Names of India
The Republic of India is principally known by two official short names: India and Bharat. An unofficial third name is Hindustan, which is widely used throughout North India. Although these names now refer to the modern country in most contexts, they historically denoted the broader Indian subcontinent.
"India" is a name derived from the Indus River and remains the country's common name in the Western world, having been used by the ancient Greeks to refer to the lands east of Persia and south of the Himalayas. This name appeared in Old English by the 9th century and re-emerged in Modern English in the 17th century.
One of the earliest known epigraphical attestations of the name Bharata occurs in the Hāthigumphā inscription of King Kharavela a Jain inscription at Udayagiri, near Bhubaneswar in Odisha. The inscription, which records Kharavela's military campaigns, contains a reference to Bharatavarsa, indicating that the term was already in use as a cultural or territorial designation in ancient India.
According to Jain tradition, the name Bharatavarṣa derives from Emperor Bharata, the eldest son of the first Tirthankara, Rishabhanatha. Jain texts describe Bharata as a universal monarch, after whom the land was named. This association between Bharata and the territorial name Bharatavarṣa is a recurring theme in Jain literature.
According to vedic tradition "Bharat" is the shortened form of the name "Bhāratavarṣa" in the Sanskrit language. It originates from the Vedic period and is rooted in the Dharmic religions, particularly Hinduism. The long-form Sanskrit name is derived from the Bharata tribe, who are mentioned in the Rigveda as one of the principal peoples of Aryavarta, which roughly corresponds with the Indo-Gangetic Plain. The initial application of the name referred only to the western part of the Gangetic Valley. In 1949, the Constituent Assembly of India adopted "Bharat" as one of the country's two official short names.
"Hindustan" is also a name derived from the Indus River, combining "Hindu" as an exonym with the suffix "-stan" in the Persian language. It has been the most common Persian name for India since at least the 3rd century, with the earlier form "Hindush" being attested in Old Persian as early as the 6th century BCE, when it was used to refer to the lands east of the Persian frontier in the Indus Valley. However, the name did not become particularly widespread in other languages until the 11th century, when it was popularised during the Muslim period in the Indian subcontinent. While it is no longer used in an official capacity, "Hindustan" is still a common name for India in the Hindustani language.
India
The English term is from Greek Indikē or , via Latin transliteration India.The name derives from Sanskrit, which was the name of the Indus River as well as the lower Indus basin.
Southworth suggests that the name Sindhu is in turn derived from Cintu, a Dravidian word for date palm, a tree commonly found in Sindh.
The Old Persian equivalent of was. Darius I conquered Sindh in about 516 BCE, upon which the Persian equivalent was used for the province at the lower Indus basin. Scylax of Caryanda who explored the Indus river for the Persian emperor probably took over the Persian name and passed it into Greek. The terms for the Indus river as well as "an Indian" are found in Herodotus' Histories. The loss of the aspirate /h/ was probably due to the dialects of Greek spoken in Asia Minor. Herodotus also generalised the term "Indian" from the people of lower Indus basin, to all the people living to the east of Persia, even though he had no knowledge of the geography of the land.
By the time of Alexander, in Koine Greek denoted the region beyond the Indus. Alexander's companions were aware of at least India up to the Ganges delta. Later, Megasthenes included in India the southern peninsula as well.
Megasthenes was a Greek ambassador in the Mauryan Empire court during the regin of Chandragupta Maurya and wrote a detailed account of his visit in Indica. He resided in the Mauryan capital of Pataliputra, noting that they surpassed in power and glory in all India.
Latin India is used by Lucian. India was known in Old English language and was used in King Alfred's translation of Paulus Orosius. In Middle English, the name was, under French influence, replaced by Ynde or Inde, which entered Early Modern English as "Indie". The name "India" then came back to English usage from the 17th century onward, and may be due to the influence of Latin, or Spanish or Portuguese.
Sanskrit indu "drop ", also a term for the Moon, is unrelated, but has sometimes been erroneously connected.
