essay writing about jai ho bharat

Essay on Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat for Students and Children

500 words essay on ek bharat shreshtha bharat.

It is a government scheme talked by the PM of India Mr. Narendra Modi on the occasion of National unity day (Rashtriya Ekta Divas) 31 st October 2015. Also, 31 st October happens to be the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabh Bhai Patel.

Ek Bharat Shrestha Bharat Scheme

It is a scheme launched by Narendra Modi – the Prime Minister of India on 31 st October 2016. Furthermore, the main purpose of the scheme is to enrich and enhance the tradition and culture of the country.

In addition, it launched an initiative to boost the cultural connection between the states and union territories of the country. Furthermore, it helps people to enhance their interaction with the people of a different region of the country.

Moreover, it boosts the cultural connection between different parts of the country. Besides, it helps people to understand the different culture that exists in the country closely.

What is the Scheme?

In this scheme, one state of the country will connect to other states of the country on annual basis and both will promote the rich tradition of each other through events like song and dance festivals, food festivals, book festivals, tour and travel, literacy events and many more.

Most noteworthy, in the next year both the states, will connect to two other states for fulfilling the same aim. Furthermore, in this way, we can make sure that more people in the country will know about the tradition, culture, and practices of different states of the country.

Besides, this will enhance the understanding of the culture and bonding among the people also it will strengthen the unity of the country.

Moreover, the government of India decides to take inputs from the citizen of the country before implementing this scheme. For doing this, Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat contest was launched to get opinions and ideas from the public. In addition, in this way, the program can be made more effective in various magnitudes.

Also, the government opened a portal on which people can give their themes and sub-themes, ideas and suggestions in detail. Besides, citizens can make the following themes and sub-themes their base before writing and submitting original and views, suggestions, and innovative ideas. These themes are:

• To identify the role of the central government and state government in implementing this program.
• Also, identify a way y which civil society, public groups, government, and private sector can work together to fulfill the scheme.
• Furthermore, specify how we can use modern communication tools such as social media.
• Document some success stories of these types.
• Also, how can Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat be made a people’s movement relative to a government program?

Prize of the Scheme

Also, the PM announced that the most innovative and original idea that explains all the details will be preferable and the person score is also higher.  Also, the first, second, and third prize was Rs. 1 lakh, Rs. 75 Thousands, and Rs. 50 thousand respectively.

Furthermore, a certificate will also be provided with the prizes. Besides, the government does this to attract more participants to participate in the scheme.

To sum it up, the Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat is a nice scheme that will help the people of the country to know and understand the different cultures and traditions of the country.

FAQs about Essay on Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat

Q.1 What is the launch date of Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat and who launched it?

A.1 The launch date of Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat is 31 st October 2016 and it was launched by our Honorable Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi.

Q.2 Why 31 st October is chosen to launch this scheme?

A.2 31 st October is chosen because it is the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabh Bhai Patel who is known as the iron man of India. Also, he is the man who united the nation against the Britishers.

Customize your course in 30 seconds

Which class are you in.

• Travelling Essay
• Picnic Essay
• Our Country Essay
• My Parents Essay
• Essay on Favourite Personality
• Essay on Memorable Day of My Life
• Essay on Knowledge is Power
• Essay on Gurpurab
• Essay on My Favourite Season
• Essay on Types of Sports

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Download the App

• हिन्दी Hindi
• অসমীয়া Assamese
• বাংলা Bengali
• ગુજરાતી Gujarati
• ಕನ್ನಡ Kannada
• മലയാളം Malayalam
• मराठी Marathi
• ਪੰਜਾਬੀ Punjabi
• தமிழ் Tamil
• తెలుగు Telugu

