, from Central Asia’s Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to Afghanistan, we have many similarly named countries. The name ‘Pakistan’ also came up by the same rationale. This is a Muslim concept, definition, and taxonomy.
Hindus, both at instinctive and intellectual levels, have been aware of the foreignness of ‘Hindustan’. In his 1911 book The Soul of India, the great nationalist leader Bipin Chandra Pal said, “We never called her either India or Hindoostan. As long as you look upon our country as India, you will get no closer or truer view than the foreign officials and students have been able to do.” No wonder that despite VD Savarkar’s elaborate theorisation around ‘Hindusthan’ — the h inserted to Sanskritise ‘Hindustan’ — in his 1923 book Essentials of Hindutva, it could not become as mainstream in the Hindutva discourse as Bharat. The Hindus instinctively knew that Hindustan was a foreign word, used by Muslim rulers to designate their kingdom. It was the “Muslim idea” of India.
Pakistani-American historian Manan Ahmad Asif in his 2020 book The Loss of Hindustan has rued the displacement of Hindustan by India – as is clear from the telltale title. It’s no reductionism to say that he is actually mourning the loss of Muslim power to the British. One wonders if he would similarly lament the loss of Bharat to Hindustan. The Muslim association of Hindustan is so strong that Pakistan doesn’t use it for India — obviously since our country is no longer under Muslim rule. They use Bharat to emphasise the Hindu character of India and justify the Two Nation theory. For once, they are right, but only by half. Bharat is Hindu, but not in the narrow religious sense — it refers to a broader civilisation where religion is a part of culture and not its entirety. India, from Indus, is a geographical expression, and Hindustan, though of the same root, has a political connotation. Only Bharat encompasses our civilisational heritage.
Ibn Khaldun Bharati is a student of Islam, and looks at Islamic history from an Indian perspective. He tweets at @IbnKhaldunIndic. Views are personal.
Editor’s Note: We know the writer well and only allow pseudonyms when we do so.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)