Class 6 Social Science Chapter 5: India, That Is Bharat

Two different things with one name

The India we know today is a modern nation. It has borders that are drawn and agreed, states with their own names and boundaries, and a population we can count. All of that is recent. The land underneath is enormously older, and for most of its history it had none of those things. Keeping the nation and the land apart in your mind is the first step in this chapter.

Five hundred, two thousand, five thousand

Picture this region five hundred years ago. Then two thousand. Then five thousand. At each step further back it looks less like the map on a classroom wall. The names change. The boundaries move. Kingdoms appear and vanish. What does not change is the land itself, and that is what people were naming.

The Subcontinent

For the region as a whole we use the term Indian Subcontinent. It is a geographical idea rather than a political one, which is exactly why it is useful here. A subcontinent is a large, fairly self-contained part of a continent, and this one is marked off by nature quite clearly.

What marks it off

Look at a physical map of the region and the boundaries almost draw themselves. Along the north stand the Himalayas, with the Hindu Kush at the north-western end. To the west, the south and the east lies ocean. Between those mountains and those waters sits a region that hangs together, and that is what people across many centuries have been naming.

Where the names come from

We know these names because three kinds of source preserved them. Ancient texts recorded them. Travellers and pilgrims wrote them down in their accounts. And inscriptions carried them, cut into stone in a form that lasts. Those are exactly the families of source you met in the last chapter, doing their work on a single question.

The land of seven rivers

No Indian text is older than the Ṛig Veda, which goes back several thousand years. It gives the north-western part of the Subcontinent a name: Sapta Sindhava, which means the land of the seven rivers. The word Sindhava comes from Sindhu. Sindhu means the Indus River, and at times it simply means a river.

Why that word matters later

Hold on to Sindhu, because it will come back. It is the word behind a whole family of names that outsiders later gave this country. Following that single word across languages is one of the more surprising things in this chapter. For now, notice only that the Ṛig Veda's name covers one region, the north-west, and not the whole land.

A text that names the regions

Move forward in time and names for other parts appear. Few Indian texts are as famous as the Mahābhārata, and it runs through a great many regions. Among them are Kāshmīra, which is more or less today's Kashmir, and Kurukṣhetra, which covers parts of present-day Haryana. There is Vanga, parts of today's Bengal, and Prāgjyotiṣha, roughly today's Assam. There is Kaccha, which is today's Kutch, and Kerala, which is more or less today's Kerala.

What that list shows

Notice how far apart those places are. Kashmir is in the far north, Kerala in the far south, Assam in the east and Kutch in the west. A text that names regions across that whole spread is a text written by people who knew the geography of the country well. The names are worth meeting, though the longer list of regions is not something to memorise.

A name for the whole thing

But when does a name appear for the entire Subcontinent? That is a harder question, because nobody can date an ancient Indian text with much confidence. The Mahābhārata carries two such names. Scholars place the writing of that long poem no earlier than a few centuries BCE, and later in parts. The two names are Bhāratavarṣha and Jambudvīpa.

The country of the Bharatas

Bhāratavarṣha clearly covers the whole Subcontinent, and the text names numerous rivers and peoples within it. The word means the country of the Bharatas. Bharata is a name we meet first in the Ṛig Veda, belonging there to one of the main Vedic groups. Later literature mentions several kings of that name too.

The island of the jamun

Jambudvīpa means the island of the fruit of the jamun tree. The jamun is a common tree native to India, also known as the jambul or the Malabar plum. Whatever its origin, the word came to mean the Indian Subcontinent, and it was used that way for a very long time.

A date we can hold on to

With ancient texts hard to date, one piece of evidence is especially welcome. The emperor Aśhoka, whom you will meet later, can be placed at about 250 BCE. He left many inscriptions, and in one of them he used the name Jambudvīpa for the whole of India. That single inscription anchors the name to a time we can be reasonably sure of.

How much land that meant

It is worth knowing what the whole of India meant in that inscription. It took in land that today lies in Bangladesh and in Pakistan, and parts of Afghanistan as well. The land had not moved. The borders had not been drawn yet. That is the difference between a nation and the country underneath it, which is where this chapter began.

