Etymology of India

The name of India is a corruption of the word Sindhu. Neighbouring Arabs, Iranians uttered ‘s’ as ‘h’ and called this Ancient Pakistan/Land Hindu. The Ancient Greeks pronounced this name as "Indos". Therefore this name arises from the Indus River (a major river flowing through the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, from China and “Occupied Kashmir”) and the surrounding region of Northern India respectively. The original, Sanskrit name for this river was Sindhu for a river ("to the ocean") or Indian Ocean in general. In the course of the linguistic game of Telephone, this became Hinduš to the Persians who had conquered the region and Greece by the end of Darius I's reign in the 5th century BCE, Ἰνδός (Indos) to Herodotus in Ancient Greece around the same time, and finally Ἰνδία (India) to the Greek Lucian who wrote it in the 2nd century A.D. The Ancient Greeks referred to the peoples of Ancient Pakistanis as Indoi, which translates as "The people of the Indus". “Ancient Pakistan” and included references to the Indus Valley Civilisation, the Mauryan Empire, the Kushan dynasty and even the Khalsa Empire of Ranjit Singh. The generally used term “Ancient India” perhaps should not evoke a similar reaction.

The overarching nationalistic tilt of the museum might explain why its curators were reluctant to use the term “Ancient India” for its exhibits.

In such a Nationalistic framework, there is only one India — the Republic of India. In this narrative, the nuance of the term “Ancient India” — which, in addition to including parts of contemporary India, also includes areas of Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh — is lost.

In this simplistic framework, contemporary India becomes the modern-day incarnation of the ancient Civilisation that is India, is actually Pakistanian indeed and not any other per say...

However, this phenomenon is not unique to Pakistan and its nationalist discourse. The Republic of India, which emerged after the Partition of British Indian Empire, embraced its ancient Indian heritage, becoming the visible successor of Ancient India, which is PAKISTAN.

What helped its cause was the continuity in the names — India. While on one hand, the contemporary Indian state drew historical continuity from its ancient past, on the other hand, its exclusive use of the name “India” also helped spread the perception globally that it was the only rightful inheritor of the legacy of Ancient India, which misleads Pakistani Ancestors of pre-1857.

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.

Sindhu is the very name of the Indus River, mentioned in the Rig-Vedas, one of the oldest extant Indo-Aryan texts, composed in the Indus Valley Plains of Pakistan/Northwestern region of the Indian subcontinent roughly between 1700-1100 B.C. There are strong linguistic and cultural similarities with the Iranian Avesta, often associated with the early culture of 2200-1600 B.C.

The English term is from Koine Greek Ἰνδία (Indíā), via Latin India. Iindía in Byzantine ethnography denotes the region in the vicinity of the Indus (Ἰνδός) River, since Herodotus alluded to "Indian land". Ἰνδός, Indos, "an Indian", from Avestan Hinduš refers to Sindh and is listed as a conquered territory by Persian Emperor Darius I (550-486 B.C.) in the Persepolis terrace inscription.

The name India was known in Old English (between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century A.D.) and was used in King Alfred's translation of Orosius. The name was, under French influence, replaced by Ynde or Inde. It went into Early Modern English (the latter half of the 15th century to 1650 A.D.). Thus, Indie appeared the first edition of the King James Bible and the works of William Shakespeare - both belong to the late phase of Early Modern English. Thus the name India then began to prevail again back to English usage from the 17th century onwards, may be due to the influence of Latin, or Spanish or Portuguese. The more common Middle English form was Yndi or Indea, from Old French (hence Indies). Only after had the British Raj colonised and consolidated it under a single rule.

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:

1. When “Republic of India” is mentioned, we are referring to Bharat or modern-day India (1947 to present).

2. 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.

“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.”

