The debate that has cropped up between two names – Bharat and India – is politically timed, but more fundamentally, it is based on an arbitrary approach to history. The attempt to politically dissociate the relation between Bharat and India is based on a historically skewed and puritan logic.
Bharat is understood as a name of the place that people living in this country gave to themselves. These people who lived in the time of the Vedas, however, were still not ‘Hindus’, as that term came into being when the Arabs and Iranians coined it for people who lived on the other side of the Sindhu river. They named the place, ‘Hind’ (by Ishtakri, 590 AD, and Al-Birūnī, 1020 AD) and from it was derived, ‘Hindustan’. The Greeks called the same river, Indus, and named the place, India (by Herodotus, 440 BC, and Megasthenes, 330 BC).
We accepted a name for ourselves and of our place, given by other people. This is unique to Hindus, and our country that we call Bharat, Hindustan, and India. Are Hindu, Hindustan, and India tainted because they were named by others? The vast and unique heterogeneity of the people living in India was so bewildering that those who came from outside used geo-cultural descriptions to demarcate the land and its people. Natural, social and customary attributes were used to categorise and define people. These narratives of demarcation were both laudatory and critical. It was a premodern mode of othering people (in both positive and negative ways), according to their beliefs and practices. We derive a sense of national identity from these words extracted from historical sources. They are also proof of how the land was a favoured destination for travellers. To be named by travellers is a delightful fact of our history, and the recognition of their fascination for this place and the hospitality of its inhabitants.
To suddenly understand these words as distortions to our self-identity and introduce a politically motivated discourse that regards our adoption of these words as a mark of our naiveté and weak tolerance is to erase and escape the complex story of history.
Ironically, the birth of ‘Hindu’ and ‘India’ are closer to each other in historical time than Bharat. Ironically again, the word ‘Hindu’ gave the community a sense of cohesiveness that was missing earlier. Claims to Hindu pride and unity should be (grudgingly, or not) grateful to the originators of the word. The term ‘Hinduism’ came much later, during the 18th century, from the Hindu social reformer, Raja Ram Mohan Roy. It was taken up by British colonisers and German Indologists, alike. Are these terms to be abandoned because they are associated with foreign and colonial regimes of the past?
Nehru’s imaginative clues
In the richest book on Indian history, The Discovery of India, Jawaharlal Nehru offers us wonderful, imaginative clues to look at our association with these words in contention today.
In the section ‘Bharat Mata’, Nehru writes: “Often, as I wandered from meeting to meeting, I spoke to my audience of this India of ours, of Hindustan and of Bharata, the old Sanskrit name derived from the mythical founder of the race.”
Nehru’s spontaneous use of the three words side-by-side in the same sentence demonstrates their synonymy that is part of our plural heritage. It also highlights the interesting history behind their naming. The origins of the words that undergo linguistic inflections in their usage by other people belong to this place. Is it something to detest and decry, or something to wonder, think, and understand about our unique history?
When Nehru asked the peasants what “Bharat Mata ki Jai” means, someone called it “dharti”. To it, Nehru responded (as he narrates): “You are parts of this Bharat Mata, I told them, you are in a manner yourselves Bharat Mata.” Nehru ignores the problem of gendered representation, but widens the epistemological scope of the phrase by associating it with demos. It marks Nehru’s interest in widening the idea of nation as mere land, or territory, to the idea of the people.
In the section on The Mahabharata, Nehru writes: “In the Mahabharata, a very definite attempt has been made to emphasise the fundamental unity of India, or Bharatvarsha as it was called, from Bharat, the legendary founder of the race. An earlier name was Aryavarta, the land of the Aryas, but this was confined to Northern India up to the Vindhya mountains in Central India.” From Aryavarta to Bharatvarsha, names were given to map the region of pagan worshippers. The war itself, Nehru writes, as described in The Mahabharata, “was for the overlordship of India (or possibly of northern India)”. New names were also associated with war and conquest that started with the coming of the Indo-Aryans.
In the section on the Gupta period, Nehru makes a broader point about names and their history: “[In] the ages since the Aryans had come down to what they called Aryavarta or Bharatvarsha, the problem that faced India was to produce a synthesis between this new race and culture and the old race and civilisation of the land. To that the mind of India devoted itself and it produced an enduring solution built on the strong foundations of a joint Indo-Aryan culture. Other foreign elements came and were absorbed.”
Nehru finds the acceptance of new people and belief-systems as India’s most defining historical characteristic, or svabhav. India till then, Nehru writes, was self-absorbed, unconnected to the changes happening elsewhere in the world. The coming of the Greeks in the 4th century, and more decisively, the Muslims in the 12th and the British in the 17-18th century, changed all that. Nehru calls it “periodic invasion by strange peoples with strange customs” that threatened to dismantle the older political and social structures and cultural values. This dismantling involved both the negative effects of the purdah system, and the positive awareness of spiritual (if not social) equality. The “symbol of nationalist revivals” (a premature term for a time before the 17th century) against these invasions was seeped in “Brahminism”, according to Nehru. The political and social ethos of modern India is anti-Brahminical. A scrutiny of the past, any research, re-evaluation and reconsideration of old names, must convey this critical sensibility.
The politics of naming and not-naming
We must bear in mind that behind the politics of naming there is a politics of not-naming (the other name).
In his philosophical meditation on the ‘original’ name, Khôra (a word that comes from the Greek, which designates a place for being), Jacques Derrida writes in On the Name (1995): “And when a name comes, it immediately says more than the name: the other of the name and quite simply the other, whose irruption the name announces.” The names, Bharat, India, and Hindustan appear in our history as echoes of different times. History is a series of interruptions where new names and meanings were produced. These names, implanted into our history through the various encounters with other people, add new layers to our historical identity. No single word can adequately define us and the place we inhabit.
Recalling Plato’s Timaeus, Derrida writes, the name Khôra at times names “neither this nor that, at times both this and that.” There is a uniqueness and ‘double-ness’ about the origin of names, something that makes it a name and forces us to grapple with its origin(s). Bharat, India, and Hindustan don’t cancel each other out as names of origins. They suggest continuities in our history. It marks the spirit of “synthesis” that Nehru so admired.
Today we are facing a revivalist moment in our political history, ironically, as a free nation. It is a defeatist hangover of history to create a wedge between what we named and what named us. We adopted these names for centuries out of a spirit we call Indian, or Bharatiya.
Article 1 of the Indian constitution begins, “India, that is Bharat…” It does not discriminate between names that describe our beloved country. The plurality of this delightful synonymy must be retained. Or else, India will rid itself off its own history and become a monolithic idea.
Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is an author. His latest book is Nehru and the Spirit of India.
