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What’s in a
name; ‘India’ and the ‘Indian’ Identity
Over the 2 centuries of their colonial rule over India, the British made
a conscious effort to devalue the Indian identity, in particular its
broad and unique civilizational aspects, and to deny that there ever was
a cohesive entity called India throughout its history. The word India
itself is merely the latest avatar of the original Sindhu Saraswati
river valley civilizations. While the original connotation of Sindhu
was local to what is now the Indus Valley, over the millennia it
acquired a geographical connotation comprising the entire subcontinent.
It may not have been the term the ancient Indics may have used to refer
to themselves but by usage and custom it has acquired a broader
connotation.
In denying such an identity for the people of the subcontinent, the
British wished to take credit for the formation of the modern political
nation state called India and perhaps more to the point, to deny an
independent civilizational status to the Indics. It would become very
inconvenient to explain to the British public that given the antiquity
of the cultural and civilizational status of the Indics, there was any
need for the British to exert the role of Colonial overlord in the
continent much less a role where they assumed absolute suzerainty over
the people of the subcontinent. It was far easier to keep up the façade
that Britain had a civilizing role in the subcontinent, if the
presumption was made that there was no civilization to speak of prior to
their arrival. Hence the constant attempt to deny any kind of
civilizational status and to say whatever there was in existence on
their arrival was in large part due to the advent of the Mughals and
prior conquests and invasions. It is also ironic that Pakistan tries its
best to deny the existence of the Indian identity, given the fact that M
A Jinnah wanted to appropriate the name for the territories he inherited
from the British.
Furthermore, such an attempt flies in the face of history. In fact other
Asian civilizations such as the Chinese have Civilizational memories of
India, her culture and her people. Even the Arabs before Islam and after
Islamic civilization have a Civilizational memory about the people of
India through trade and commerce. However, such memories have been
superseded by the viewpoints of the Anglo Saxon world. The rest of the
world even today has views about India/Hindus set by Europeans [Anglo
Saxons] and missionaries in the 1800 and 1900s. Hence the country and
Indians/Hindus are already stereotyped with a particular set of images
and perceptions for the most part from the British and colonial
perspective. The British due to their interaction with India from the
early 17th century and later their long experience with colonial rule
became the global power by the end of 19th century and were able to
influence and build a worldwide image of Hindus, the non-Muslims, along
with India and the Indic civilization, an image that was in accord with
their views of the world. This is very critical to understand in the
21st century. This British image of Indians and India was perpetuated
throughout the 20th century with the advent of the communication
revolution. India has never been able to change the perception
appreciably after independence. Europeans by the time of World War II
looked at India and Indians, Muslims and non-Muslims in a certain way
from their historical experience.
An English authority, Sir John Strachey, had
this to say about India: ...... this is the first and most essential
thing to learn about India -that there is not and never was an India or
even any country of India, possessing according to European ideas, any
sort of unity, physical, political . His was not an isolated opinion.
Reginald Craddock, Home Minister of the Government of India under
Hardinge and Chelmsford, in The dilemma in India (1929) denied the
existence of an Indian nation: An Indian Nation, if such be possible,
has to be created before it can exist. It never existed in the past, and
it does not exist now. Do we flatter ourselves that we created it? If
so, it is sheer flattery. There is no word for 'Indian' in any
vernacular tongue; there is not even any word for 'India'. Nor is there
any reason why there should be an Indian Nation. The bond or union among
the races to be found there is that they have for the last century and a
half been governed in common by a Foreign Power. P. C. Bobb sums up
Craddock's views nicely: By this account 'Indian' was the same kind of
misnomer, applied by the English, as the term 'European' when applied to
the English (as it was in India). According to Craddock, India was
merely, like Europe, a subcontinent within the vast single continent of
Europe and Asia, whose peoples had "roamed over the whole" in
prehistoric times. Down the centuries nationalities had become
localized, until Europe and India, for example, each contained well over
twenty separate countries, divided by race and language. India looked
like one country only if seen from the outside, from ignorance or
distance. India's cultural diversity, and lack of political unity has
often invited its comparison with Europe.
These are indeed astonishing statements when viewed from an Indic
perspective and certainly many Indian personalities such as
Sankaracharya, who roamed the length and breadth of India and what is
more made himself perfectly understood wherever he went, through the
ages would have expressed consternation to learn that India was not a
unique cultural and civilizational entity. As we have already remarked,
cultural diversity and ethnic diversity are two different aspects of
society and one can have one without the other. It is our contention
that India is culturally unique while being ethnically diverse.
"The renowned Islamic scholar, Mawlana Syed Sulaiman Nadwi develops a
variant of a widespread idea about the origin of the name 'Hind': Before
the advent of the Muslims, according to him, there was no single name
for the country as a whole. Every province had its own name, or rather a
state was known by the name of its capital. When the Turco Afghans, the
upper classes among whom spoke Persian, conquered a province of this
country, they gave the name 'Hindu' to the river, which is now known as
Indus, and which was called Mehran, by the Arabs. In the Old Persian and
also in Sanskrit, the letters 's' and 'h' often interchange. There are
many instances of this. Hence Sindhu became in Persian Hindu, and the
word 'Hind' derived from Hindu, came to be applied to the whole country.