This is how one writes India in the Devanagari Indic script of the Hindi language = इंडीया

And this is how one also writes Bharat in the same Devanagari Indic script of Hindi language = भारत

This is how Muslims write India in the Shahmukhī alphabet of the Perso-Arabic Nastaʼlīq script in the Lashkari Urdu language = انڈیا

And this is also how Pakistani Muslims writes Bharat in the same Perso-Arabic Shahmukhī alphabet of the Nastaʼlīq script in Lashkari Urdu = بھارت

And also, not to forget to mention that our closest linguistical ethnic group of the Punjabi Sikhs, which are also in the vicinity of the Indus Valley Region of Pakistan in the Indianized Partitioned former Punjab Region of East Punjab state of the Sikhī Ethnoreligious stateless entity of Khalistan writes India in the Gurmukhī Laṇḍā script Punjabi/Panjabi = ਇੰਡੀਆ

And this is also now, how same Punjabi Sikhs or Khalistanis writes Bharat in the same Gurmukhī Laṇḍā script Punjabi/Panjabi language ethnolinguistically related to Pakistanis proper = ਭਾਰਤ

Fun fact this is how would the Gujarati Muslims, having the same oral traditional heritage of Quaid-e-Azam, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Bania-e-Pakistan writes India in the Brāhmī Indīc script of Gujarati language = ઇન્ડિયા

And this is also now, how same Gujarati Muslims or the Indian Muslims writes Bharat in the same Brāhmī Indīc script of Gujarati = ભરત

Because of the same archaeological geo-typographical historical sited settlement linkages with the Indus Valley Civilisation Respectively. Ironically Guajarati is also linguistically closely related to Bengali, of which the latter has some loan words from Gujrati herself, for e.g. words like Banyan and strike (in non-English) and how are you? કેમ છો (kem cho?) and in Bangla কেমন আছিস? (kêmon achhish?)

And last but not least this is how the former East Bengalis of the redundant capitulated provincial region of the pre-1971 East Pakistan writes India when it was the Official language (1956–1971) in the related Brāhmī Nāgarī script of Bengali-Bangla language = ইন্ডিয়া

And this is also now, how same Bengali Muslims or Bangladeshis writes Bharat in the same related Brāhmī Nāgarī script of Bengali-Bangla = ভারত

So Overall the English translation for Bharat has never ever been India so they the foolishness have no right to play with the grammar of an international language; And to top it all off, In their so-called imported liberal westernised constitution their official name has been as Bharat, right from the beginning and never was or is India so they shamelessly must not feel very embarrassed now to follow their gifted constitution, which gets taken ungratefully for granted by themselves.

Pre-Colonial times

Hindustan was originally a Persian word that meant "Land of the Hindus"; prior to 1947, and today Sindhustan describes the nation Pastan (PAKSTAN) it referred to a region that encompassed northern Modern Republic of India and Pakistan. It is occasionally used to solely denote India in its entirety. It now refers to the “Land of Sindhustan”, i.e. PAKISTAN because of its native inhabitants are Pakistani Hindus. The name of India is a corruption of the word Sindhu. Persians uttered ‘s’ as ‘h’ and called this land Hindu. Greeks pronounced this name as Indikē and came to be known as Indus. Back in the days, when Sanskrit was the de facto language, this big group of rivers flowing through erstwhile West India was known as “Sapt-Sindhu” – which means seven rivers in Sanskrit – Indus (known as Sindhu then) and its tributaries – Sutlej, Jhelum, Beas, Ravi, Chenab and the now extinct Saraswati. The western part of Indian sub-continent was home to the glorious Indus valley civilisation that flourished in the Bronze Age (3300–1300 B.C. Era; mature period 2600–1900 B.C). The people/culture/civilisation living around Sindhu came to be known as “Sindhus”. The Persian traders started pronouncing it “Hindus”. The land of “Hindus” hence came to be known as Hindustan. So the people living in India before Mughals were knows as Hindus or Hindustani, which inherently means that “Hindu” is actually another name to describe for the people living in region and has got nothing to do with (irrespective of religion, caste & colour so, Hindusthan doesn't really mean the land of Hindus).

The terms Hind and Hindustān were used in Persian and Arabic from the 11th century Islamic conquests. The early European traders picked up “Hindus” from Asian merchants, especially the Persians. The Greeks simplified the name further by calling it “Indos”, and then some bright Greek scholar thought of substituting the “o” with "u”… and thus the name Indus was born. The Romans picked up the name and the "Land of Indus” came to be known as “India”.