Home | MyGov

• White to Black
• Poll/Survey
• Andaman & Nicobar Islands
• Arunachal Pradesh
• Chhattisgarh
• Jammu And Kashmir
• Madhya Pradesh
• Maharashtra
• Himachal Pradesh
• Uttarakhand
• Uttar Pradesh
• Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu
• Transforming India
• Self4Society
• Innovate India
• About MyGov
• Work at MyGov
• Associate with MyGov
• MyGov Media
• MyGov Tenders
• Weekly Newsletter
• Pulse Newsletter
• Website Policies
• Points & Badges
• Meity Dashboard
• Usage of Aadhaar
• Web Information Manager
• Terms & Conditions
• Public Grievance
• Chandigarh UT
• Creative Corner
• Dadra Nagar Haveli UT
• Daman and Diu U.T.
• Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances
• Department of Biotechnology
• Department of Commerce
• Department of Consumer Affairs
• Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP)
• Department of Posts
• Department of Science and Technology
• Department of Telecom
• Digital India
• Economic Affairs
• Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat
• Energy Conservation
• Expenditure Management Commission
• Food Security
• Girl Child Education
• Government Advertisements
• Green India
• Incredible India!
• India Textiles
• Indian Railways
• Indian Space Research Organisation - ISRO
• Job Creation
• LiFE-21 Day Challenge
• Mann Ki Baat
• Manual Scavenging-Free India
• Ministry for Development of North Eastern Region
• Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare
• Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilizers
• Ministry of Civil Aviation
• Ministry of Coal
• Ministry of Corporate Affairs
• Ministry of Culture
• Ministry of Defence
• Ministry of Earth Sciences
• Ministry of Education
• Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology
• Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change
• Ministry of External Affairs
• Ministry of Finance
• Ministry of Health and Family Welfare
• Ministry of Home Affairs
• Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs
• Ministry of Information and Broadcasting
• Ministry of Jal Shakti
• Ministry of Law and Justice
• Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME)
• Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas
• Ministry of Power
• Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment
• Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation
• Ministry of Steel
• Ministry of Women and Child Development
• MyGov Move - Volunteer
• New Education Policy
• New India Championship
• NRIs for India’s Growth
• Revenue and GST
• Rural Development
• Saansad Adarsh Gram Yojana
• Sakriya Panchayat
• Skill Development
• Smart Cities
• Sporty India
• Swachh Bharat (Clean India)
• Tribal Development
• Watershed Management
• Youth for Nation-Building

Essay Writing Competition on the topic Ek Bharat Shrestha Bharat

Join the spirited celebration of Independence Day 2024 with enthusiasm through the Ministry of Defence and MyGov's compelling essay competition themed "Ek Bharat, Shrestha ...

Join the spirited celebration of Independence Day 2024 with enthusiasm through the Ministry of Defence and MyGov 's compelling essay competition themed "Ek Bharat, Shrestha Bharat."

This competition encourages Indian youth to share their ideas and perspectives on India's unity in diversity. Participants will delve into how India's diverse cultures contribute to its distinctive identity. This initiative provides a vibrant platform for reflecting on India's journey to greatness, culminating in a festive celebration of Independence Day infused with passion, pride, and profound insights.

Participation Guidelines: 1. Participants are to write an essay on the topic "Ek Bharat, Shrestha Bharat" in around 500-600 words showcasing the essence of unity in diversity of Indian Culture.

Gratifications: 1st Prize - ₹ 25,000/- 2nd Prize - ₹ 15,000/- 3rd Prize - ₹ 10,000/- Top 250 participants would be issued invitation cards by Ministry of Defence to witness Independence Day Celebration to be held on 15th August, 2024 at Red Fort, Delhi.

Click here to read the Terms and Conditions. (PDF 157KB)

For any concerns related to this Ministry, please connect on the Ministry website directly - https://mod.gov.in/

• Skip to main content
• Skip to secondary menu
• Skip to primary sidebar
• Skip to footer

A Plus Topper

Improve your Grades

Essay on Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat | Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat Essay for Students and Children in English

February 14, 2024 by Prasanna

Essay on Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat: India is a country where people follow various religion. It has a rich heritage and ethnicity. People speak various languages and dialects. But, still, all the Indians are one nation. They have mutual love and respect for each other. The Ek Bharat Shrestha Bharat scheme is a programme to strengthen this unity among the people of India. The programme was started by the Prime minister of India, Mr Narendra Midi, where the states and union territories of India exchange the various customs and practices. This will promote and signify the customs and identity of particular states and union territories and will also enhance mutual love and respect for each other. This will encourage brotherhood and integrity among the diverse nation.

You can also find more  Essay Writing  articles on events, persons, sports, technology and many more.

