Is Pakistan The Real Historic India?
When we refer to India today, are we referring to the historic India that ancient historians and explorers wrote about? Turns out it’s not. The India of today is not the historic India…ironically Pakistan is. Are you Confused? You should be!
Unfortunately European colonialism played a big role in how the term “India” was misused and mislabeled. To discuss this more in detail, we first need to define some basic terms:
- When “Republic of India” is mentioned, we are referring to Bharat or modern-day India (1947 to present).
- When “India” is mentioned, we are referring to its historic definition (the Indus Valley in modern-day Pakistan) as cited in Vedic, Persian, Greek, Macedonian, Arab, Chinese and Roman sources.
Part 1: Jinnah vs Mountbatten
By 1947, the British Raj was going to be divided into two new nation states — Hindustan and Pakistan. However, just months before independence in August 1947, both Jinnah and the Muslim League were objecting to the use of “India” by Nehru’s Hindustan. Jinnah was initially convinced that no state would use the term India, since it lacked any indigenous pedigree. However, as independence approached, it was clear that Hindustan was going to be named India. Jinnah specifically wrote to Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of British India, stating:
“it is a pity that for some mysterious reason Hindustan have adopted the word ‘India’ which is certainly misleading and is intended to create confusion.”
By the 20th century, it was common knowledge that the word India derived from the Indus River. Yet even if Mountbatten knew Jinnah’s argument held merit, he would never admit it. In a 1973 interview, Mountbatten admitted he never got along well with Jinnah, to the extent where he referred to Jinnah as a “bastard” during the interview.
To add to the confusion, many maps printed in the Republic of India after 1947 referred to the newly formed country as Bharat — in fact the Constitution of the Republic of India officially names the country as Bharat. Even today, many Hindu nationalists and Hindi speakers of the Republic of India argue in favour of the word Bharat becoming the official name of the country. The word Bharat derives from ‘Bharatavarsha’ (the land of the Bharatas), with these Bharatas being one of the early Vedic clans who migrated from the Indus Valley to the Ganges plain sometime between 1200 BCE to 800 BCE. Bharat would seem preferable, since the term India was too redolent of colonial disparagement. It also lacked a respectable indigenous pedigree. In the whole colossal corpus of Sanskrit literature, nowhere is the term India ever mentioned. Nor does the term India appear in Buddhist or Jain texts and nor was it used in any of the Republic of India’s numerous languages.
Worse still, if etymologically the term India belonged anywhere, it was not to the republic proclaimed in Delhi by Jawaharlal Nehru but to its rival headed by Mohammed Ali Jinnah in Pakistan. Partition would have a way of dividing the subcontinent’s spoils with scant reference to history. No tussle over the word India is reported because Jinnah preferred the newly coined and Islamic-sounding acronym Pakistan. Additionally, he was under the impression that neither state would want to adopt the colonial term India. He only discovered months before independence, that Mountbatten and Nehru were going to name Hindustan as “Republic of India”. Jinnah, according to Mountbatten, “was absolutely furious when he found out that they (Nehru and the Congress Party) were going to call themselves India”. The use of the word implied a sub-continental primacy that Pakistan would never accept. It also flew in the face of history, since India originally referred exclusively to territory in the vicinity of the Indus River (with which the word is cognate) and its tributaries. Hence India was largely outside the Republic of India and largely within Pakistan.
Part 2: Successor State
Why Nehru and Mountbatten chose the word India for Hindustan is not fully understood, but may have had something to do with Nehru wanting to become a successor state to British India (also called British Raj or British Indian Empire).
In 1857, the British had chosen India, a word with Greek roots, to name their colony in the subcontinent. Yet following the end of World War Two in 1945, Britain was bankrupt and by 1947, the colony of British India had to be let go — thus partition into Jinnah’s Pakistan and Nehru’s Hindustan. However, the word India crept its way back in to define Nehru’s republic. The reason for this is because Britain did not really have any intention of abandoning the region or its colony. British India was considered a “crown jewel” in the vast British Empire, yet following World War Two the colonies had to be sacrificed due to financial constraints. Despite this, Britain still wanted to remain relevant in the subcontinent even after their departure, and thus they began looking for a “successor state”.
A successor state is defined as: “a sovereign state over a territory and populace that was previously under the sovereignty of another state”. Hence, British India essentially wanted either Hindustan or Pakistan to become a successor of its colony, in a bid to remain relevant in the region.