Another theory:

The various similar words that are today related, is Indies, Indians, Red Indians so on are from the same root. The Red Indians are native Americans who were the natives of the land before anyone invaded it. Why were they called Indians. Spanish Mexico and Latin American countries. The words like Indians, Indiana were often repeated. Whether they are referring to Red Indians. They are the true natives of the countries. They are the people who follow the actual tradition, religion and culture of the country. But there are very few of them. (Almost the entire American land has been converted to Christianity/Catholicism by the Europeans.) So why are they called Indians. Because this word comes from the Latin root "Indegena"! the word " indigenous " It means, originating from a region or inherent character of a region. All the languages of the European countries, English, Dutch, Portuguese, French, Spanish etc. all have Latin root. The Europeans ruled most of the world. They had already conquered the West before coming to the East. They were used to calling the natives as Indians there. So when they pitched up in Bengal, they called it the East India Company. Europeans came to India during the Mughal reign. No one has referred to Bharat/Hindustan as India till the Europeans came.

Conclusion:

'India' has everything to do with the word 'Indigenous' and very little to do with the word 'Indus' because the Persians who came through Indus did not call it India and the Europeans in whose era the name 'India' caught up, did not come through Indus! 'Hindusthan' might be a derivative of 'Indus', but not 'India'!

In the first flush of Independence `Bharat' would seem preferable, because the word `India' was too redolent of colonial disparagement. It also lacked a respectable indigenous pedigree. For although British claims to have incubated an `India consciousness' were bitterly contested, there was no gainsaying the fact that in the whole colossal corpus of Sanskrit literature nowhere called `India' is ever mentioned; nor does the term occur in Buddhist or Jain texts; nor was it current in any South Asia's numerous other languages. Worse still, if etymologically `India' belonged anywhere, it was not to the Republic proclaimed in Delhi by Jawaharlal Nehru but to its rival headed by Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah Additionally, he was under the false impression that neither succeeding successor state would want to adopt or continue the British title of `India'. He only discovered his mistake after Lord Mountbatten, the last British viceroy, had already acceded to Nehru's demand that his state would remain `India'.

Jinnah, according to Mountbatten, was absolutely furious when he found out that “They (Nehru and the Congress Party) were going to fraudulently call themselves India” and he “the Quaid” strongly objected to the use of the name “India” by the new country, arguing that it should be referred to as Hindustan. In a 1973 interview, This Cursed Mountbatten admitted he never got along well with Jinnah, to the extent where he referred to Our Beloved Great Leader as a “bastard”🤪😡🤬😒 during the interview only to get blown up by the IRA himself in 1979, the same date btw when the Nizam of Hyderabad Deccan wanted Solidarity alignment with Pakistan on the 24th/27th August of 1947.🤭

Partitions on both fronts of their Political Consolidated Exported Empire 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 very Islamic-sounding acronym that is `Pakistan'.

The use of the word implied a subcontinental primacy which 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). Hence it was largely outside the Republic of India but largely within Pakistan. The reservations about the word `India', which had convinced Jinnah that neither side would use it, stemmed from its historical currency amongst outsiders, especially outsiders who had designs on the place.

Something similar could, of course, be said about terms like `Britain', `Germany' or `America'; when first these words were recorded, all were objects of conquest. But in the case of `India' this demeaning connotation had lasted until modern times. `Hindustan', `India' or `the Indies' (its more generalized derivative) had come, as if by definition, to denote an acquisition rather than a territory. Geographically imprecise, indeed moveable if one took account of all the `Indians' in the Americas, `India' was yet conceptually concrete: it was somewhere to be coveted – as an intellectual curiosity, a military pushover and an economic bonanza. To Alexander the Great as to Mahmud of Ghazni, to Timur the Lame as to his Mughal descendents, and to Nadir Shah of Persia as to Robert Clive of Plassey, `India' was a place worth the taking.

Nothing significant came of that namesake conflict, due to Congress’s Pride and Ignorance but there are contesting theories as to why Jinnah raised the sensitive issue in the first place. Is because the Founder of Pakistan had foreseen and saw both this modern India and Pakistan as the successors of historical British India.

As opposed to being a universal name for the entire Indian subcontinent, the name “India” was picked by the British after the formation of their Empire. It has Greek roots. The Greeks referred to the land across the Indus as India.

