If the name 'Bombay' was erased for being a relic of colonial rule, why do we still use 'India'?

Language Log

A short history, and the politics, of the many names of the country.

Image credit:  Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP

Jun 24, 2016 · 08:00 am   Updated Jun 24, 2016 · 11:17 am

Shoaib Daniyal

One of the last vestiges of “Bombay” is about to be wiped out. More than 20 years after Bombay was renamed as Mumbai, the Bharatiya Janata Party government at the Centre is preparing to make the High Court located in the city follow suit. In the upcoming monsoon session of Parliament, legislation will be moved to rename Bombay High Court as Mumbai High Court. At the same time, Madras High Court will also get an identity that reflects the city’s current name, Chennai.

Language nationalism is an on-and-off factor in Indian politics. In the 1960s, Tamils rioted over concerns that the New Delhi was forcing Hindi down their throats. Mumbai frequently sees Marathi nationalists go on rampage against purported outsiders. The 1990s saw a spate of city renamings, with colonial names replaced by local language names.

Globally, language identity is the most common basis for nationalism. This means that renaming has been a common activity: Burma became Myanmar, Ceylon, Sri Lanka and Siam, Thailand.

What is interesting, however, is that Indian nationalism has never involved itself in matters of nomenclatural identity. But this is not for the lack of options. Like Bombay/Mumbai/Bambai, the country also has three names that are in popular use: India, Bhārata and Hindustan.

India as “Bhārata”

The oldest of these is Bhārata, a Sanskrit word dating to the Puranas, which would make it at least 2,000 years old. Now, Puranic geography isn’t the most accurate at describing the planet, but it makes up in imagination what is lost in accuracy. The Puranas envisage a land mass on which humans dwell called Jambudvipa – “jambu” being the Sanskrit name for the Indian blackberry and the origin of “jamun” in Hindi-Urdu. Jambudvipa, in turn, was divided into nine parts, one of which was Bhāratavarsa.

However, as Indologist Bimala Churn Law points out: “Bhāratavarsa is not our India of present geographical area." An exact mapping of the Pauranic Bhāratavarsa is difficult – and mostly moot given how different modern geography is from ancient myth – but it might have also included faraway Sumatra, now in modern-day Indonesia.

Bhārata, as a word for India, therefore, has far more modern origins. Nevertheless, given the prestige of Sanskrit, Bhārata has been borrowed into almost every Indian language as a name for India.

India as Hindustan

The other local language name for the country is Hindustan. It started off as an exonym – an external name for a geographical place (like Peking , the name given by foreigners, versus Beijing) – and is a Persian word. Hindu was the Persian name of the people who inhabited that land. In Sanskrit, it has the same origin as Sindhu. Like Bhārata, Hindustan was geographically ambiguous in ancient times (like any geographical name at the time). It referred to the area around the Indus (hence Sindh) or the entire area east of the river (a fairly good fit then with modern-day India).

Indians themselves would use this word only when Persian-speaking Turks established multiple sultanates in the subcontinent, starting with the Mamluk Sultanate in Delhi in 1206 AD.

In medieval India, while the word Hindustan was very popular, it didn’t refer to the entire subcontinent but only a part of it, which roughly corresponds to the modern-day cow belt. Thus, there is a town called Sirhind – Persian for “head of Hind” – close to the Punjab-Haryana border, and plundering Maratha armies would often talk of entering Hindustan from the Deccan as they crossed the river Tapi. This is also why, when the British encountered spoken Hindi-Urdu, they took to calling it Hindustani in much the same way as Bengali was the British name for the language spoken by people in Bengal.

Hindustan, the subcontinent

As the modern concept of nationalism took root during the British Raj, the name Hindustan started being used as a pars pro toto for the Indian subcontinent. This is not uncommon. The Holland and Netherlands phenomenon is another example of a single region overshadowing a larger geographical area. Nevertheless, shades of the old meaning survive today. Bengalis still refer to, say, people of Uttar Pradesh-origin as Hindustanis.

While the name Hindustan has no status in the eyes of the Indian state whose formal names remain Bhārata and India, it is the most popular, even natural, word in spoken Hindi-Urdu for the country. Consequently, Hindustan/Hindustani is a common word used by Bollywood for India across film titles and song lyrics, while Bhārat is rarer and only reserved for formal occasions.

Along with Bollywood, the Hindutva ideology is a great promoter of Hindustan as it is a key part of the alliterative slogan “Hindu-Hindi-Hindustan”. This trilogy of religion, language and region, as a defining aspect of Hindutva, was proposed by Hindu nationalist leader Vinayak Savarkar, who was perhaps unaware of the common Persian origin of all three words, leading to the delicious irony of a chauvinist movement using a word of foreign origin to name itself.