Long and Short Essays on Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat for Students and Kids in English

We are providing the students with essay samples on an extended essay of 500 words and a short essay of 150 words on Ek Bharat Shrestha Bharat’s topic.

Long Essay on Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat 500 Words in English

Long Essay on Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat is usually given to classes 7, 8, 9, and 10.

India is a country that is rich in culture and heritage. It is the most diverse country in the entire world. However, unity among the citizens is a unique feature of this country. In a view to strengthening this unity, the Prime Minister of India, Mr Narendra Modi launched a nationwide programme called the “Ek Bharat Shrestha Bharat” programme on 31st October 2015. This particular programme was launched on the auspicious 140th birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. Sardar Vallavbhai Patel was a great freedom fighter of India who served as the Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister. He is also given the title of “The Iron man of India”.

The role of Sardar Vallavbhai Patel in gaining freedom of India and making it a Republic is immense. He had United all the provinces and princely states of India during the Freedom struggle movement to get independence from the British Rule. He has ignited the flame of unity along with other freedom fighters which are still alive. So this programme is dedicated to his contribution to the unity and integrity among the people of India.

This programme involves the mutual exchange of culture between the different states and Union Territories if India. This will be held from time to time. This will ensure a good sense of unity and integrity in the whole country. This will also help people to accept and promote their own culture and identity. This programme recognises the rich culture of people in a particular area. People who are unaware of their own culture will get to know about their own and respect each other’s culture. The scheme initially had 11 ministers, including the Department of Higher Education, Department of School Education and Literacy, Department of Sports, and Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.

India has the most diversified culture and language. There are as many as 1075 languages and dialects of the Indian country. One will observe the slight difference in language in every 6 kilometres of length. Although Hindi is a majorly spoken language, however, there are as many as 22 Scheduled Languages spoken by India’s people. Not only language, but India is a secular country. Every citizen is free to practise, profess and propagate the religion he or she likes. The State favours no particular religion. There is no state law. However, most of the population practises Hinduism, followed by Islam, Christianity, Sikhism, Buddhism, and Jainism. Some people are atheists.

Despite all these differences, the difference in language, culture, ethnicity, religion, there are no hindrances to unity. Fraternity is the essence of the Indian counter. The whole country is a big family. This programme fosters this beautiful and divine quality and retains them. When the states and Union Territories are paired from time to time, they are mutually bonded. They share common cuisines, dance forms, festivals and other events. In this way, brotherhood remains intact. The society becomes healthy and rich to dwell in.

Short Essay on Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat 150 Words in English

Short Essay on Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat is usually given to classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

The Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat programme was launched on the auspicious 140th birth anniversary of Sardar Vallavbhai Patel on 31st October 2015 by the Prime minister Narendra Modi. This programme has been initiated to promote and strengthen the unity and integrity of the country. Under this scheme, the States and Union Territories are paired to exchange their culture and other practices mutually. In this way, the citizens get to know about their glorious history, their customs, traditions, philosophies, cuisines and other differences and respect the others.

This is to ensure peaceful coexistence among the people of India. As we all know, India has many people who speak different languages and practice various religions from different parts of India. Despite all these differences, there is a sense of brotherhood and integrity among the people who have held people together, as we all know that Unity is Strength. This unity among the people has brought in the Independence of India. And this unity has prevented the country from being divided based on such differences.

10 Lines on Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat in English

• The Ek Bharat Shrestha Bharat scheme was initiated on 31st October 2015, on the 140th birth anniversary of Sardar Vallavbhai Patel.
• This programme pairs different States and Union Territories to exchange their cultural differences.
• This programme enhances the unity and integrity among the people of India.
• There were 11 Ministries involved in it when it was initiated.
• Various events are organised where people share their culture, food, cuisines and traditions.
• This programme is to ensure mutual self-respect among the States and Union Territories.
• This will also enhance interdependence among people.
• Despite the differences in language and culture, we ate still one nation.
• Vasudhaiba Kutumbakam is our philosophy.
• We should keep up such moral values intact.

FAQ’s on Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat Essay

Question 1. When was the Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat scheme announced?

Answer: The Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat scheme was announced on 31st October 2015, on the 140th birth anniversary of Sardar Vallavbhai Patel.