Scenario:

A class is shown a map of India today and asked whether it would have looked the same two thousand years ago. Most say yes, since the rivers and mountains are still there. Their teacher asks which lines on the map are drawn by nature and which by people. The children sort them. Coastlines, rivers and mountain ranges are natural, while state boundaries and the national border are agreed. Rohit sees that the physical map would be largely recognisable and the political one would not. The class concludes that the land is far older than the nation drawn on top of it.

Analysis:

Two maps of one place, and only one of them is old. Sorting the lines by who drew them is what separates the land from the nation.

Activity:

Trace an outline of your state. Mark two natural boundaries and two agreed ones, and label which is which.

Title:

Map the old names onto the new

What You Notice:

Two things stand out once the names are on a map. The old names cover the whole country rather than clustering in one corner, which tells you how well the geography was known. And the dotted line for Aśhoka's India reaches well past today's borders, which is the difference between a land and a nation.

The emperor Aśhoka, whose date we may take as about 250 BCE, used the name Jambudvīpa in one of his inscriptions for the whole of India.

The India of Aśhoka's inscription included land that is today in Bangladesh and Pakistan, and parts of Afghanistan as well.

The jamun tree that gave Jambudvīpa its name is also called the jambul, or the Malabar plum. It is native to India and grows widely here.

What Sapta Sindhava means — Sapta is seven, Sindhu is river — Put them together and you have the land of the seven rivers, which is what the Ṛig Veda calls the north-west.

The two whole-country names — One from a people, one from a tree — Bhāratavarṣha means the country of the Bharatas. Jambudvīpa means the island of the jamun fruit.

The name that stayed

A few centuries after the Mahābhārata, one of its two names for the whole land won out. Bhārata settled in as the name of the whole Subcontinent, and it never really went away. That alone makes it worth attention: many names appear in this chapter, and only one of them is still in daily use.

Where the ocean ends and the mountains begin

The Viṣhṇu Purāṇa, an old text, defines Bhārata by its edges. It is the land with the ocean below it and the snowy mountains above. Read that again against the map. The snowy mountains are the Himalayas, and the ocean is the water wrapping the peninsula on three sides. It is a short description, and a remarkably accurate one.

Written two ways

Bhārata is still used today, and the spelling shifts across the country. In north India it is generally written Bharat. In south India it is often Bharatam. Both are the same name, and the difference is simply how the sound settles in different languages.

The same land, described in Tamil

The idea travelled too. Tamil literature of roughly 2,000 years back carries a poem in praise of a king. His fame, it says, ran from Cape Kumari at the southern tip to the great mountain of the north, and out to the sea on either hand. You can place every one of those. The great mountain is the Himalayas, and Cape Kumari is Kanyakumari at the southern tip.

Why that matters

Notice what has just happened. A text in Sanskrit from one part of the country and a poem in Tamil from another describe the same land by the same edges. The mountains above, the ocean around. Neither is copying the other. Ancient Indians, north and south alike, knew their geography and agreed on what this land was.

The name in our own time

India's Constitution was drawn up in English first, and its opening words are India, that is Bharat. The Hindi version says the same thing the other way round: Bhārat arthāth India. A constitution lays down what a nation stands on, and the laws it goes by, and India's came into force in 1950. So the ancient name sits in the newest and most formal document we have.

Now from the other direction

Everything so far came from the inhabitants of this land. The rest of the chapter comes from outside, from visitors, traders and invaders, and it takes a completely different route. Remarkably, almost all of it starts from a single word you already know: Sindhu, the name of the Indus River.

The Persians

Iran's ancient people, the Persians, were the first outsiders to write of this land. One of their emperors marched east in the 6th century BCE and took the country around the Indus. That region was called Sindhu. No wonder, then, that their oldest records and their stone inscriptions call this land Hind, Hidu or Hindu. Those are the shapes Sindhu takes in their language.