India as India

The name given to the land by the ruling British owes its origin to the word “Hind”, which entered the Greek and Latin languages as “India”, literally the region of the river Indus. The name “India” was perhaps the first unambiguous, legal name for the whole subcontinent that was in common use. However, the name India as a synonym for the Indian subcontinent ended in 1947 with Partition.

Pakistan's founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who wanted Pakistan and Hindustan to add up to “India” after Partition, objected to New Delhi's appropriation of the word “India”. In September 1947, eight weeks after Partition, Jinnah wrote to India’s governor general Louis Mountbatten: “It is a pity that for some mysterious reason Hindustan have adopted the word “India” which is certainly misleading and is intended to create confusion”.

Anti-“India” nationalists

Nationalist movements usually dislike exonyms, doubly so when they are an outcome of colonialism. Thus, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Zimbabwe all replaced their colonial names – Ceylon, Burma and Rhodesia.

In much the same way, there were quite a few political formations within India, which, for reasons of their own, agreed with Jinnah that India wasn’t a suitable name for the newly-partitioned county. These came to the fore in the Constituent Assembly, as the body discussed the very first article of the Constitution which read: “India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States”. The pro-Bharat constituency was a mixed group of Hindu and Hindi nationalists. Seth Govind Das, a Congressmen from Madhya Pradesh and head of the All India Cow Protection League, attacked the name India as a colonial imposition with some non-partisan help from the Encyclopedia Britannica:

The word India does not occur in our ancient books. It began to be used when the Greeks came to India. They named our Sindhu river as Indus and India was derived from Indus. There is a mention of this in Encyclopedia Britannica. On the contrary, if we look up the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Brahmanas and our great and ancient book the Mahabharat, we find a mention of the name “Bharat”.

In the end, the name India was retained, a rare example of a colonial exonym being used in a post-colonial state. In 1950, this was a strategic decision since the name India carried with it international prestige and provided a stable link with 200 years of the British Raj – an advantage Pakistan and Bangladesh, the two other successor states of the Raj did not have.

Opposing and accepting 'India'

Nevertheless, historical movements to expel the name “India” keep resurfacing. The Samajwadi Party, using Hindi rather than Hindu nationalism, asked to rename India as “Bharat” in its manifesto for the 2004 General Elections.

Hindutva ideologues, repeating Savarkar’s etymological confusion, still continue to ask for “Hindustan” to be brought back. In 2003, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, part of the Sangh Parivar, made the demand for Hindustan as did Bharatiya Janata Party leader Subramanian Swamy, in 2013.

Unlike, say Tamil or Kannada identity, language is hardly central to Hindu nationalism, so the movement for Hindustan has remained rather listless. Hindi nationalism was a major force till 1947, mostly in opposition to its Siamese twin Urdu, but the distributed nature of the language means its politics is quite different from, say, Marathi. Hindi, even in its home states, is mostly an urban language and states like Uttar Pradesh have vast rural swathes where languages like Awadhi or Bhojpuri, and not Hindi, are native tongues.

Additionally, after 200 years of India being the official name of the land, it is slowly ceasing to be an exonym and is being absorbed into Indian languages. The name “India” is now used by non-Anglophones quite easily, and is so common that it is even entering written forms. This represents an interesting contrast with regional exonyms such as West Bengal (Paschim Banga), Madras (Chennai) and Bangalore (Bengaluru), amongst others, which have followed the globally more common option of reasserting local language names.

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Meghnad Desai explains the fallacies in the idea of Hindu nationalism

BOOK EXCERPT

In a new essay, the economics professor from the LSE highlights the flaws in this version of history.

 Image credit:  YouTube

The following propositions are at the core of the Hindu nationalist doctrine:

- India has always been a single nation since prehistoric times as Bharatavarsha or Aryabhoomi.

- India got enslaved when Muslim invaders came from the North-west from the eighth century onwards – Mohammad Bin Qaseem and then Mahmud Ghazni followed by the Delhi Sultanate and then the Mughal Empire. Muslims are foreigners. The corollary of this xenophobia is to deny that the Aryans came to India from elsewhere. There is a tension about reconciling the Indus Valley culture with the story of Aryan incursions. The Hindu nationalists deny point-blank that Aryans were foreigners.

- The British did not create a single Indian entity. It was always there. The education which Macaulay introduced created the elite – Macaulay-putras – who behave and think like foreigners.

- In 1947, 1,200 years of slavery came to an end. (Narendra Modi said as much during his first speech in the Central Hall of Parliament after his election.) India was at last free to assert its true identity as a Hindu nation.