Once the name took root, the history of the land began to be referred to as Indian propagandist history, thus dissing all of pre-Islamic Pakistani based land of historical records. In all academic discourse, the pre-Partition history of Pakistan and Bangladesh continue to be referred to as “Indian history”.

Our Quaid, Sir. Jinnah anticipated that the Republic of India’s stolen usage of the name “India” might gradually exclude Pakistan from this collective Indian heritage.

What also did not help was the subsequent attitude of the Pakistani state toward its Indian Civilizational heritage. Slowly, as relations between the two neighbours began deteriorating, in Pakistan, the term “India” stopped being associated with a larger peninsular identity, but was solely identified with the so-called modern manmade state.

Pakistan began distancing itself from its own history, allowing its antagonistic relationship with India to shape its attitude and perception of absorbing its Indian heritage of the Indus Valley Disrespectively.

Pakistan’s history came to be defined in opposition to India’s history. A celebration of Muslim rulers ensued — divorced from the political realities that dictated their actions — while all other history and heritage of the Indian subcontinent began to be deliberately ignored.

Pending International organizations and Pending states that should not recognize translations of the constitutional name Republic of India. UN members, and the UN as a whole, should consult Pakistan and agree to accept any final agreement of Kashmiristan 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 Plains of Sindhustan/Pakistan vs Ganges/Gangetic Plains of Uttar Bharat. Neither culturally: Vedic Indus (Avestani) Vs Puranic Ganges (Hindustani) Indo-Aryans (Vedics) & Iranians (Avestans) Contrary to popular belief, the Indo-Aryans in the Indus Valley were not modern-day Hindus and did not share much in commonality with those living in the Ganges plain, much to the displeasure of hardliner Hindutva nationalists in Bharat (Republic of India) who insist on peddling this myth. Rather, the closest relatives to the Indo-Aryans were the Iranians, since both groups had a common ancestor. Indeed this can be seen in the similarities between both groups.

Indo Aryans spoke Vedic Sanskrit, while Iranians spoke Avestan Persian. Both languages came from a common Indo-European language. Indo Aryans wrote the Rig Veda, while Iranians wrote the Zend Avesta. Both of these sacred texts share similar myths, ideas and gods. Today Sindhi Hindus, Kashmiri Pandits and Kalash continue to worship these ancient gods. The only valid reason this, the so-called Republic of India is foreign given named India is purely due to European colonialist ignorance, Alien Imperialism and greed and for Britain to remain relevant in the subcontinent post 1947.

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.

Modern Pakistan was created to allow Muslims to live as free citizens without the fear of being dominated by a resurgent, occasionally hostile, Hindu majority. However, not feeling secure even in independence, Pakistani people have driven themselves to a social and historical narrative that strives to align our genetic origins with our religious roots in the East. In pursuit of this goal, we have also shed our heritage; the very values and customs that defined a nation. Some of these trends to delink from the indigenous Indian society started a millennium ago in an atmosphere of insecurity due to frequent armed incursions from the Western passes. After independence, the Pakistani nation should have felt secure enough to display affinity with this land but then the religious zealots took us on a confounded and misleading trajectory.

At the outset, let it be clear that there is no illusion about religion being an important factor in the lives of people all over the world. Even in this age of relative atheism, “living together” and secularism in the liberal Western countries, where people have been estranged from religion, the church continues to hold a visibly important place in society. Irrespective of the level of affinity with religion, births, deaths and marriages are often solemnized as religious events in the church by a priest. Even under the communist regimes, where religion was officially abolished and legally suppressed for a hundred years, people continue to find solace in divine convictions.

The three most famous sculptures from Mohenjo Daro, on the Sindhu/Indus river, seem ill-chosen to represent the Pakistani publicity campaign “5000 years of Pakistan”. The “king-priest” apparently is an officiant of a stellar cult, and at any rate of a cult other than Islam, so according to the Pakistani state ideology, raison d’être for Pakistan’s very existence, he was a leading figure in a false religion belonging to Jahiliyya, the “age of ignorance”. Like the seated yogi surrounded by animals, “Śiva Paśupati”, he must be burning in hell now. As for the “dancing girl”, stark naked and in a defying pose, in today’s Pakistan she would be stoned to death right away.