The Arabs, however, who were acquainted with other parts of the country,
restricted the word 'Sind' to a particular province, while applying the
word 'Hind' to other parts of the country as well. Soon this country
came to be known by this name in distant parts of the world. The Western
nations dropped the 'h' and called the country Ind or India. All over
the world, now, this country is called by this name or by any one of its
many variants. (Nadwi, Mawlana Syed Sulaiman Nadwi, Indo-Arab Relations
(An English Rendering of Arab O' Hind Ke Ta'alluqat) (Translated by
Prof. M. Salahuddin), The Institute of Indo-Middle East Cultural
Studies, Hyderabad, India P. 8). An influential historian, André Wink,
writes about the fashioning of "India" from whatever geographical and
cultural and human materials were present in the region now known as
India: We will see that the Muslims first defined India as a
civilization, set it apart conceptually, and drew its boundaries. The
early Muslim view of India includes, to be sure, a close parallel to the
Western Mirabilis Indiae in the accounts of the "aja'ib al-Hind". It
also includes a number of stereotypes which were already familiar to the
ancient Greeks: of India as a land of self-absorbed philosophers, high
learning, "wisdom", the belief in metempsychosis, of sacred cows,
elephants, and, again, great wealth. "
"The Arab geographers are perhaps uniquely obsessed with Indian idolatry
and polytheism, "in which they differ totally from the Muslims". But the
Arabs, in contrast to the medieval Christians, developed their
conception of India in direct and prolonged contact with it. In a
political-geographical sense, "India" or al-Hind, throughout the
medieval period, was an Arab or Muslim conception. The Arabs, like the
Greeks, adopted a pre-existing Persian term, but they were the first to
extend its application to the entire Indianized region from Sind and
Makran to the Indonesian Archipelago and mainland Southeast Asia. It
therefore appears to us as if the Indians or Hindus acquired a
collective identity in interaction with Islam. (Wink ),. According to
this view, the idea of "India" or "Hindus" itself emerged in interaction
with Islam. The Arabs must have called a vast land 'al-Hind' as a
shorthand term, just as a modern textbook of geography might club
diverse nations under the umbrella term 'Middle East'. Another example
is the term Sudan. It was the Arabs who named a vast tract of land
(without delimiting it exactly) as Bilad al-sudan -"land of the blacks".
The various peoples of that region did not refer to themselves as
'Sudanese' until modern times‘‘ Yet the alert reader who reads the above
excerpt would surely notice that the concept of an Indianized region
stretching from Makran (Baluchistan) to Indonesia has somehow wriggled
its way into a discourse which would deny (a priori) the existence of an
"India". A question arises immediately: What was it about the region
from Sind to Indonesia that merits the term 'Indianized', which caused
the Arabs to call this region collectively as 'al-Hnd'? A partial answer
to this question can be formulated by quoting what Vincent Smith, an
authority on early India had said: "India, encircled as she is by seas
and mountains, is indisputably a geographical unit, and as such is
rightly designated by one name."
"Wink's statement says: "We will see that the Muslims first defined
India as a civilization, set it apart conceptually, and drew its
boundaries”. The fact that the word
"India" is ostensibly of foreign origin is used to insinuate that the
very idea of an Indian nation is a contribution by outsiders.
No matter how the name India originated, it eventually came to mean
something quite well-defined, and the use of a single term, India, is
justified, and not only as a shorthand for a hazy notion. Vincent Smith
explains: “The most essentially fundamental
Indian unity rests upon the fact that the diverse peoples of India have
developed a peculiar type of culture or civilization utterly different
from any other type in the world. That civilization may be summed up in
the term Hinduism. India primarily is a Hindu country, the land of the
Brahmanas, who have succeeded by means of peaceful penetration, not by
the sword, in carrying their ideas into every corner of India. Caste,
the characteristic Hindu institution, is utterly unknown in Burma,
Tibet, and other borderlands, dominates the whole of Hindu India, as
well as in distant outposts of Indian civilization such as Bali, and
exercises no small influence over the powerful Muslim minority. Nearly
all Hindus revere Brahmanas, and all may be said to venerate the cow.
Few deny the authority of the Vedas and other ancient scriptures.
Sanskrit everywhere is the sacred language. The great gods, Vishnu and
Shiva, are recognized and more or less worshipped in all parts of India.
The pious pilgrim, when going the round of the holy places, is equally
at home among the snows of Badrinath or on the burning sands of Rama's
Bridge. The seven sacred cities include places in the far south as well
as in Hindustan. Similarly, the cult of rivers is common to all Hindus,
and all alike share in the affection felt for the tales of the
Mahabharata and Ramayana. India beyond all doubt possesses a deep
underlying fundamental unity, far more profound than that produced
either by geographical isolation or by political suzerainty. That unity
transcends the innumerable diversities of blood, color, language, dress,
manners and sect.” "
"The reader may not agree with all that Vincent Smith says but the idea
of a culturally united India, call it a nation, or a civilization,
clearly did not depend upon the Arabs/ Muslims. Nor was the idea born
out of the labors of the Western Orientalist or the British colonial
administrator. "India" --- the name which
launched a thousand ships, and which has fired the imagination of
explorers for ages, predates the emergence of Islam and Western
Indology, by centuries, if not millennia".
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Radhakumud Mookerji, The Fundamental Unity of India (From Hindu
sources), Longmans, Green and Co. 1914) .
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P. C. Bobb, Muslim Identity and Separatism in India: The
Significance of M. A. Ansari, Bulletin of the School of Oriental
and African Studies, Volume LIV, Part I, 1991 pp. 116-117.
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Andre Wink, Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World,
Oxford University Press, 1990, pp. 4-5
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Vincent Smith, Oxford History of India, 3 rd Edition, 1958 p. 7
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