The British saw Jinnah and the Muslim League as “traitors” to Britain. Despite having studied at prestigious British institutes like Oxford and becoming successful lawyers and businessmen in British India, the league pushed for the “Pakistan Movement”. The British considered this movement as a betrayal of the very system that had elevated the Muslim League’s leaders into an elite political and social stratosphere — which mind you very few “natives” of British India enjoyed at the time. Furthermore, the British were very distrustful of the Muslim population of British India as well. The 1857 War of Independence was considered by the British as a “Muslim uprising” and the Hunter Commission concluded that “it was in the conscious of every Muslim to rebel against the queen”. Conversely, the Muslim League and Jinnah were not very fond of the British either. Muslims had all become second-class citizens within British India due to institutionalized discrimination, and many Muslims considered the British as the main reason why Muslim rule in the subcontinent came to an abrupt end. Therefore, any idea of Pakistan agreeing to become a successor state to British India was out of the question.
Attention then naturally swung over to Jinnah’s rivals, Nehru and the Congress Party. This seemed more preferable to the British for a number of reasons. Firstly, British India’s capital Delhi would fall under Nehru’s Hindustan after partition. Secondly, the British and Brahmin Hindus already had a very good working relationship. Following the 1857 War of Independence and the Hunter Commission’s conclusions, the British began allying themselves with North Indian Hindu Brahmins, an elite caste within the Hindu community. It was argued that in order to project British rule, the complex prism of Hinduism’s caste system should be exploited. By using the Brahmin Hindus and elevating them into powers of position within the colony, the British could transfer their rule down the caste system, while at the same time preventing another “Muslim uprising”. This is what eventually helped form the Congress Party in the first place. Thus, convincing Nehru and the Congress into becoming a successor state wouldn’t be difficult. Furthermore, by becoming a successor state to British India, the new “Republic of India” could inherit most of the legal titles enjoyed by British India, including the British Indian Army and a seat at the United Nations. For this reason, the Hindustan became “Republic of India”.
Part 3: European usage of the word India
Reservations about the word India, which convinced Jinnah no nation would use it, stemmed from its historical usage among European colonialists. India or Indies (its more generalized derivative) had come, as if by definition, to denote an acquisition rather than a specific territory. India was yet conceptually concrete to Europeans: it was somewhere to be coveted as an intellectual curiosity, a military pushover and an economic bonanza. While the historic term of India exclusively referred to the Indus Valley (today known as Pakistan), the European definition of India was used to describe acquired territories across the world. Let’s go over some of them:
- British East India Company — present-day Bangladesh, Republic of India
- British West Indies — present-day Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, Antigua, Virgin Islands, Dominica, Montserrat, Grenada, Cayman Islands, Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago
- Dutch East India Company — present-day Bangladesh, Republic of India
- Dutch East Indies — present day Indonesia, Brunei & Malaysia
- Dutch West Indies — present-day Suriname & Netherlands Antilles
- French East India Company — present-day Puducherry (Republic of India)
- French West India Company — present-day Dominica, Grenada, Guadeloupe and Haiti
- Portuguese East India Company — present-day Goa (Republic of India)
- Portuguese East Indies — present-day Malacca (Malaysia) and Macau (China)
- Casa da India — present-day Brazil and Angola
- Spanish West Indies — present-day Puerto Rico, Cuba, Venezuela and Dominican Republic
- Spanish East Indies — present-day Philippines, Guam, and Papua New Guinea
- Danish East India Company — present-day Bangladesh, Bengal and Tamil Nadu (Republic of India)
- Danish West Indies — present-day US Virgin Islands
- Swedish East India Company — present-day Bangladesh & Bengal (Republic of India)
You get the picture. India was geographically imprecise among the Europeans. This is in stark contrast to terms like Africa, Arabia, Britain, Scandinavia or America, where the territory was well defined. The term India on the other hand was indeed movable if one took account of all the “Native Indians” in the Americas, and all the overseas Indies. Tulane University professor Rosanne Adderly says the phrase “West Indies” distinguished the territories encountered by Columbus or claimed by Spain from discovery claims by other powers in [Asia’s] “East Indies”. Eventually, the term “Indies” was used by all European colonial powers to describe their acquired territories in the world.