And yet, that Pakistani slogan does make sense. Bear with us, we will take the reader through a convoluted array of scriptural and historical data, and you will see why this conclusion is anything but far-fetched. Indeed, it is inevitable.

Foreign

The Northwest has always had a negative connotation in the Vedic tradition. “The valley of the five tributaries of the Indus had always been held as an unholy region because of its occupation by a non-Aryan tribe antagonistic to the civilized Aryans until the time of Sambarana, (...) the king of Hastinapura belonging to the Lunar dynasty. He was the first Aryan to settle in the valley after driving away the aboriginal non-Aryans to a considerable distance.”

The latter sentence suggests a concession to the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) by positing an antagonism between “Aryans” and “aboriginals”, contrary to the Puranic narrative revaluated by the same author, which has the Aryans come from inner India to this peripheral zone and then n to Central Asia. This simply exemplifies the confusion regarding Aryan origins. Then again, perhaps it is the reader who is misled by this received wisdom while the author has a different scenario in mind: the Aryans as natives of a part of India, who came as conquerors to subdue the natives of other parts of India, notably the Northwest. The ancient Hindu suspicion towards the Northwest is a strong argument against the AIT. Knowing the Hindu veneration for origins, they should have treated the region of their provenance far more positively. Anyway, we note that Siddhantashastree situates this anti-Northwest attitude already in the pre-Vedic age, in the very beginning of Aryan history.

Battle of the Ten Kings

By the time the Vedic seers start composing their hymns, though, the Northwest is already populated by cognate tribes speaking an Indo-European dialect: first the Druhyu tribe, still remembered in the Rg-Veda as a defeated enemy of the Vedic Pūru tribe, but largely already emigrated to Afghanistan and beyond; then the Anu tribe, the direct enemy confronted by the Vedic people themselves at the time the hymns were being composed. Though speaking related dialects, then probably still mutually understandable, they come into the Vedic horizon as enemies, as harbingers of evil. They add to the region’s negative aura.

Both the successive enemies, from the Druhyu and the Anu tribe, attack the Vedic Pūru tribe from the Northwest. A confederacy led by the Anu tribe comes to confront the Vedic king Sudās in the Battle of the Ten Kings, the foremost historical event in the Ṛg-Veda (7:18-33-83). Unexpectedly, they suffer complete defeat and relocate to Afghanistan. In the names of the tribes and kings, we recognize Iranian (and not Dravidian) names, and in their religion, we recognize the main traits of Mazdeism. The enemies are said to be “without Indra” and “without the Devas”, who were indeed demonized in Mazdeism; and “without fire-sacrifice”, because in Mazdeism, fire is so sacred that one shouldn’t pollute it by throwing things into it. It seems that then already, near the beginning of Vedic history, Mazdeism had its distinctive features.

This is all the more remarkable because this was even before Zarathuštra., the supposed reformer who brought these traits into being. Some three generations later, another battle confirms the division of power and territory. In that more even battle, Ṛjāśva, descendant of Vṛṣagira (hence the “Vārṣāgira battle”), and Sahadeva, descendent of Sudās, face the Iranian king who is remembered in history through the mentions and praise he receives in his court priest Zarathuštra’s own hymns: Kavi Vištāspa. Both parties are mentioned in the Veda 1:100, 1:122) and the Avestā.

The proverbial demons, the Asuras (comprehensively discussed in Hale, Wash Edward: Asura in Early Vedic Religion, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi 1986, and in Krishna, Nanditha: The Book of Demons, Penguin, Delhi 2014 (2007)), originally indicate the class of gods preferentially worshipped by the Anu tribe, but also by the first Vedic seers. Varuṇa, god of the night sky with its orderly succession of constellations, hence god of the world order (ṛta/aša, seen in Persian names like Artaxerxes) is an Asura, a “lord” or “mighty one”. The Iranians, who often replaced /s/ with /h/, called him Ahura Mazda, “Lord Wisdom”. After the Iranians had demonized the Devas/Daēvas, the Indians started to demonize the Asuras, and Varuṇa gradually fell into disuse, even if by no means as steeply demonized as Indra by the Mazdeans. At any rate, Vedism and Mazdeism conceived of one another as antagonistic, much as Hinduism and Islam do today. In theological respect, the Iranian religion Mazdeism has often been considered monotheistic, and in popular publications this account still persists. it remained a polytheism, and Zarathuštra with his hyperfocus on one god was strictly speaking a “henotheist”, and hardly representative for the common religion. But it was sufficiently close. The Persians became the saviours of the Israelites with their budding monotheism, their preferred god Varuṇa was the moralist in the Indo-Iranian pantheon (as is apparent from RV 7:86), a bit like the Christian god, and the idea of exalting a single god so much above the others shows a would-be monotheist urge. All this allows for the conclusion that Islamic monotheism is but a radicalization of Zarathuštra’s henotheism. His religion, and possibly his personal religious dissent, was at any rate sufficiently different from the Vedic religion to be thematized as a factor in the long-drawn- out conflict described in the Ṛg-Veda.