Question 2. What does the Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat connote?

Answer: The Ek Bharat Shrestha Bharat withholds the concept of Unity in Diversity.

• Picture Dictionary
• English Speech
• English Slogans
• English Letter Writing
• English Essay Writing
• English Textbook Answers
• Types of Certificates
• ICSE Solutions
• Selina ICSE Solutions
• ML Aggarwal Solutions
• HSSLive Plus One
• HSSLive Plus Two
• Kerala SSLC
• Distance Education

Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat Essay

“Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat” was announced on 31 st October 2015 by the then Prime Minister Sri Narendra Modi to mark the occasion of 140 th birth anniversary of a renowned politician and the first Deputy Prime Minister of India – Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. The scheme aims for improving the unity between different cultures of Indian society. It stresses on state-state, state-Union Territory or district to district harmony and brotherhood by organizing cultural exchange programs.

The concept of “Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat” is based on many themes like music, health, cuisine, dance, painting, sculpture, handicraft etc.  Apart from cultural exchange programs, several other activities are also listed in “Ek Bharat Shrestha Bharat Scheme”, like – translation of award winning books into different languages; organizing culinary events; broadcasting programs exchange between partner states etc.

Essay on Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat

We have provided below some essay on Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat under various words limit according to the student’s needs and requirements.

Now-a-days, essays or paragraphs writing are common strategy followed by the teachers in schools and colleges in order to enhance student’s skill and knowledge about any topic.

All the Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat essay provided below are written in very easy and simple sentences in order to fulfill the students need and requirement.

So students, you can select any of these essays:

Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat Essay 1 (100 words)

Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat is a scheme, which is in the process to be launched as a new and effective scheme by the government of India. The Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi, has announced on Rashtriya Ekta Divas (31 st of October 2015, the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel) to launch this new initiative.

The aim of this scheme is to boost unity in India through the existing cultural connections among various parts of the country. It also aims to improve interaction between Indian people who are living at different places all through the country. This initiative will connect people to people which will really enhance unity in India.

Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat Essay 2 (150 words)

The Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi, has announced on Rashtriya Ekta Divas address on 31 st October in 2015 to launch a new initiative known as EK Bharat Shreshtha Bharat. Government of India is in process to launch this new initiative in order to boost the unity among people of India through the existing cultural connections between different parts of country.

There is a plan to connect one state to any other state of the country every year on a reciprocal basis. In which, one state can popularize the rich heritage of another state such as Haryana state can connect to the Tamil Nadu state and can popularize its rich heritages through various events like literary events, book festivals, food festivals, song festivals, tours of Haryana people to Tamil Nadu, etc in its own state. In this way, a state would connect to any other state of the country every year and promote its heritages.

Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat Essay 3 (200 words)

PM Narendra Modi has announced that EK Bharat Shreshtha Bharat is a new initiative to be launched in the near future in order to enhance unity in India. This initiative is in the process to be launched and aimed to connect people to people all through the country. This scheme was announced by the PM on Rashtriya Ekta Divas address, 31 st of October 2015 (birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel) to be launched. It is to initiate the cultural connections between different parts of the country. According to this initiative, one state of the country would connect to the other and promote each other’s heritage in other state.

Through this scheme, people of a state will get proper knowledge of tradition, culture, and other practices of other states which will enhance the understanding and bonding among people thereby enhance and strengthen the unity and integrity of India. In order to make this scheme more effective ‘EK Bharat Shreshtha Bharat’ contest has been started to know the views and ideas of different people all through the country. Citizens of the country are invited to submit their views, ideas and suggestions (on government website) to structure the programme so that it can be effective in its all dimensions.

Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat Essay 4 (250 words)

Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, has talked about a new scheme called as Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat on 31 st of October 2015 (birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel) in his speech. This is an initiative in the process to be launched in near future. It is an effort by the Indian government to strengthen the unity and harmony all over the country. It is a programme aimed to connect people to people all through the country. India is a country which is the best example of “Unity in Diversity”. This programme is also an initiative to improve the quality of unity in India. He also said in his ‘Mann Ki Baat’ programme that Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat scheme is to make India “One India Supreme India”.