Part 4: Historic India
Now that we have a clear picture of how the word India was misused by Europeans, let’s delve deeper into where the term India comes from and what it actually defines. The first occurrence of the word sets the trend. It’s an inscription found at Persepolis, capital of the Achaemenid Empire of Darius I in Persia dated from 518 BCE, where it lists his numerous domains including that of “Hi(n)du”. Where does the word Hindu comes from? Let’s investigate. The word for the Indus River in Sanskrit is “Sindhu”. This is why ancient Punjab was referred to as “Sapta Sindhu” (land of the seven rivers). Six of these rivers were all tributaries to the Indus River and so the Indus was viewed as the “Sindhu par excellence”.
In the ancient Persian language, a relative of Sanskrit, the initial ‘S’ of a Sanskrit word was invariably rendered as ‘H’ and thus Sindhu became Hindhu in Persian. When the word found its way into Greek, the initial ‘H’ was dropped, and it began to appear as the root Ind in Greek. In this form, it reached Latin and most other European languages, giving rise to “Ind+ia” or India.
In Arabic, Persian and Turkish, the “H” was retained and the term Hindhu would eventually give rise to Hind and Hindhustan, by which Arabs, Turks, Persians and Mughals would know India. The word Hindhu also reached Europe much later and was used to define the Indus Valley’s indigenous people — the Vedic clans such as the Sindhu, Kasmiras, Kambojas, Gandhara etc.
On the strength of a slightly earlier Persian inscription, which makes no mention of Hindhu, it is assumed that the Indus Valley was added to Darius’ Achaemenid Empire much earlier than 520 BCE. This earlier inscription mentions “Gadara” (or Gandhara), a Buddhist state located in an arc reaching the western Punjab through Khyber Pakhtunkhwa towards Kabul and perhaps into southern Afghanistan (where it is believed Kandahar got its name from).
According to Xenophon and Herodotus, Cyrus The Great had conquered Gandhara, which means the first Achaemenid invasion may have taken place as early as the mid-sixth century BCE (~550 BCE) rather than 518 BCE. This invasion seems likely from a reference to Cyrus dying of a wound inflicted by the enemy. The enemies were the “Derbikes” who enjoyed the support of the “Sindhu” people and were supplied by war-elephants. In Persian and Greek minds alike, the association of “Sindhu” with war elephants was thereafter almost as significant as its connection with the mighty Indus River. To Alexander of Macedon, following in the Achaemanids’ footsteps two centuries later, the river would be a geographical curiosity, but the elephants were a military obsession.
If Gandhara was already under Achaemenid rule, Darius’ Sindhu territory must have been beyond it, and so to the south or east. Later Persian records refer to Sindhu giving rise to the word Sind, today Pakistan’s southern most province. It seems unlikely though that the present-day Sindh borders were that of Sindhu in the late sixth century BCE, since Darius subsequently found it necessary to send a naval expedition to explore Sindhu. Flowing through the middle of the Indus River would surely have been familiar to any naval explorer of the region. More probably then the territory of Sindhu lay east of Gandhara and in all likelihood would be the region between eastern Punjab and Thar Desert. Sindhu territory thus occupied what is today Cholistan and Thar (southern Punjab and northern Sindh provinces). Both Gandhara and Sindhu would later on become provinces or “satrapy” of the Persian Empire.
Under Xerxes (Darius’ successor), troops from the satrapy of Gandhara and Sindhu were reportedly serving in the Achaemenid Army. These people were mostly archers, although cavalry and chariots are also mentioned. They fought as far as eastern Europe and some were present at the Persians’ victory over Leonidas and his Spartans at Thermopylae, and then at the decisive defeat by the Greeks at Plataea. Through these and other less fraught contacts between Greeks and Persians, Greek writers like Herodotus gleaned some idea of India.
Compared to the intervening lands of Anatolia and Iran, it appeared a veritable paradise of exotic plenty. Herodotus told of an immense population and the richest soil imaginable from which kindly ants, smaller than dogs but bigger than foxes, threw up hillocks of pure gold dust. The ants may have intrigued entomologists, but the gold was registered in political circles. With several rivers to rival the Nile and behemoths from which to give battle (war-elephants), it was clearly a land of fantasy as well as wealth. Herodotus, of course, knew only of the Indus Valley and that too by hearsay. Hence, he did not report that the land beyond the sensational extent of the Thar Desert. Hence, the Indus Valley was considered “terra firma” or the end of the world to Greeks and Europeans.