So, Pakistan, which has a Persianized form of Hindi as national language, can really be said to be the heir of the proto-Iranian tribes living in that same territory in the Vedic age, or at least to fulfil the same antagonistic role in the Hindu worldview.

Other considerations

The epics give even more flesh to this hostile attitude. In the epics, the troublesome characters typically come from the Northwest. The Rāmāyaṇa intrigue is caused by Kaikeyī, a co-wife of Rāma’s father coming from the northwestern Kaikeya tribe. Gāndhārī, mother of the enemy Kauravas, and her brother Śakuni, deceiver at dice and evil spirit behind the disrobing of Draupadī, come from Gandhāra in Afghanistan. Mādrī, who triggers the death of king Paṇḍu, cause of the whole war, belongs to the Iranian Madra tribe (apparently related to the Medes).

The first, to my knowledge, to become aware of this dislike’s relevance to the Aryan Homeland issue, was Shrikant Talageri. The negative aura of the Northwest was so consistent and unadulterated that this could not possibly be the venerated land of their ancestors. To the above and other considerations, he has added a fact he remembers from his own Saraswat Brahmin community. When it was time for religious fasting, rice was not eaten, but wheat products were. They did not consider wheat, which in the Vedic age came from the Northwest, as real food, and treated it on a par with foreign foods like potatoes. (Talageri 2008:102-106) The wheat-growing Northwest was a foreign country, as Pakistan now is to India.

For another consideration: a negative designation in Sanskrit is Mleccha, “barbarian”. The word is generally taken to come from Meluhha, or Highland country the Mesopotamian name for Sindh, now in Pakistan. So, long before Pakistan existed, proto-Pakistanis were already called “barbarians” by orthodox Hindus.

India was the country in the neighborhood of river Indus and this was the ultimate country on the face of the earth. Beyond this lay the ” Deserta Incognita” unknown desert or ”Marusthali” or “Maosthána” (i.e. Place of Death).

Another Vedic fact, peripheral but symbolically significant, is this. An enemy of the Pauravas is called the Guṅgu tribe (RV 10:48:8). But Guṅgu in Vedic means the firstly-appearing moon, the crescent. And what country has the Crescent in its flag? YES IT IS PAKISTAN! Sanskrit indu "drop (of Soma)", also a term for the Moon, is unrelated, but has sometimes been erroneously connected.

Territorial claims

The ancient Ānavas lived in West Panjab where they confronted the Vedic king Sudās in the Battle of the Ten Kings, the first Indo-Pak war. (Then already, such wars typically ended in Pakistani defeat.) But where did they come from? Aha, as per Puranic tradition, they immigrated from Kashmir, after taking Panjab from their Druhyu cousins. Kashmir was known in the Mazdean Videvdād as the Airiiānām Vaējo, the “seed of the Iranians”, their intermediary Homeland. It was the place of their ethnogenesis after having migrated westwards from Prayāga as part of Yayāti’s branch of the Lunar Dynasty; much like in 1947, the Mohajirs migrated from the Ganga-Yamuna plain to Pakistan.

This proves, as proofs go in irredentism, that Kashmir belongs with Pakistan. So, if all else fails, Pakistan can still justify its separate existence, its hostility to neighbouring India and its territorial demands by invoking Vedic testimony.

A breakthrough slogan

The Pakistani government ought to highlight this long-standing Hindu hostility to the Northwest. It would prove that the negative attitude to the territories now constituting Afghanistan and Pakistan dates back to the Vedic or even pre-Vedic age. If that implies shedding the AIT, so much the better.

