Bharat sans India

The rather brash move to push and promote India’s identity as ‘Bharat’ and only ‘Bharat’ is to pit one identity against another. Perhaps it arises out of a desire to create a new mythology of Indian nationhood after the British Raj’s brutalisation of Indian culture. It is an act of executive vandalism because the ruling party tends to think that it can push anything by the sheer force of majority in its numbers, even if that comes to pigeonhole the national identity of our country by rebranding it, without caring to reach a consensus first.

The grapevine has it that the government is likely to bring a resolution to rename India as Bharat in the upcoming special session of parliament. If this turns out to be the case, it would amount to robbing India of its international and cosmopolitan identity and reducing it to the narrower view of India that the Sangh Parivar loves to uphold. How can a transitory government dare to tinker with a matter as important as the name of the nation itself without taking her people on board? Just because the BJP feels allergic to, and intimidated by, a motley political coalition banding together to dislodge it that shrewdly christened itself as I.N.D.I.A., it cannot rob Bharat of its Indianness.

Written in English and adopted in 1950, the Constitution of India uses the name ‘India’ throughout, while providing the Sanskrit alternative to a name that is essentially foreign, perhaps mindful of the fact that since the death of Emperor Ashoka in 232 BC, large parts of the subcontinent had been conquered by various foreign invaders. Persian kings had named the eastern province of their empire ‘Hindu’ after the river Indus (Sanskrit Sindhu, Iranian Hindu). In the mouth of Greek-dialect speakers, the initial consonant was lost, and the people were called Indoi and their land India. These foreign forms were introduced as Hindostan (Land of the Indians) by the Muslims, and India by the Europeans. The Brits were yet to colonise India.

When Shakespeare mentioned India in his play Henry VI (1591): “My crown is in my heart, not on my head/Not decked with diamonds and Indian stones/Nor to be seen: my crown is called content/A crown it is that seldom kings enjoy”, India was being ruled by the Mughals, the domain of which spread 1,200 miles along the Tropic of Cancer, from the white salt flats of the Rann of Kutch on the shores of the Arabian Sea, to the verdant delta of the holy River Ganga in Bengal and from the snowy crags of Kabul to the lush teak forests of the Vindhyan foothills. The bazaars sold an assortment of goods such as gold from Jaipur, rubies from Burma, fine shawls from Kashmir, spices from the islands, opium from Bengal, and what not. Compared to Indian opulence, in England, meanwhile, most of the population of around 2.5 million lived in a state of misery and impoverishment due to its internal wars during much of the 16th century.

Just in case we seek to showcase India’s millennial glory, it’s difficult to recount our history without the India tag. Alexander, the Great, reached this country and is said to have established economic and philosophical contacts, even affinity, with India. Chinese and other European visitors were attracted to Indian culture and customs that remain fairly documented. The study and interpretation of India’s scriptural texts by British missionaries and the officials of the Empire came to be known as Indology, which later acquired a wide interpretation with further insights into Indian systems of economics, politics, ethics and philosophy.

India’s colonial encounters are part of its history and is not something that can be brushed aside, though Western Indology feeds on a sense of superiority based on the stereotype of the image of a stagnant, unmovable ancient India where the only positive changes and progress have been ushered by Western invaders and ideas, thus denying the propulsive strength of the autonomous social evolution of the subcontinent.

But Indology lives on. Indological studies in countries like the Czech Republic (Prague), Croatia, Poland (Krakow), in Germany, France and England have a time-honoured tradition. Germans wanted to remove themselves from French cultural influence, and they turned for inspiration to ancient India, a society they believed could rival the splendour of France’s classical Roman heritage.

The other totem of India’s ancientness alongside the universal Bharat is perhaps an account of the maritime trade across the Indian Ocean. Traders exchanged goods along the coasts of the northwest Indian Ocean long before the rise of Islam in the seventh century. From the Harappa civilisation of the Indus Valley, coasting vessels transported goods from what is today the coast of modern Pakistan to the Arab or Persian Gulf to the Red Sea, and eventually to Egypt. The Indonesian settlement of Madagascar testifies to the reality that the entire circumference of the Indian Ocean littoral was probably being traversed as early as the first century CE. Archaeological evidence – as early as about 100 BCE – of trade between the Mediterranean world and that of the Indian Ocean in the form of Roman coins and amphoras (ceramic vessels for carrying wine and olive oil) -- exists. Are we going to lay claim to the Indian Ocean without the Indian toponym?

But is not the Bharat versus India binary somewhat misleading? We need the timelessness of Bharat alongside the cosmopolitanism of India. Gandhiji often harked back to a prehistoric ‘golden age’ of godliness, simplicity and humility – which was surely the archetype of traditional Bharat. He insisted that India’s future lay in a return to simple village life, not industrialisation. His distaste for synthesised drugs and surgery, which he associated with Western medicine, are well-known. With a vast majority of people living in the countryside, our political and social leaders and our intellectual elite always put India in an adversarial relationship with Bharat. On top of it, changing the name of the country would count as the most anti-Indian and thus the most glaringly anti-national act undertaken by a
government. 

(The writer is a Kolkata-based commentator on geopolitics, development and culture)