India, That Is Bharat

Why This Matters

What is the name of our country?

You may say “India”. You may say “Bharat”. Both are correct! Did you know that?

Look at the very first line of our Constitution. (The Constitution is the big book of rules for our country.) It begins like this: “India, that is Bharat…”. So our country has two names side by side.

But here is a surprise. Long ago, our land had even more names. People called it Bharatavarsha. They called it Jambudvipa. They called it Hindustan. Each name has its own little story.

Names are not just words. A name tells us how people saw a place. It tells us who lived there and what they cared about. So when we learn the old names of our land, we learn a piece of our own history.

In this chapter, we will go on a name hunt. We will find out where each name came from. And we will see something beautiful — that even thousands of years ago, people saw this whole land as one.

The Big Idea

Our country has had many names through history. People who lived here gave it names like Bharata (after a group of people called the Bharatas) and Jambudvipa (after the jamun tree). Visitors from outside named it after the river Sindhu (the Indus river) — that is how we got “Hindustan” and “India”. All these names point to the same land. And here is the wonderful part: even long ago, people saw this land — held by the snowy mountains in the north and the seas on the other sides — as one whole, shared by all its people.

Let’s Break It Down

A country with many names

Today, India is a modern country. It has fixed borders. It has states. We know how many people live here.

But it was very different long ago. Five hundred years ago, it was different. Two thousand years ago, it was very different. Five thousand years ago, it was very, very different.

This part of the world is often called the Indian Subcontinent. (A subcontinent is a large area of land that is part of a continent but stands out on its own, marked off by mountains, seas or rivers. Our land is marked off by the Himalaya mountains and the seas.)

This land has had many names. Some names were given by the people who lived here. Some names were given by visitors from outside — travellers, pilgrims and traders.

How do we know about these old names? We find them in three places:

• Ancient texts — very old books, like the Rig Veda and the Mahabharata.
• Accounts of travellers — the writings of people who came here from far away.
• Inscriptions — words carved on stone or metal long ago. (An inscription is writing scratched or cut into a hard surface, like a name carved on a rock.)

Figure 5.1 below shows our land in the middle, with five of its old names floating around it. Take a look first, and then we will learn each one.

Tap to zoom

Let us now meet each name, one by one.

Bharat / Bharatavarsha (where the name comes from)

The name Bharata is very old. It first appears in the Rig Veda. (The Rig Veda is India’s most ancient text. It is several thousand years old.)

In the Rig Veda, “Bharata” was the name of a group of people. They were one of the main groups who lived here long ago. So “Bharata” started as the name of a people, not a place.

Later came the Mahabharata, one of India’s most famous texts. It uses the word Bharatavarsha. This word means “the country of the Bharatas”. So now the name of the people had become the name of the whole land.

The “varsha” part simply means a large land or region. So Bharatavarsha = the land of the Bharatas.

After some more centuries, the short form Bharata became the common name for the whole land. An old text called the Vishnu Purana even describes it. In simple words, it says: the country that lies south of the snowy mountains and north of the ocean is called Bharata.

Does that sound familiar? The snowy mountains are the Himalayas. The ocean is the sea in the south. So even long ago, people knew exactly where Bharata was!

This name is still used today. In north India, it is written as “Bharat”. In south India, it is often “Bharatam”.

Jambudvipa

Here is a name with a tasty story. Jambudvipa.

Break the word into two parts:

• Jambu means the jamun tree. You have surely eaten jamun — the small purple fruit that stains your tongue!
• Dvipa means an “island” or a large land.

So Jambudvipa means “the land of the jamun tree”. The jamun tree is common in India. So people named the land after it.

We get a wonderful clue about this name from a great emperor. His name is Ashoka. He ruled about 250 BCE. (BCE means “Before the Common Era” — it counts the years before year 1. The bigger the BCE number, the further back in time. So 250 BCE was over two thousand years ago.)

Ashoka left behind many inscriptions on stone. In one of them, he used the word “Jambudvipa” to mean the whole of India. And at that time, this land was huge. It included what is today Bangladesh, Pakistan, and even parts of Afghanistan.

Hindustan

You have surely heard the name Hindustan. But where did it come from?

To answer this, we must first meet a river. The Sindhu river. (You may know it by its English name — the Indus river.) It flows in the northwest of our land.

Long ago, the people of Persia (today’s Iran) came to this region. They found it hard to say “Sindhu”. In their language, they said it as Hind, Hidu or Hindu. It was just a name for the land near the river. (Important: here “Hindu” only meant “the land by the Sindhu”. It did not mean the Hindu religion.)