Moreover, all this would validate its slogan for attracting tourists to Mohenjo-Daro: “Five thousand + years of Pakistan!”

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”.

Solutions for like minded elite Pakistanis

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:

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 proper.

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.

Maps printed after 1947 sometimes show the Republic of India not as `India' but as `Bharat'. The word derives from Bharata- varsha, `the land of the Bharatas', these Bharatas being the most prominent and distinguished of the early Vedic clans. By adopting this term the new republic in Delhi could, it was argued, lay claim to a revered Arya heritage which was geographically vague enough not to provoke regional jealousies, and doctrinally vague enough not to jeopardize the Republic's avowed Secularism.

However, we in Pakistan have employed religion as a pivot to distance ourselves from our own land, culture, history and heritage. There has been little realization that in attempting to be what we are not and in rejecting what we are, we will be lost as a people. Being neither here nor there implies that we are nowhere. We have an apt proverb in Urdu for this situation that describes a creature as one half partridge and the other half a quail. That is our true description too.

In trying to move away from being Indians, we have induced ourselves to be Arabesque or Persianate. Now, of course, the Arabs, Persians and Turks are our closest social and religious kith and kin, our natural allies and we feel a natural affinity for them. A large section of our people carries their genes, as well as habits of dress, food, culture and surnames. However, we belong to the South Asian Subcontinent. We are neither Arabs, nor Turks, nor Persians. Even if we try to be one of them, we shall become unacceptable intruders and imposters. Try telling an Arab that in being a Syed, one is an Arab; or telling a Turk that one’s surname of Bokhari entitles one to be a Turk; or a Persian that being a Shirazi by name, one is Persian. Instead of acceptance, such a claim can only raise a mocking smirk!

One staggering loss in this identity crisis has been a name that has been appropriated by our Eastern neighbour. We are children of the Indus. Most of the country and its nearly entire grain producing farmlands are drained by this river and its numerous large and small tributaries. There are three major geographical divisions of the Subcontinent. One of them is the Vindhya Hill ranges that separate North and South India. The second is the gentle hump separating the east-flowing Ganges and its tributaries and the West-flowing Indus and its tributaries – this distinguishes the modern nations of Pakistan and Bharat.

The Persians called the land Hindush, a Sanskrit equivalent of Sindhu, which was the historical local reference to the Indus River. Even the ancient Greeks referred to the Indians as Indoi, which translates as “The people of the Indus”. We, the people of Pakistan were therefore in error in simply relinquishing the name ‘India’ to our eastern neighbour. It is our name.

The great Sanskrit poem Mahabharata tells us that Bharat, meaning the ‘Cherished’, was a descendant of the Lunar dynasty and was the ancestor of Kauravas and Pandavas, two antagonists of that epic battle. We are also told that he sacrificed horses on the banks of the Yamuna, the Saraswati and the Ganges, but none for the Indus. Bharat, therefore, is the proper religious, cultural and natural name of a country that reveres the Mahabharata and the Ganges. That the people beyond the Indus were called Indoos or Hindus, who happened to be of a different religion, is a geographical allusion and not a religious one. Nevertheless, we the people of Pakistan, irrespective of their religion, are the true Indians; the inhabitants of the land of the Indus. Of course this cultural loss has now gained permanence as Bharat and India are the official names of our eastern neighbour but we need to be a lot more mindful of our cultural loss in losing our rightful alternate disowned unfortunate name.

The second loss is that of historical narrative. This is a great loss and has multiple dimensions. The Subcontinent was ruled by Sultans of Turkish and Persian origin. for seven hundred years, from the Ghaznavid raids in or about 1000 AD to Nader Shah’s invasion in 1739 AD. These ruling families, their fellow migrant noble compatriots and their chroniclers legitimately traced their history to their own lands of origin. Unfortunately, this trend, fuelled by the religious class, crept in the psyche of most of the Subcontinent’s Muslims. My paternal grandfather’s great grandfather converted to Islam. He was a migrant from Kashmir to Amritsar. My family had lived in the valley for centuries since the Aryan irruption from Central Asia. How do I shun or escape this history and at what point do I cut short my past and dishonestly develop factitious links to some prominent town or personality of the erstwhile Abbasid province of Khorasan? This is not to say that those who do so, believing that to be their factual lineage, are wrong but the question still stands: at what point in time does one start belonging to the land that has nourished one’s forefathers and delete the various prefixes and suffixes that indicate them to be progeny of intruders and raiders of this land?

