Today, the India we know is a modern nation, with defined borders, defined states and a known population. However, it was very different 500 years ago, 2,000 years ago or even 5,000 years ago. This region of the world, which we often call the ‘Indian Subcontinent’, has had many different names and shifting boundaries. We can learn about India’s past and evolution from many different sources. Let us explore.  

The Ṛig Veda is India’s most ancient text; as we will see in Chapter 7, it is several thousand years old. It gives the northwest region of the Subcontinent the name ‘Sapta Sindhava’, that is, the ‘land of the seven rivers’. The word ‘Sindhava’ comes from ‘Sindhu’, which refers to the Indus River, or at times to a river in general Moving on in time, we see names for other parts of India appear in the literature. The Mahābhārata is one of India’s most famous texts (we read about it in the theme ‘Our Cultural Heritage and Knowledge Traditions’). Interestingly, it lists many regions, such as Kāshmīra (more or less today’s Kashmir), Kurukṣhetra (parts of Haryana today), Vanga (parts of Bengal), Prāgjyotiṣha (roughly today’s Assam), Kaccha (today’s Kutch), Kerala (more or less today’s Kerala), and so on.

The first term, ‘Bhāratavarṣha’, clearly extends to the entire Subcontinent, and the text includes the names of numerous rivers and peoples. ‘Bhāratavarṣha’ means ‘the country of the Bharatas’. ‘Bharata’ is a name that first appears in the Ṛig Veda, where it refers to one of the main Vedic groups of people. In later literature, several kings named ‘Bharata’ are mentioned.

The second term, ‘Jambudvīpa’, means ‘the island of the fruit of the jamun tree’. This is indeed a common tree native to India, also called ‘jambul tree’, ‘Malabar plum tree’, etc. ‘Jambudvīpa’ came to mean the Indian Subcontinent. In fact, we get a good clue from an Indian emperor — his name is Aśhoka and we will meet him later; for now, we can take his date to be about 250 BCE. As we will see, he left us many inscriptions. In one of them, he used the same name ‘Jambudvīpa’ to describe the whole of India, which at the time included what is today Bangladesh, Pakistan, as well as parts of Afghanistan.

A few centuries later, ‘Bhārata’ became the name generally used for the Indian Subcontinent. For instance, in an ancient text called the Viṣhṇu Purāṇa, we read : 

It is interesting to note that different parts of the country adopted a similar definition for India. For instance, a poem of ancient Tamil literature, from about 2,000 years ago, praises a king whose name is known “from [Cape] Kumari in the south, from the great mountain in the north, from the oceans on the east and on the west...” You can now recognise ‘the great mountain in the north’, and it should not be difficult to identify ‘Cape Kumari’. It looks like ancient Indians knew their geography well! 

 

Constitution: A document that spells out the basic principles and laws of a nation. The Indian Constitution, which will be studied in Grade 7, came into force in 1950 . 

The first foreigners to mention India were the Persians, the ancient inhabitants of Iran. In the 6th century BCE, a Persian emperor launched a military campaign and gained control of the region of the Indus River, which, as we saw, was earlier called ‘Sindhu’. So, it is no surprise that in their earliest records and stone inscriptions, the Persians referred to India as ‘Hind’, ‘Hidu’ or ‘Hindu’, which are adaptations in their language of ‘Sindhu’. (Note that in ancient Persian, ‘Hindu’ is a purely geographical term; it does not refer here to the Hindu religion.) 

Based on these Persian sources, the ancient Greeks named the region ‘Indoi’ or ‘Indike’. They dropped the initial letter ‘h’ of ‘Hindu’ because this letter did not exist in their Greek language.

Sindhu—---------> Hindhu —--------->Indoi / Indike