FOREVER INDIA

WE SHOULD CONTINUE TO USE BOTH INDIA AND BHARAT RATHER THAN RELINQUISH OUR CLAIM TO A NAME REDOLENT OF HISTORY, A NAME THAT IS RECOGNISED AROUND THE WORLD

Reconciling irreconcilables is a great Indian virtue. When the Constituent Assembly was divided over whether to call our country ‘India’ or ‘Bharat’, our founding fathers and mothers found the perfect compromise in drafting the Republic’s foundational document, referring to “India, that is Bharat” and making both sides happy. The Preamble speaks of “We, the People of India” in English, and

“Bharat ke log” in Hindi. Article 52 declares, in English, that “There shall be a President of India”, and in Hindi calls the position “Bharat ke Rashtrapati”. A simple, uncomplicated practice followed from all this: in English, and therefore internationally, our country was referred to as ‘India’; in Hindi and other Indian languages, ‘Bharat’ was our country’s name.

It worked, just as the country known in English as ‘Germany’ is Deutschland at home and to all who speak Deutsch (the language we refer to as ‘German’). Nobody in that proud country, whose nationalism was at one time far more ferocious than ours, insisted that English speakers had to call them Deutschland too.

But what has worked for 76 years, and for a few millennia before that, is apparently not good enough for our government. The sudden unsettling decision to have the President of India issue formal invitations as “the President of Bharat” and for the prime minister to sit behind a name-plate at the G20 summit saying ‘Bharat’ in the Roman script, rather than ‘India’, has sparked off a controversy that is both pointless and totally unnecessary. Why tamper with an arrangement that was working perfectly satisfactorily? As the Americans like to say, “if it ain’t broke, why fix it?”

We know what the ruling party’s defenders are saying: that ‘India’ is a colonial imposition and that reverting to an ancient, historically sanctified name is a way of rejecting the “colonisation of the mind” that the name India implies. They are wrong, and even if they were right, dropping ‘India’ would still be a bad idea.

Why are they wrong? Because 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, or ‘Indus’, well before the Christian era. The ancient historians Herodotus and Megasthenes wrote of India in the 5th and 4th centuries

THE NAME INDIA HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH BRITISH RAJ, PREDATING IT BY TWO MILLENNIA

BCE. The term India existed in Old English (5th century CE) and features in the King James Bible. And the word isn’t just in English. The Dutch East India Company was established in 1602, at about the same time as the British one in 1599. Their colonisation of the ‘East Indies’ gave Indonesia its name. As a name for our subcontinent, ‘India’ long precedes the British Raj.

But even if, for argument’s sake, the natives were right that ‘India’ came with the British, it would still be wrong to dump it in favour of the desi ‘Bharat’. It was Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, who wanted our country named either Bharat or Hindustan, to deny it any right to claim the storied legacy of the name India, to which he felt his own state had equal claim. At the same time, our first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, insisted on retaining the name ‘India’ for the newly independent country, in the face of resistance from nativists who wanted it renamed ‘Bharat’, in order to ensure that we were seen as the successor state to the India that had enjoyed membership of the United Nations and the League of Nations. By retaining India, he ensured that Pakistan was just a seceding state, which had to apply afresh for international recognition.

There is also the undoubted fact that the name India has incalculable brand value built up over centuries. When a brand is mentioned, it carries with it a whole series of associations in the public mind, as well as expectations of how it will perform. A country isn’t a soft drink or a cigarette, but its very name can conjure certain associations in the minds of others. This is why ‘India’ had value in the eyes of the world: it was a fabled and exotic land, much sought after by travellers and traders for centuries, the “jewel in the crown” of Her Britannic Majesty Victoria, whose proudest title was that of “Empress of India”. Nehru wanted people to understand that the India he was leading was heir to that precious heritage. He wanted, in other words, to hold on to the brand, though it was not a term he was likely to have employed.

This is why we should continue to use both words rather than relinquish our claim to a name redolent of history, a name that is recognised around the world. Of course, ultimately the only real guarantee of any brand’s continued worth is the actual performance of the product or service it stands for. But why be so foolish as to relinquish all the benefits of the India brand globally when we can enjoy them without giving up the strength of “Bharat” at home?

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. No longer will they be able to demand of us all, “Garv se kaho ki hum Hindu hain”. Etymologically, that is just the same as declaiming “Garv se kaho ki hum Indian hain”! Which all of us have been for too long, really, to waste any more time debating this utterly fatuous and juvenile proposition. ■