In abbreviated form, Herodotus’ history circulated widely throughout ancient Greece and Europe — and a hundred years after his death, people would still be reading his writings, including an avid teenager named Alexander of Macedon, who knew it well enough to quote its stories. It wouldn’t be until Alexander’s arrival in the Indus Valley (~330 BCE), that people would discover a land beyond the Indus Valley (the Gangetic plain and Deccan…or what is today the Republic of India). Up until this point, the Indus Valley was considered “one end” of the ends of the world. The rest as they say is history.
Part 5: Moving Forward
If Pakistan Studies had been written properly, today we would not be having this discussion. It’s very easy to blame European colonialists for disparaging the word India, but why haven’t we claimed this name? What are we sitting around for twiddling our thumbs for? Pakistan should have done to the Republic of India as Greece did to the Republic of Macedonia.
The Macedonia naming dispute is a political dispute regarding the use of the name Macedonia between Greece and the Republic of Macedonia, formerly a federal unit of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. After the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991, the former Socialist Republic of Macedonia gained independence in 1991, naming itself Macedonia. Citing historical and territorial concerns resulting from the ambiguity between the Republic of Macedonia, the adjacent Greek region of Macedonia and the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedon which falls mostly within Greek Macedonia, Greece opposed the use of the name “Macedonia” by the Republic of Macedonia without a geographical qualifier such as “Northern Macedonia” for use by all and for all purposes. As millions of ethnic Greeks identify themselves as Macedonians, unrelated to the Slavic people who are associated with the Republic of Macedonia, Greece further objects to the use of the term “Macedonian” for the neighboring country’s largest ethnic group and its language. The Republic of Macedonia is accused of appropriating symbols and figures that are historically considered part of Greek culture such as the Vergina Sun and Alexander the Great, and of promoting the irredentist concept of a United Macedonia, which involves territorial claims on Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, and Serbia. The dispute has escalated to the highest level of international mediation, involving numerous attempts to achieve a resolution. In 1995, the two countries formalized bilateral relations and committed to start negotiations on the naming issue, under the auspices of the United Nations. Until a solution is found, the provisional reference “the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” (sometimes unofficially abbreviated as FYROM) is used by international organizations and states that do not recognize translations of the constitutional name Republic of Macedonia. UN members, and the UN as a whole, have agreed to accept any final agreement on a new name resulting from negotiations between the two countries.
Similarly, Pakistan should have done the same to the Republic of India, which has no valid claim on the term India.
- Neither historically: as noted above
- Neither geographically: Indus Valley vs Ganges plain
- Neither culturally: Vedic Indus vs Puranic Ganges
The only reason the Republic of India is named India is purely due to European colonialist ignorance and greed and for Britain to remain relevant in the subcontinent post 1947.
Part 6: Solutions
It remains to be seen if Pakistan will ever legally question the usage of the term India, but before we get to that stage, we need to look within. To educate the world, we as a nation must educate ourselves. Pakistan needs to address its national identity and embrace its rich history. This can be with the following measures:
- Redefine the two nation theory
Expand upon an Indus nationalist ideology — read my article > Redefining The Two Nation Theory — Is It Religion or Culture That Divides Us — https://medium.com/@ancientpakistan/redefining-pakistans-two-nation-theory-d6f8edd2ee9d - Revise Pakistan studies curriculum
Cleanse our history and social studies textbooks of the corruption and hatred that was embedded in 1982 under General Zia ul Haq. - Reclaim the words Indo, India and Indies
Emphasize its relationship with the Indus Valley and Pakistan, and lack thereof with the Republic of India.
The Indus Valley is the true India, always has been and always will be. It’s time we reclaimed our history and for Pakistan to celebrate its multiculturalism. Very few countries have the luxury of having such a rich history, yet our population is devoid of any knowledge of it. Nations unaware of their past, are doomed for the future. PM Imran Khan says he wanted a “Naya Pakistan”, well here’s his chance.
ADDITIONAL READING
SOURCES
- ‘Constitutionalism in Islamic Countries: Between Upheaval and Continuity’ By Rainer Grote, Tilmann Röder
- ‘India, that is Bharat’ by Catherine Clementin-Ojha
- ‘India: A History — Chapter 3 India and Indus’ By John Keay
- ‘The Story of India’s Integration’ — together, they persuaded the rulers of one princely state after another — nearly 600 in all — to sign the Instruments of Accession to the Indian state. It helped that India, as the successor state to British India, maintained a tenuous control over the princely states
