Etymology of India
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
India, as a country and nation, has three principal names, in both official and popular usage, each of which is historically and culturally significant. All three originally designated a single entity comprising all the modern nations of the Indian subcontinent.
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[edit] India
The first Article of the Constitution of India, which deals with the official name, states that "India, that is Bharat, shall be a union of states." Thus, not only in usage but officially India and Bharat are both accorded primary status. The name India is derived from the river Indus.
The original name of the river came from the fact that in the north-west of the subcontinent, there are seven main tributaries of the one river. The local inhabitants therefore called it Sapta-Sindhu, meaning the seven rivers. As the seven tributaries are part of the one river, the entire river system came to be known in time as Sindhu. In general, Sindhu also means any river or water body in Sanskrit.
Persian explorers visited the area even in ancient times, and the Iranian 'h' is cognate with Sanskrit 's'. Thus Sindhu became Hindu. Similarly, Sanskrit Asura (a spirit, later an evil spirit) is cognate with Ahura, the Supreme God of the early Iranian people.
The name of the river entered Greek from Persian, with the loss of the initial 'h', to become Ίνδός Indos, from which the Greeks derived their name for the region, Ίνδια India. The Latin form of Indos is Indus, the name by which the river system is still known in the West. Its name was given to the entire subcontinent by the Romans, who adapted it to the current India.
The word India is the form used by Europeans over the ages.
Sindhu is also the Sanskrit term for Ocean and for any large water body. It would specifically mean the modern river Indus, if ancient Indic originated there. It could just mean "water dwellers" as well.
Interestingly, the Vedas did not assign any particular name for India, although some scholars assert that references to Indu in the Rig Veda relate to India's present name. Many traditional literary/cultural works from around the globe lack definite terminology for their home culture as a political unit; China, Greece, and many other civilizations lacked fixed names for themselves in traditional literature of their early periods.
In the Matsya Purana 126, the length of India (Bharatavarsa) is 9,000 puranic yojanas, which is a good estimation.[1]
Listed by, among others, Colonel James Todd in his Annals of Rajputana, he describes the ancient India under control of tribes claiming descent from the Moon, or "Indu", and their influence in Trans-Indian regions where they referred to the land as Industhan. This explanation might serve better to explain the term Hindu. Having said that, ancient Greeks do mention the Indic tribes or related tribes (could be of Iranian origin or joint Indo-Iranian origin) inhabiting what is now Ukraine as Sindoi or Sindkoi.
The name India was known in Anglo-Saxon, and was used in King Alfred's translation of Orosius. In Middle English, the name was, under French influence, replaced by Ynde or Inde, which entered early modern English as Indie. The use of the name India dates from the 17th century onwards, and may be due to the influence of Latin, or Spanish or Portuguese. [2]
[edit] Bhārata
Bhārata, sometimes Bhāratavarsha (Bhārat or Bhāratvarsha in Hindi) is the name in Sanskrit and many languages of India for northern India. The Hindi form is also an official name of the Republic of India, and possibly the earliest name given to the nation. (Article 1 of the Constitution of India - 'India that is Bharat shall be a Union of States.'). In Sanskrit, it is pronounced as [bʱaːrət̪ə] while in Hindi as [bʱaːrət̪].
[edit] Mythological Origins
The Sanskrit word Bhārata (Sanskrit: भारत has several meanings. In Vedic Sanskrit, the primary meaning of the word Bhārata was the epithet of Agni (the Vedic demigod of fire). There could be two etymologies for this epithet:
- It may come from the Sanskrit root bhr- (Sanskrit: भृ), which means to bear / to carry. As Agni was believed to carry the offerings of the Vedic fire-sacrifices to the Heavens, he was given the title of Bhārata, as the bearer of sacrificial oblations.
- It may come as a linguistic derivative of the term Bharata (Sanskrit: भरत, note the short vowel in the first syllable). The term Bharata again refers to Agni or to the fire-priests of the Vedic Age, and is again derived from the same root bhr, but here under the sense of to maintain.
The root bhr is cognate with the English verb "to bear" and Latin "fero".
However, the term Bhārat was also the proper name of several other people in the Early and Later-Vedic Ages.
The Bharatas are a tribe mentioned in the Rigveda, defeated in the Battle of the Ten Kings.
