The politics of naming

The message of the founding fathers was that the plurality of meanings belong to the plurality of the people residing in this land

The public discourse on the proposed change of name from India to Bharat, from both sides of the political divide, betrays a poor sense of history. This issue dates back to the Constituent Assembly (CA) debates immediately after Independence. For an accurate appreciation, one must consider the inherited discourse on ‘Bharat’ both prior to and at the time of its official equivalence with ‘India’ in the Constitution in 1950, and why, after much deliberation, the CA voted to register the nation under a dual and bilingual identity.

In Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India, written while he was in the Ahmednagar Fort jail in 1944 and published in 1946, Nehru wrote: “Often, as I wandered from meeting to meeting, I spoke to my audiences of this India of ours, of Hindustan and of Bharat…” At the time of Independence, these names co-existed in the subcontinent. To capture these various meanings today is not an easy task. It entails being aware of the simple but often forgotten fact that words have a history of their own; they do not retain the same significance throughout time. Take the name ‘India’. Since its ancient use by Greek (Indikê) and Latin (India) authors, it has been applied to a variety of territories; or the word ‘Hindustan’, that was in use in Persia in the third century BC to refer to the land lying beyond the Indus (Sindhu) River. Or the word ‘Hindu’ itself, it too has changed as everything changed around it. From being a geographic and ethnic term, it became a religious term.

In 1950, the CA, while adopting the Constitution, decided how the newly independent country should be known. In the opening Article they wrote: “India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States.” Two names: one, India, associated with the foreigners whose rule was coming to an end; the other, Bharat, perceived as native because it was part of ancient Sanskrit literature. Henceforth, no other name besides these two was to be used legally. In this juridico-political conception, India and Bharat were interchangeable terms. What are we to make of the equation of Bharat and India in the Constitution? How did such a double-name formula come about? The CA’s decision can only be understood as the outcome of a long historical process with deep cultural roots.

Bharat is indeed an old name, references to which are found in the Puranas and other Sanskrit texts dating back to the early centuries of the Christian era. However, there is little historical evidence of the way in which the name Bharat was used in everyday life, in what circumstances, and by whom, though the traditional depiction of Bharat was transmitted over many generations down to the colonial period. However, an important socio-political shift occurred during the British Raj: from the Puranic Bharat to the colonial Bharat, when the old toponym became the ‘indigenous’ name for a budding nation exposed to the imported political and geographical conceptions of British India.

The maps that associate British India with a given space are so familiar to us that we easily forget that they were not introduced to the educated Indian public before the 1870s. By then, what came to be represented was not a mere geographical space but also a political space enclosed in boundaries or administrative units drawn by the colonial power. This new national space was inseparable from the equally new idea of a ‘country’. Thus, by mid-19th century, what educated people called ‘Bharat’ was the territory mapped and organised by the British under the name ‘India’.

In The Soul of India, published in 1911, Bipin Chandra Pal, the Bengali nationalist and social reformer, well-known for the part he took in organising the Swadeshi movement after the partition of Bengal, proclaimed Bharat to be the only real indigenous name for India. He wrote: “We knew her of old by quite a different name…The fact of the matter really is that as long as you look upon our country as ‘India or the Land of the Indus’—you will get no closer and truer view than the foreign officials…have been able to do … Our own name was, and is still today, among the population of the country, Bharatvarsha.”  Thus, supported from all sides as it was then, not only had the old name ‘Bharat’ not fallen into oblivion, but it had been invested with a new meaning and was used in reference to the emerging country.

On the relationship between the two words India and Bharat, the CA witnessed animated debate. The main speakers were Seth Govind Das and Kamalapati Tripathi, two Congress leaders, and Hari Vishnu Kamath, a leader of the All-India Forward Block. Introducing the first amendment, Kamath proposed that the sentence ‘India, that is Bharat’ be replaced by ‘Bharat, or, in the English language, India’. Seth Govind Das proposed: ‘Bharat, known as India also in foreign countries…’ He was followed by Kamalapati Tripathi who wanted ‘Bharat, that is India’.

None of these proposals were accepted by the CA. The processes of construction and reconstruction of the meanings of the nation’s names have been uninterrupted since the adoption of the first Article of the Constitution. Hindu nationalists are not alone in thinking that Bharat is the only legitimate name for the Republic of India. The former Congress MP (Goa) Shantaram Naik introduced in August 2012 in the Rajya Sabha, a bill to amend the first Article.

Finally, the argument that ‘India’ should be replaced by ‘Bharat’ is not encountered only within the binary of ‘communalist versus secular’. In April 2004, the Samajwadi Party proposed that the sole name ‘Bharat’ be adopted in the Constitution “as a step to protect the identity of the country”.

The politics of naming is part of the social production of the nation. India or Bharat, the two words are collocated, and their meaning and usage context-specific and language-sensitive. The message of the founding fathers was clear and unequivocal: the plurality of meanings belong to the plurality of the people residing in this land. That will not change.

(The writer is Director, School of Social Sciences, Ramaiah University of Applied Sciences)