This country has been indigenously called Bharat for thousands of years, and the name is commonly used in Indian languages. The use of India, however, is also very old. Many other countries have embraced external and internal names: Germany and Deutschland, Japan and Nippon. This is why the Indian Constitution begins with the words: “India, that is Bharat …” – Sanjeev Sanyal
This country has been known as Bharat or Bharatavarsha for a very long time. The span literally ranges across thousands of years. The name has two origin stories: an older Vedic one and a later Pauranic/Jain one. Interestingly, the origins of the names Bharat and India are also closely linked.
The Rig Veda, an early Bronze Age text (more than 5,000 years old), mentions a tribe called Bharata (also Trutsu) that lived on the banks of the Saraswati river in what is modern-day Haryana. They called their homeland Sapta Sindhu or the Land of Seven Rivers. These seven rivers relate to the Saraswati and its system of tributaries, and should not be confused with those that gave their name to Panjab.
The Rig Veda tells us that the Bharatas were attacked by a coalition of 10 tribes from the West. Led by their chieftain Sudas and Rishi Vashishtha, the Bharata army crossed the Saraswati and headed out to meet the enemy. In the Battle of Ten Kings, on the banks of the Parushni river (now Ravi), the Bharatas defeated the coalition; there are descriptions of how the fleeing enemy soldiers drowned in the river. Sudas now turned eastwards and defeated another chieftain called Bheda on the banks of the Yamuna.
Thus, the Bharatas created India’s first known empire, and Sudas became the first ‘chakravartin‘ or universal monarch. The symbol of the chakravartin is a wheel, and the Mauryan version is today in our national flag. However, the real importance of the Bharatas derives less from conquest and more from what they did next.
Instead of imposing their gods on the vanquished tribes, they invited all the defeated tribes, and other neighbouring clans, to contribute their ideas, rituals and gods to a common pool that we know as the Vedas. Many of the important composers of Vedic hymns, such as the Bhrigu clan, were on the losing side in the battle!
The word ‘India’, though old, is the result of serial mispronouncing by ancient foreigners [i.e. Greeks].
The last hymn of the Rig Veda explicitly states a “contract” whereby all the tribes accept each other’s gods:
“Assemble, speak together: let our minds be all of one accord,
Let all the ancient Gods take their rightful place around the sacrificial fire,
The place is common, common the assembly,
Common our mind, let our thoughts be united.“
The idea of assimilation, as opposed to imposition, must have been quite attractive because this framework came to be accepted across the subcontinent as more and more people added their gods to the pool. Thus, by the Iron Age, we can see that the Land of Seven Rivers has expanded to include virtually all of India. This is reflected in a hymn chanted commonly even today for ritual bathing:
“O Ganga, Yamuna, Godavari, Saraswati, Narmada, Sindhu, Kaveri!
May all your waters come together to purify me.“
Similarly, almost all the Puranas clearly state that the land south of the Himalayas, and north of the ocean, is inhabited by the Bharata people. There are also detailed lists of rivers and mountain ranges as well as neighbouring people such as the Kiratas (Tibeto-Burmans).
Nevertheless, the Puranas and Jain texts (about 2,500 years old) mention an origin story for Bharatavarsha that is different from the Vedic version. According to it, there was a great king named Nabhi who had a son, Rishabh. After ruling for a while, Rishabh would become an ascetic (in the Jain tradition, he is the founder, the first tirthankara) and handed over his throne to his son Bharat. As it turned out, Bharat would conquer the whole subcontinent and become a chakravartin. Thus, the country comes to be known as the Land of Bharat or Bharatavarsha. The link with the older Vedic story is unclear and one could speculate that Bharat’s conquest is a distant memory of that of Sudas. Also unclear is the link to a later story about another all-conquering King Bharat, son of King Dushyant and Shakuntala.
Meanwhile, the ancient Avestan Persians would come to use the term Hapta Hindu, derived from Sapta Sindhu, through the phonetic shift of ‘s’ to ‘h’. The Avestans seem to have some dispute with the Vedic Indians as the Vendidad text mentions that Hapta Hindu had been taken over by evil gods (devas). Notice that the very first use of the word Hindu is mentioned as part of the name of a land and is not derived from the river Sindhu as commonly assumed.
The Middle East would continue to use ‘Hindu’ but the word would evolve to ‘India’ as it went further west. Thus, the name ‘India’ is the result of serial mispronunciation by ancient foreigners. In contrast, the word ‘Bharat’ would travel to Southeast Asia where it survives in Indonesian and Malaysian Bahasa as ‘Barat’, meaning west!
As one can see, this country has been indigenously called Bharat for thousands of years, and the name is commonly used in Indian languages. The use of India, however, is also very old. Many other countries have embraced external and internal names: Germany and Deutschland, Japan and Nippon. This is why the Indian Constitution begins with the words: “India, that is Bharat….” – India Today, 25 Septemeber 2-23
› Sanjeev Sanyal is a writer and economist who currently serves as member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council.
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BHARATA BHARATI 