On September 9, Indian President Draupadi Murmu is scheduled to host a dinner in New Delhi for the leaders of the G20 conference, with the words ‘President of India’ written on the invitation, sparking debate over whether the Modi government has changed India’s name. Is India going to do it?
Before India, there are eight countries that have changed their name. Turkey recently changed its name to Turkey. Before that, Holland changed its name to Netherlands, Czech Republic to Czechia, Burma to Myanmar, Ceylon to Sri Lanka, Kampuchea to Cambodia, Swaziland to Eswatani and Prussia changed its name to Iran.
Behind the name India is actually Pakistan?
When the Aryas entered India, their settlements were on the banks of the seven rivers that flowed through the Punjab. Indus was the greatest river among them. Accordingly, the entire region was called Sapt Sindhu, meaning ‘Land of Seven Rivers’.
These areas did not include the areas beyond the Yamuna, so according to the Rigveda, known as the Gospel of the Aryans, this area was the Sapt Sindhu.
When Alexander the Great came to Taxila in 326 BC, the influence of the Greeks also increased here. Persians already called Indus Hindus, which the Greeks started calling Indus, which later became Indus and hence the word ‘India’.
India is perhaps the only country in the world that is called by three names, India, Bharat and Hindustan, while its oldest name was ‘Jumbo Deep’, which is known as the Jamon fruit. This is because the map of India resembles a fruit like a jam.
The Constitution of India, which has the status of being the longest written constitution in the world with 395 clauses, its first clause begins as follows, ‘India, being India, shall be a Union State.’
According to the Constitution, India has precedence over the word Bharat. Although the word Bharat is also commonly used, India has been written in official documents, but now is the first time that the Modi government has given priority to the word Bharat over India.
One of the main reasons for this is that the Modi government believes that the word India was given by foreigners. When Vasco da Gama discovered the sea route to India in 1498, European nations turned towards India.
On 17 March 1616, the King of Denmark established the Danish East India Company with the aim of promoting trade links with India. After that, other European nations, the Portuguese Company of Portugal, the India Oriental, the East India Company of the Netherlands, the British East India Company, the United East India Company of the Netherlands, etc., were established.
When the sun of the East India Company rose in the form of British occupation of India, India was written and called India all over the world.
Pakistan’s right to the word ‘India’?
Sir John Marshall was the head of the Archaeological Survey of India before partition. In 1949, when the constitution of India was made and it was given the official name of India, he wrote a letter to the government of Pakistan protesting against it, saying, “All the relics of the Indus Valley come in the territories of Pakistan, so the word India In principle, Pakistan is right. India has no cultural right to use it.’
But the name of Pakistan is attributed to Chaudhry Rehmat Ali and he wrote this name in his famous booklet ‘Ab Ya Kabhi Nahi’ (Now or Never) in 1933. But actually he took this name from Sir Olaf Carew’s book ‘Soviet Empire’ in which the name of a state was mentioned as ‘Karakal Pakistan’. This area is part of Uzbekistan today. Therefore, it is not correct to say that P means Punjab, K means Kashmir, S means Sindh and Tan means Balochistan.
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But since ‘Pakistan’ had become a special and common language in the freedom movement, no leader paid attention to the fact that the name of the new state could be something other than Pakistan.
The Indus River originates from Tibet in China and enters Gilgit-Baltistan at Kargil through the Indian-administered Ladakh region. Its total length is 3180 km, most of which passes through Pakistan. Apart from this, most of the Indus Basin area is also in Pakistan. Moreover, the famous civilization of the Indus Valley was established on the banks of this river, which is considered one of the oldest civilizations in the world.
The two largest cities of the ancient world, Mohenjodaro and Harappa, belong to this Indus Valley Civilization. The sacred book of Hindus, Rigveda, was written on the banks of this river.
The civilization of the Ganges and Yamuna is actually the spread of the civilization of the Indus Valley.
All these areas are part of present day Pakistan. This is the reason why Sir John Marshall said in 1949 that Pakistan is the inheritor of Sindh civilization, so it should protest against India’s name India.
Will India now separate from Sindh civilization?
The staunch Hindu organization RSS believes that the word India is associated with the colonial history of the region and secondly that all important areas of the Indus Valley Civilization fall within Pakistan.
But this is one side of the coin, while the other side is that India is a reflection of the Indus Valley Civilization.
By changing the name of India, the Modi government is not only separating itself from the civilization of Sindh, but it is in search of its own history, which has its roots in Hinduism and the word Bharat.