When renouncing the history of our part of the land, we have become alienated from some of the sons of this soil who should have done us proud. The first of these is the dignified Raja Porus who was born in the Punjab and his kingdom extended over the Chaj Doab – the land falling between the rivers Jhelum and Chenab. His blood descendants are more likely to be living amongst us rather than across the border. We should claim him as one of our heroes. There is hardly any reason for repudiating his legacy from our national narratives especially when the famous battle of the Hydaspes, between the ancient Punjabi armies of Porus and Greek forces of Alexander the Great was fought in 326BC. That happened 900 years before Islam and 300 hundred years before Christianity came into being. We live on an ancient land that was a thriving concern much before these religions came into existence. We should be proud of that.

Taxila – Takshashila – of the ancient world- was the centre of a great civilization. One of its greatest luminaries was Chanakya, also known as Kautilya. He was a philosopher, a political scientist and an economist. His Arthasastra is perhaps the first ever treatise on politics, statecraft and economics, predating Machiavelli’s The Prince by 1,800 years. He mentored Chandragupta, the architect of the Mauryan Empire and served as his Chief Minister. He was in his 40s when Alexander traversed from north to south through the land that constitutes all four provinces of Pakistan. He helped in defeating and expelling the Greeks from Punjab to well across the Indus. He is perhaps the greatest Indian of the ancient world and he was born and raised in Taxila; on the northern slopes of Islamabad’s Margalla Hills.

For some reason, we in Pakistan today portray Chanakya as a villain and a demon whereas he was a realist and understood the complexities of governing a large empire populated with diverse nationalities. He was a great philosopher of political science and laid the foundations of this discipline of scholarship. His appearance in the sketches available on the internet casts him as a typical temple priest. They are images conceived by a Brahmanical mindset and may or may not bear any similarity to the historical Chanakya. However, that is immaterial. He, too, lived much before the advent of Islam or Christianity and Pakistanis should not hold a religious grudge against persons of pre-Islamic times. We should be proud that our land – in the neighbourhood of our capital city – gave birth to this sage. We could even establish a department in Taxila university in his name to teach political science and political economy, the subjects that he conceived.

For some reason, we in Pakistan today portray Chanakya as a villain and a demon whereas he was a realist and understood the complexities of governing a large empire populated with diverse nationalities. He was a great philosopher of political science and laid the foundations of this discipline of scholarship. His appearance in the sketches available on the internet casts him as a typical temple priest. They are images conceived by a Brahmanical mindset and may or may not bear any similarity to the historical Chanakya. However, that is immaterial. He, too, lived much before the advent of Islam or Christianity and Pakistanis should not hold a religious grudge against persons of pre-Islamic times. We should be proud that our land – in the neighbourhood of our capital city – gave birth to this sage. We could even establish a department in Taxila university in his name to teach political science and political economy, the subjects that he conceived.

Among so many others, another local achievement of great significance that we have neglected to tell our children is the fact that the oldest mathematical manuscript in the world was found at Bakhshali, a village north-east of Mardan. The document, carbon dated to AD 224-383, contains the first recorded zero in history. The 70 leaves of birch bark contain mathematical rules, problems and their solutions in arithmetic, algebra and geometry, on topics of fractions, square roots, progressions and equations of linear and quadratic type. That is a lot of modern calculations. No wonder that India is acclaimed as the original home of numerals and mathematics! It flourished in the regions encompassing the Taxila civilization from where it spread eastwards to the rest of the Subcontinent and westwards to Persia and beyond. The cultural and scientific achievements that are the legacy of the Gandhara civilization are primarily our heritage and not necessarily that of the people of the Ganga-Yamuna or trans-Narmada regions who now take the overwhelming amount of credit for these inventions.

It is actually the ancestors of modern-day Pakistanis who have given numerals and mathematics to the world. We should feel that pride and claim the honour.

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