The name "Bhārata" (in the sense of India) is derived from either of two ancient Hindu kings named Bharata, though it is more commonly accepted that the name derives from that of the son of Dushyanta, whom the Mahabharata credits with bringing the whole of Bharatavarsha under his rule and securing the title of an emperor. He was said to have first conquered all of the known world, which was duly named after him in his honor. Hence his descendants were called as the Bhāratas. In all the classical and religious works of Hinduism, such as the Mahabharata, the Ramayana and the Puranas, Bhārat is the name used for what is today known as the Indian subcontinent.
The Vishnu Purana (2.3.1) defines Bharata as follows: "The country that lies north of the ocean and south of the snowy mountains is called Bharata; there dwell the descendants of Bharata."
[edit] In History
Historical Bharata extends to what are today Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh and even by some accounts, portions of eastern Afghanistan. The Maurya Empire, under Emperors Chandragupta Maurya and Ashoka the Great, and the Mughal Empire are the other times the similar extent of land and peoples have been united under a single political entity, but the social, cultural and economic links are complex and originated nine thousand years ago. This expanse has variously been reduced and increased, and was at its largest under Emperors like Chandragupta Maurya, Ashoka the Great, Samudragupta, Chandragupta Vikramaditya, Alauddin Khilji, Akbar the Great, Aurangazeb and lastly under the British.
[edit] Hindustan
To the Western world, Bhārat has always been known under the name of Hind or its variants. In Vedic Sanskrit, the word Sindhu meant the river Indus in particular and any river or water body in general. The Ancient Indo-Aryans called their expanse Sapta Sindhu, meaning the land of seven rivers (including the Indus) —attested several times in the Rig Veda. The /s/ of the Indic branch (as represented by Sanskrit) is linguistically cognate with the /h/ sound of Iranian (as represented by Avestan and Old Persian). Hence the term Sapta Sindhu became Hapta Hindu in Avesta, the supreme scripture of the early Iranians (Vendidad: Fargard 1.18). In Persian, stān means a land (cognate to Sanskrit's sthāna: place, land) . Hence India, the land to the East of the Indus, soon came to be known as Hindustan by the Persians and the Arabs. Its shortened form was Hind, which became Hindia in Ancient Greek and India in later Greek and Latin. The Arab, Turk, and Mughal invasions started in India from 11th century onwards; the rulers in the Sultanate period and Mughal period called their Indian dominion Hindustan, which centred around Delhi — whether it swallowed almost the whole of the Indian subcontinent (as during the time of Alauddin Khilji and Aurangazeb) or had shrunk to only Delhi and the adjoining areas (as during the rule of Bahadur Shar Zafar II). Some people interpret Hindustan to be the region of India between Indus and Brahmaputra and between the Himalayas and the Vindhyas. Others call the whole of the Indian subcontinent as Hindustan. In modern India, Hindustan is almost exclusively used by all Hindi-speakers and the Hindi media in informal contexts (South Indians prefer their local variants of Bhārata, such as Bhāratam) for the Republic of India. India is now called Al-Hind in the Arabic language and Hind in Persian.
The word Hindu (हिन्दु), due to Iranian influence — in the sense of dwellers of the Indian subcontinent — is used in some early-medieval Sanskrit texts like Bhavishya Purāna, Kālikā Purāna, Merutantra, Rāmakosha, Hemantakavikosha and Adbhutarūpakosha.
[edit] Āryavarta
Āryavarta is yet another name which refers to India. It is no longer in common usage, but does occur with some frequency in ancient texts. Āryavarta refers to the Land of Āryas. Ārya in Sanskrit means "noble" and is related to the term Āryan.
Āryavarta once covered only the Yamuna-Ganga doab, so it is also debatable if this name could apply to all of ancient India. Āryavarta was also a collection of city-states, not a political entity by itself.
[edit] Other terms
Some other ancient terms for India or for parts of India include:
- Madhya-desha (middle country)
- Brahmarshi-desa (western part)
- Uttarapatha or Udichya (northwestern/northern part)
- Aparanta, Pratichya (western India)
- Purva-desa, Prachya (east)
- Dakshinapatha (Deccan)
- Tamilakam (far south)
- Parvaasrayin (Himalayas)
- East Indies
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Subhash Kak. Birth and Early Development of Indian Astronomy. In Astronomy across cultures: The History of Non-Western Astronomy, Helaine Selin (ed), Kluwer, 2000
- ^ India Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition: 1989.
[edit] External links
- The Unity of India Dileep Karanth's article about the terms "Hindu" and "India"
- Meaning of the word Hindu
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