Indies
The term "Indies" refers to the land east of river Indus. It is fully interchangeable with the word India. Portuguese initially described the entire region they discovered as the Indies. Caribbean islands were initially described as "Indies" as they were thought to be India. When they became known to be in western hemisphere, they were renamed as West Indies. Thus West Indies means India in the western hemisphere. Indonesia's former name is Dutch East Indies which means India in southeast Asia.Bharat
Bharat is a coequal name of India, as set down in Article 1 of the Constitution, adopted in 1950, which states in English: "India, that is Bharat, ..." Bharat, which was predominantly used in Sanskrit, was adopted as a self-ascribed alternative name by some people of the Indian subcontinent and the Republic of India.This realm of Bharat, which has been referred to as Bhāratavarṣa in Puranas – after Emperor Bharata, the son of Rishabhanatha the first tirthankar of Jainism. He is described to be a Kshatriya born in the Solar dynasty. This has been mentioned in Vishnu Purana, Vayu Purana, Linga Purana, Brahmanda Purana, Agni Purana, Skanda Purana and Markandeya Purana, all using the designation Bhāratavarṣa.
According to vedic texts Bharat is derived from the name of the Vedic community Bharatas, who are mentioned in the Rigveda as one of the original community of the Āryāvarta and notably participating in the Battle of the Ten Kings.
The designation Bharat appears in the official Sanskrit name of the country, Bhāratagaṇarājya. The name is derived from the ancient Hindu Puranas, which refer to the land that comprises India as Bhāratavarṣa and uses this term to distinguish it from other varṣas or continents. For example, the Vayu Purana says "he who conquers the whole of italic=no is celebrated as a italic=no".
The Sanskrit word Bhārata is a vrddhi derivation of Bharata, which was originally an epithet of Agni. The term is a verbal noun of the Sanskrit root bhr-, "to bear/to carry", with a literal meaning of to be maintained. The root bhr- is cognate with the English verb 'to bear' and Latin ferō. This term also means "one who is engaged in search for knowledge". Barato, the Esperanto name for India, is also a derivation of Bhārata.
The Vishnu Purana mentions:
The Bhagavata Purana mentions – "He begot a hundred sons that were exactly like him ... He had the best qualities and it was because of him that this land by the people is called Bhāratavarṣa."
Bharata Khanda is a term used in some of the Jain and Hindu texts.
In the Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata, a larger region of Indosphere is encompassed by the term Bharat. Some other Puranic passages refer to the same Bhārata people, who are described as the descendants of Dushyanta's son Bharata in the Mahabharata.
The use of Bharat often has political overtones, appealing to a certain cultural conception of India. In 2023, President Droupadi Murmu and Prime Minister Narendra Modi used the Bharat name in connection with a G20 gathering, which caused speculation on a name-change for the country. Such a change would need a constitutional amendment, meaning two-thirds of the vote in each of the two houses of parliament, and an official notice to the UN, advising how to write the name in the UN's six official languages.
Epigraphical references
The earliest recorded use of Bhārata-varṣa in a geographical sense is in the Hathigumpha inscription of King Kharavela, where it applies only to a restrained area of northern India, namely the part of the Ganges west of Magadha. The inscription clearly mentions Bharat was named after Bharata, the son of first Jain tirthankara Rishabhanatha.Hindustan / Hind
The words and came from Indo-Aryan/Sanskrit . The Achaemenid emperor Darius I conquered the Indus valley in about 516 BCE, upon which the Achaemenid equivalent of, viz., "Hindush" was used for the lower Indus basin. The name was also known as far as the Achaemenid province of Egypt where it was written O4-N35-D46-V4-M17-M17 on the Statue of Darius I, circa 500 BCE.
In middle Persian, probably from the first century CE, the suffix was added, indicative of a country or region, forming the name. Thus, Sindh was referred to as Hindustān in the Naqsh-e-Rustam inscription of Sassanid emperor Shapur I in 262 CE.
Emperor Babur of the Mughal Empire said, "On the East, the South, and the West it is bounded by the Great Ocean." Hind was notably adapted in the Arabic language as the definitive form for India, for example, in the 11th-century Tarikh Al-Hind. It occurs intermittently in usage within India, such as in the phrase Jai Hind or in , the Standard Hindi name for the Indian Ocean.
Both the names were current in Persian and Arabic, and from that into northern Indian languages, from the 11th century Islamic conquests: the rulers in the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal periods called their Indian dominion, centered around Delhi, "Hindustan". In contemporary Persian and Hindi-Urdu, the term Hindustan has recently come to mean the Republic of India. The same is the case with Arabic, where is the name for the Republic of India.
"Hindustan", as the term Hindu itself, entered the English language in the 17th century. In the 19th century, the term as used in English referred to the Subcontinent. "Hindustan" was in use simultaneously with "India" during the British era.