The Britannica Guide to India

What's in a name? The subcontinent has so many; and all contentious. In ancient cosmography India was located in Jambudvipa - Rose-apple island - named after the Jambu tree at its centre. For the ancient Persians and Arabs it was, less romantically, simply the land beyond the river Sindu: AI-Hind or Hindustan. Later nationalists considered this too blandly physical an appellation, a name, moreover, humiliatingly coined by foreigners. Bipin Pal, one such critic, insisted instead on Bharatavarsha, after the ancient king Bharat, a name as richly evocative and as redolent of great power as Rome. For Gandhi, a less conventional nation-maker, it was another ancient monarch, the mythical Ram, who provided the preferred eponym - Ram's Rajya was the epitome of moral not geopolitical grandeur. Others - more preoccupied with race and ethnos than history and morality - preferred Aryavarata: the land of the Aryans. And for the British, downright dismissive ofIndian national pretensions, both ancient and modern, India was merely a geographical expression.