From “Hind”, the Persians later made the word Hindustan. The ending “-stan” means “land” in their language. So Hindustan simply means “the land of the Hind” — the land near the Sindhu river.

This name was first used in a Persian inscription about 1,800 years ago. Later, many visitors used “Hindustan” for the whole Subcontinent.

India (and how the names connect to the land & people)

Now for the name we use the most in English — India.

This name also comes from the same river, the Sindhu. Watch how it changed step by step:

1. Indians called the river Sindhu.
2. The Persians said it as Hindu / Hind.
3. The ancient Greeks heard this from the Persians. But the Greek language had no “h” sound at the start. So they dropped the “h”. “Hindu” became Indos or Indike.
4. From the Greek word came the Latin word India.
5. And from Latin, we get the English word India — the one we use today.

Figure 5.2 below shows this whole journey as a flow. Follow the arrows and watch one Indian river turn into the word “India”.

Tap to zoom

So notice something interesting. The names split into two families:

• Names that Indians gave — Bharata and Jambudvipa. These came from a people and a tree of this land.
• Names that outsiders gave — Hindustan and India. These came from the river Sindhu.

But all of them point to the same place. They all connect the land to its people. The people of the Bharatas gave us “Bharata”. The people near the Sindhu gave us “Hindustan” and “India”.

And one more lovely point. People in different corners of this land had the same idea of one whole country. An old Tamil poem from south India, about 2,000 years old, praises a king known “from Cape Kumari in the south to the great mountain in the north, from the sea on the east to the sea on the west”. The “great mountain in the north” is the Himalayas. “Cape Kumari” is the southern tip (Kanyakumari). So people in the far south also pictured the same land, bounded by the same mountains and seas. Ancient Indians knew their geography well!

Why one land had many names

So why did one land end up with so many names?

The reason is simple. Different people met this land at different times, and each gave it a name in their own way.

• The people living here named it after themselves (the Bharatas) and after a tree they loved (the jamun).
• The visitors named it after the first thing they reached — the great river Sindhu.

Figure 5.3 below sorts this out in a neat chart. The name is on the left. Where it came from is on the right.

Tap to zoom

Here is a quick table you can use to revise all four names together.

Many of these names came from very long ago. To see when each one was used, look at Figure 5.4 below. It places the names on a simple timeline, from the distant past on the left to today on the right.

Tap to zoom

Let us put your new knowledge to work. The worked example below asks you to match each name to where it came from.

There is one more big idea hiding in all this. Even thousands of years ago, people did not see this as many tiny lands. They saw it as one whole land, shared by all its people. Why? Look at the geography. Figure 5.5 below shows it.

Tap to zoom

This is why a description like the one in the Vishnu Purana made sense to everyone. “South of the snowy mountains, north of the ocean” — that picture fit the whole land. The mountains and seas were like one big natural border. They tied the land and its people together.

Before we move on, let us refresh one idea you may need.

Now check that you understand the “why” behind these names.

Common Mistakes

Here are some slip-ups students make about this topic. Read them once, and you will not be fooled.

Quick Check

Try these quick questions. Each one checks one idea from the chapter.

Practice Problems

Try each one on your own first. Only then tap to see the full answer.

Easy

Medium

Challenge

Summary

Here is everything you can now explain to a friend:

• Our country has had many names through its long history, and even today it is “India, that is Bharat”.
• Bharata / Bharatavarsha comes from the Bharatas, a group of people named in the Rig Veda. It means “the land of the Bharatas”.
• Jambudvipa means “the land of the jamun tree”. Emperor Ashoka used it for the whole of India around 250 BCE.
• Hindustan comes from the river Sindhu. The Persians said “Hind” and added “-stan” (meaning land).
• India also comes from the Sindhu river: Sindhu became Hindu, then the Greek Indos, then the Latin and English India.
• Indians named the land after their people and a tree; outsiders named it after the river they reached first.
• We learn these names from ancient texts, travellers’ accounts, and inscriptions.
• Even long ago, people saw the land as one whole, held together by the Himalayas in the north and the seas on the other sides.

What’s Next

Now you know the many names of our land and where they came from. But who were the very first people to live here? How did towns, farming and writing begin?

In the next chapter, Chapter 6 — The Beginnings of Indian Civilisation, we will travel even further back in time. We will meet the earliest people of this land and watch how the first great Indian civilisation began. Get ready for an amazing journey into the past!