- Congress secularists, however, went on privileging Muslims whose loyalty is always to be doubted as their nation is Pakistan.

The stuff of bogus history

These propositions raise several conceptual and historical issues. Let’s examine them.

First, there is the issue of the native versus the foreigner. The British were clearly foreigners. They came when they had a job to do and never settled in India or “colonised” it as they did Rhodesia or Australia. Muslims emperors, on the other hand, did not go back and made India their home.

This creates a problem for the Hindu nationalist. For him, the fact that they have been here for 1,200 years does not make them natives of India. They shall forever remain alien. This is a strange doctrine because India was the receptacle for many “foreign” tribes throughout its history – the Shakas, the Huns, the Scythians and many other “races”, all of whom converted to Hinduism. But, then, 1,200 years are not enough. What about the Aryans? Did the Aryans also not come from central Europe or the Arctic, as Tilak argued?

To say that the Aryans are foreigners would make Hinduism a foreign religion. The aborigines – tribals – would then be the only true natives, as some Dalit scholars have argued. That is why Hindu nationalists deny foreign origin of the Aryans. The Aryans have to be primordially native to suit the Hindu nationalist narrative which imagines a time when somehow instantaneously Hinduism was established across all of India thanks to the Vedas and the Brahmins performing sacrifices, etc. Sanskrit has to have the prime place as lingua franca of Hindu India for that reason.

This is the stuff of bogus history. The religion which Hindus practise has only a marginal relationship to the Vedas. The Vedic gods are no longer worshipped. Vishnu, Shiva and Kali appear in the Hindu pantheon at least 1,000 years after the Vedas. The slow spread of Brahmanism (as the religion should be properly called) from its Punjab heartland to Delhi region and then on to UP and Bihar has been well charted. The importance of Pali and Ardhamagadhi in the propagation of Ajivikas, Jainism and Buddhism from the sixth century BCE onwards is also known.

It took a thousand-year struggle between Buddhism and Brahmanism before the latter could declare a complete victory. India became a Hindu nation about the time the Adi Shankaracharya debated and defeated the Buddhists. If the chronology of Hindu nationalists is taken seriously, however, it should be soon after India became “slave” to Muslims.

The Hindu nationalist strategy is to deny any conflict between Buddhism and Brahmanism and claim that Buddha was an avatar of Vishnu. This assertion is not found till the seventh century CE in the Puranas, by which time Buddhism was on its way out. Hinduism is not enough to define India as a Hindu nation throughout its history.

Savarkar tried to square this circle in his essay on Hindutva. He was a modernist and not a devotee of religion. His idea of nation is derived from the then fashionable ideas of nationhood espoused by the newly born nations of Europe, many of them parts of the Habsburg Empire which broke up in 1918 – Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia. Nationhood depended on territory and those born in the territory were members of the nation.

His Hindutva is not tied to Hinduism. It says that anyone born in the land of the Indus – Sindhu – is a Hindu and part of Hindutva. There is a subtext that Hindus are more so than Muslims. But Muslims can belong to Hindutva if they are loyal to the land of their birth. Subsequent Hindu nationalists have adopted the notion of Hindutva but not Savarkar’s secular doctrine.

Spurious idea of slavery

As a history of India, the Hindu nationalist story is as partial as the story that the Nehruvian vision has created. Of course, they are both north India–biased stories. They take Delhi and its rulers to be all of India. Muslim raiders may have come in the eighth century to Sind and Saurashtra and in the twelfth century established the Delhi Sultanate. But they never penetrated south of the Vindhyas.

South India has a very different history about Muslim immigrants from that of north India. Nor did it “suffer” from Muslim rule till very late when Aurangzeb went to the south in the late seventeenth century. Hindu kingdoms were coexistent with Muslim ones in the south but that happened only in the middle of the second millennium. The whole idea of “1,200 years of slavery” is spurious. Assam was never conquered by any Muslim power.

But ultimately there will never be “true objective” history. There never is in any nation. Debates and reinterpretations go on forever. Patronage to academia can be used to commission histories to buttress the official line. The sanctity of dispassionate research can never be guaranteed if the funding is public. India, however, does not have the tradition of private philanthropy for research. The government guards all the doors to higher education, thanks to the statist bias of the Congress which ruled for the first thirty years uninterruptedly. This bias has permeated the BJP as well.

It is not the idea of Hindu nationalism that is worrying. It is that the government will be the propagator of this particular view.

Meghnad Desai is emeritus professor of economics at the London School of Economics and author of The Rediscovery of India and Development and Nationhood.

Excerpted with permission from “India as a Hindu Nation – and Other Ideas of India”, Meghnad Desai, from Making Sense of Modi’s India, HarperCollins India.

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