Skip to main content

Bharat or India

From India Today


Name-changing is one of the hobbies of India’s present Prime Minister. I wrote about it a few days back too though rather facetiously: see India, Bharat, Hindustan. The latest issue of India Today has devoted page after page to the PM’s present rechristening. I wish to bring here a few interesting observations from some of those eminent writers in the weekly.

1. Shashi Tharoor

Tharoor argues that “In English, and therefore internationally, our country was referred to as ‘India’; in Hindi and other Indian languages, ‘Bharat’ was our country’s name.” For example: We, the people of India / Bharat ke log. Or The President of India / Bharat ke Rashtrapati.

Tharoor gives us an interesting parallel from Germany. “’Germany’ is Deutschland at home and to all who speak Deutsch (the language we refer to as ‘German’).” Tharoor dismantles the argument that India is a name given by the British colonialists. The “name India has nothing to do with British colonialism: it predates the British presence in India by nearly two millennia. The ancient Greeks and Persians used the term ‘India’ for the land beyond the river Sindhu…”

Towards the end of his essay, Tharoor thrusts “the final clincher: Since our neighbours, the Arabs and the Persians, pronounced ‘s’ as ‘h’, it is also they who called the people across the Sindhu the ‘Hindus’. So if the BJP rejects the name India, they will have to reject the name ‘Hindu’ by the same logic, since that is equally of foreign origin.”

2. Arvind P Datar

Like Tharoor’s example of Germany, Datar (senior advocate in the Supreme Court) gives the example of Japan. Japan is the English name for ‘Nihon’ or ‘Nippon’. “It will be strange and improper if an invitation in English is issued by the Emperor of Nippon or the Chancellor of Deutschland. Indeed, India is the name that has to be used when the communication is in English and in in international meetings.”

Datar’s final paragraph is: “India rightly aspires to be a great economic power and changing our identity to Bharat will not in the least help us become a five trillion-dollar economy or resolve major problems facing the nation. The cost of replacing India with Bharat will be huge with no corresponding benefit. Sadly, replacing India with Bharat only symbolises a special type of nationalism that may pay political dividends but will cost the country dear.”

3. Pavan K Varma

The futility and fatuity of this name-changing is summed up thus by Pavan K Varma, author and former diplomat. “Interestingly, in 2004, when the Mulayam Singh Yadav government in the Uttar Pradesh assembly passed a resolution to rename India as Bharat, the BJP walked out in protest. Is it now reversing its stand because the opposition alliance is called INDIA [The Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance]? Or is it a symbol of cultural reclamation, at the cost of eliminating another equally valid and indigenous narrative of history? Either way, Ananthamurthy’s logic was right: ordinary Indians have long happily accepted both Bharat and India, and also, incidentally, Hindustan. Why reopen this matter?”

4. Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd

“The name Bharat stemmed from the Sanatan heritage in post-Vedic times and has caste / racial connotations,” says Shepherd. “The name of the subcontinent, India, is more acceptable as it mirrors our most ancient advancement. It unites all under a common identity – Dravidian, Aryan and Mongoloid races and the teeming agrarian productive masses. Most such productive masses exist now in social categories like Shudra (OBC), Dalit and Adivasis. The name of this country must reflect their contribution too. ‘Bharat’ has no such civilisational significance; it does not encompass the long-existing productive civilisation of this subcontinent.”

As Tharoor pointed out, Shepherd too argues that “The use of ‘Hinduism’ should … be relinquished by the RSS/BJP forces to oppose both Muslims and British rule. An ideal nationalist name for their religion could be ‘Sanatan’. Then the Shudras / Dalits / Adivasis can draw a clear line between them and Sanatans. The concept of Sanatan stands for varna dharma.” 

From India Today


Concluding remark

India Today has many more essays on this topic, written by supporters of Modi’s christening exercise. I chose to highlight a few points that struck me as interesting.

Labels:

Comments

  1. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 20, 2023 at 6:01 AM

    Modi should expend his energy and the country's resources on worthwhile causes.

    ReplyDelete
  2. magiceyeSeptember 20, 2023 at 6:52 AM

    All sane voices will be drowned in the raucous cries of (faux?) nationalism.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Immuno DiagnosticsSeptember 22, 2023 at 4:41 PM

    Creative and informative blogs have been posted. Thanks for sharing.
    pathology labs in malviya nagar delhi

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...
121 comments
Read more

Tanishq and the Patriots

Patriots are a queer lot. You don’t know what all things can make them pick up the gun. Only one thing is certain apparently: the gun for anything. When the neighbouring country behaves like a hoard of bandicoots digging into our national borders, we will naturally take up the gun. But nowadays we choose to redraw certain lines on the map and then proclaim that not an inch of land has been lost. On the other hand, when a jewellery company brings out an ad promoting harmony between the majority and the minority populations, our patriots take up the gun. And shoot down the ad. Those who promote communal harmony are traitors in India today. The sacred duty of the genuine Indian patriot is to hate certain communities, rape their women, plunder their land, deny them education and other fundamental rights and basic requirements. Tanishq withdrew the ad that sought to promote communal harmony. The patriot’s gun won. Aapka Bharat Mahan. In the novel Black Hole which I’m writing there is...
61 comments
Read more

Romance in Utopia

Book Review Title: My Haven Author: Ruchi Chandra Verma Pages: 161 T his little novel is a surfeit of sugar and honey. All the characters that matter are young employees of an IT firm in Bengaluru. One of them, Pihu, 23 years and all too sweet and soft, falls in love with her senior colleague, Aditya. The love is sweetly reciprocated too. The colleagues are all happy, furthermore. No jealousy, no rivalry, nothing that disturbs the utopian equilibrium that the author has created in the novel. What would love be like in a utopia? First of all, there would be no fear or insecurity. No fear of betrayal, jealousy, heartbreak… Emotional security is an essential part of any utopia. There would be complete trust between partners, without the need for games or power struggles. Every relationship would be built on deep understanding, where partners complement each other perfectly. Miscommunication and misunderstanding would be rare or non-existent, as people would have heightened emo...
9 comments
Read more

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
44 comments
Read more

The Circus called Politics

Illustration by ChatGPT I have/had many students whose parents are teachers in schools run or aided by the government. These teachers don’t send their own children to their own schools where education is free. They send their children to private schools like the one where I’ve been working. They pay huge fees to teach their children in schools where teachers are paid half of or less than their salaries. This is one of the many ironies about the Kerala society. An article in yesterday’s The Hindu [ A deeper meaning of declining school enrolment ] takes an insightful look at some of the glaring social issues in Kerala’s educational system. One such issue is the rapidly declining student enrolment in government and aided schools in the state. The private schools in the state, on the other hand, are getting more students. People don’t want to send their children to the schools run by the government systems. The chief reason is that the medium of instruction is Malayalam. The second ...
6 comments
Read more