This solid initiative of enhancing the peace and harmony need to uphold the law and order in order to maintain the same. In order to make this programme more effective, PM has requested the views, ideas and suggestions of common public on a government portal ‘MyGov.in’. He has also requested to suggest the structure, logo and ways to increase public participation in this programme.

There are various creative minds hidden in the crowd who can give better suggestions to connect people of India to unity and harmony to make it Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat. There is a plan to make it a specific and prestigious scheme to connect people in easy manner to achieve the main goal of enriching the culture of unity and harmony in the country.

Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat Essay 5 (300 words)

Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat is a new initiative to be launched which was announced by the PM Narendra Modi on the occasion of 140 th birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel (31 st of October 2015). India is a country known all over the world for its unity, peace and harmony. So, this initiative is an effort by the government to enhance its unity, peace and harmony all around the country by connecting people to people.

It is an important task need to get fulfilled in order to achieve the new heights of development in the country. This scheme has aimed to connect people to people as well as enhance the peace and harmony in the country. Below are some points regarding this scheme:

• Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat scheme has got inspiration from the life of a great person and a freedom fighter of India named as Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.
• There is a plan to launch this scheme very soon in which, any one state of this country will connect to another state every year and promote each other’s heritage like culture, tradition, language, etc.
• There has been made committees to work effectively on the scheme in consultation with the states.
• This scheme has aimed to get started with the unique partnership of two states for one year in which cultural and student exchanges would be followed.
• Students of both states will go to each other’s state in order to get knowledge about the culture, tradition and language.

In order to make this scheme en effective one, EK Bharat Shreshtha Bharat contest has been launched on 29 th of November 2015. According to this contest, government of India needs views, ideas and better suggestions about this scheme by the common people to make it effective. People can submit their views, ideas and suggestions on ‘mygov.in’ till the last date of submission, 10 th of December 2015.

Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat Essay 6 (400 words)

PM Narendra Modi has talked about a scheme on the occasion of Rashtriya Ekta Divas, 31 st of October 2015 (the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel). The name of the scheme is EK Bharat Shreshtha Bharat which is in the process to be launched in near future aiming to enhance and enrich the culture and tradition of country. Prime Minister has announced that Government of India will launch a new initiative to boost the cultural connections between different parts of the country. It is to connect people to people by enhancing interaction among people of different states.

According to this scheme, one state of the country will connect to other state on annual basis and both popularize the rich heritage of each other through the events like song festivals, food festivals, literary events, book festivals, tour and travel, etc. Next year, both states will connect to other two states aiming the same goal. This is the way to make people know about the culture, traditions and practices of various states all through the country. This will enhance the proper understanding and bonding among people as well as strengthen the unity and integrity in India.

Government of Indian has decided to get inputs from the citizens of India before implementing this initiative. That’s why EK Bharat Shreshtha Bharat contest has been launched to get views and ideas of people. Citizens can submit their ideas and suggestions (ways to structure programme to make it effective in various dimensions) directly on the government portal (mygov.in). In order to help citizens, government of India has given some themes and sub-themes so that they can expand their ideas and suggestions in detail and in right direction. Citizens can make following themes and sub-themes their base before writing and submitting original and innovative ideas, views and suggestions:

• “Identifying role of central government and state governments in implementing the programme.”
• “Identifying the manner in which the governments, civil society and private sector can work together.”
• “Specifying the Use of modern communication tools, including social media.”
• “Documentation of success stories.”
• “Making ‘Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat’ a people’s movement rather than a government programme.”

It is said by the PM that the original and innovative ideas which are explained in detail will be more preferred and score higher. Details can be submitted in PDF format. First (Rs. 100,000/-), second (Rs. 75,000/-) and third (Rs. 50,000/-) cash prizes (along with a certificate) are also declared by the government in order to attract more participants towards this scheme. Citizens can submit the details about views and ideas till the last date of submission, 10 th of December 2015.

More Information:

Essay on Start-up India Stand-up India

Essay on Digital India

Essay on Cashless India

Essay on Make in India

Related Posts

Money essay, music essay, importance of education essay, education essay, newspaper essay, my hobby essay, leave a comment cancel reply.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

45,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. Take the first step today

Meet top uk universities from the comfort of your home, here’s your new year gift, one app for all your, study abroad needs, start your journey, track your progress, grow with the community and so much more.