One thing that word did not mean

This point needs care. In ancient Persian, Hindu is purely a geographical term. It names a place, in the way that Kashmir or Kerala names a place. It does not refer to the Hindu religion. The same sound carries a quite different meaning today, and it is easy to read the later meaning back into the older word.

The Greeks drop a letter

The ancient Greeks learnt of this region through Persian sources, and they named it Indoi or Indike. Look at what has changed. The initial h of Hindu has gone. The reason is almost comically simple: that letter did not exist in the Greek language, so they could not say it and did not write it. From Indoi and Indike descend the Latin India, the English India and the French Inde.

The Chinese

The ancient Chinese also dealt with India, and several of their texts call it Yintu or Yindu. This too comes from Sindhu, by a longer path: Sindhu becomes Hindhu, then Indu, then Yindu. Four languages have now taken the same river name and reshaped it, each according to the sounds it had available.

A traveller who stayed seventeen years

One Chinese visitor is worth meeting. Xuanzang made the journey from China in the 7th century CE. He went about the country widely, sat with its scholars, and gathered Buddhist writings. He returned to China after seventeen years and translated the manuscripts he had carried back out of Sanskrit and into Chinese. Other Chinese scholars made the same journey over the centuries.

A name with two meanings

The Chinese had another word for India, Tianzhu, also derived from Sindhu. What makes it interesting is that the same word could be understood in Chinese as heavenly master. That double meaning was not an accident of sound alone. It speaks of the regard in which ancient China held this land, the Buddha's own country.

And one you already know

One more name will be familiar: Hindustān. It is more recent than the others, but not as recent as you might think. Its first known appearance is on a Persian inscription of roughly 1,800 years back. In time most of India's invaders took it up as their word for the Subcontinent. Like Hind, Indoi and Yindu before it, it goes back in the end to the Sindhu.

Scenario:

A Class 6 group is making a display board called The Many Names of Our Country. They have collected six names: Sapta Sindhava, Bhāratavarṣha, Jambudvīpa, Hindu, Indoi and Yindu. One pupil wants to arrange them in a single line from oldest to newest. Another says the six do not belong in one line at all, because three of them came from inside the country and three from outside. A third points out that the last three all look rather alike, and wonders whether that is an accident. Their teacher tells them the third pupil has noticed the most important thing on the board.

Analysis:

The third pupil is right, and the reason is worth setting out. Hindu, Indoi and Yindu are not three independent names. All three come from one word, Sindhu, the name of the Indus River. The Persians gained control of that region in the 6th century BCE and wrote the name as Hind, Hidu or Hindu. The Greeks learnt it from Persian sources and made it Indoi or Indike, dropping the h because their language had no such letter. The Chinese reached Yindu by a longer route, through Hindhu and Indu. So the resemblance is no accident; it is a family likeness. The second pupil is also right that the names fall into two groups. The inside names describe the land itself: seven rivers, a people, a tree. The outside names all describe it by its north-western river, because that is the part outsiders met first. The first pupil's single line would hide both of those patterns, which is why the board should be arranged in two columns rather than one.

Activity:

Draw the board as two columns headed Named from inside and Named from outside. Place the six names correctly. Then draw arrows in the second column showing which name came from which, and write the word they all begin from at the top.

Xuanzang made the journey from China in the 7th century CE. He stayed seventeen years, sat with scholars, gathered Buddhist writings, and put them into Chinese once home.

The Chinese word Tianzhu, also derived from Sindhu, could be read as heavenly master, which speaks of the regard in which ancient China held this land, the Buddha's own country.

Hindustān first shows up on a Persian inscription of roughly 1,800 years back, long before the invaders who later made it their usual word for this land.

How one river named a country — Sindhu, Hindu, Indu, India — The Persians turned Sindhu into Hindu. The Greeks dropped the h. From that came Indoi, Indike and at last India.

Where Bhārata is defined — Ocean below, snowy mountains above — The Viṣhṇu Purāṇa places Bhārata with the ocean below it and the snowy mountains above — the Himalayas.