Verification Code

An OTP has been sent to your registered mobile no. Please verify

Thanks for your comment !

Our team will review it before it's shown to our readers.

• School Education /

Essay on Atmanirbhar Bharat (India): Samples in, 250 and 600 Words

• Updated on  
• Jan 25, 2024

Essay on Atmanirbhar Bharat: Today, India, that is Bharat, has become a self-reliant (atmanirbhar) country in most of the realms. The Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, launched the Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan on 12th May 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic to make India self-reliant. As India prepares to take the global centre stage, it will become an important global economy. India is ranked 5th in nominal GDP and 3rd in purchasing power parity (PPP). 

There are five pillars of the Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan, which are economy, technology-driven systems, infrastructure, vibrant demography and demand. Moreover, India is determined to become a global power under the India Vision 2047. Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan is not just a social and economic development topic. It is about the importance of India and its citizens in the global development. Today, we will provide some samples of essays on Atmanirbhar Bharat (India) for school students.

Master the art of essay writing with our blog on How to Write an Essay in English .

Essay on Atmanirbhar Bharat in 250 Words

The Prime Minister of India launched the ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyaan’ on 12th May 2020. All the activities and developments under this programme are managed by the Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Health and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity). 

Initially, this programme was launched with a total budget of INN 5,000 crore, which is 0.025% of our GDP. Later on, the Prime Minister increased this monetary budget to INR 20 lac crore to achieve all the desired objectives. To make India a self-reliant nation, native businessmen, industrialists and traders were encouraged to participate in the nation-building programme.

There are five pillars of the Atmanirbhar Mission. These are technology-driven systems, infrastructure, vibrant demography and demand. All these pillars are equally important and are managed by different ministries and departments of the Indian government. All the ministries involved in this programme have their separate objectives. 

To become a global economy, India is focusing on producing more and more products for exports and reducing its expenses in importing. When a country’s exports are more than its imports, its economy grows at a positive rate. We have a long way ahead of us. Our major focus is on producing indigenous products by encouraging local businesses so that their production is sufficient to sustain them and to export outside the country. If this trend continues, then the time is not far when India will become the global economic power, surpassing Germany, Japan, China and the USA. 

To improve your essay writing skills, here are the top 200+ English Essay Topics for school students.

Also Read: Speech on Republic Day for Class 12th

Essay on Atmanirbhar Bharat in 600 Words

The Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyaan or mission is an Indian government initiative, launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 12th May 2020. The Prime Minister laid down all the objectives, responsibilities, pillars and names of the ministries which will be working to achieve all the goals of this scheme. The objective of this scheme is to make India a self-reliant nation and a global economic power. 

Total Budget

The initial budget of the Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyaan was INR 5000 crore. However, due to the COVID-10 pandemic and global economic slowdown, this budget was raised to INR 20 lac crore. This was done to achieve all the objectives in real-time, as India is planning to enhance its production. 

Native businessmen, industrialists and traders are encouraged by the government to contribute and invest in the Indian manufacturing sector. With the number in production increasing, the country will be focusing on exporting more and importing less.

Five Pillars of Atma Nirbhar Bharat

The Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyaan functions under five ministries:  Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Health and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity). All these ministries will be working on separate pillars of the Atmanirbhar Bharat mission. These five pillars are; technology-driven systems, infrastructure, vibrant demography and demand. All these pillars are equally important and are managed by different ministries and departments of the Indian government. 

• Technology-driven systems – A system based on technological developments, which can make India an important global power in the 21st century.
• Economy – An economic system focusing on Quantum Jump rather than Incremental change.
• Infrastructure – A modern infrastructure for a modern India.
• Demography – As the mother of Democracy, our demographic variation or diversity is our strength to make India self-sustaining.
• Demand – To enhance the cycle of demand and supply for a stronger economy

Developments So far

The Ministry of Defence is focusing on building its own infrastructure and warfare equipment, instead of importing from other countries. To achieve these goals, all five departments of the Ministry of Defence are working together. These departments are the Department of Military Affairs, the Department of Defence, the Department of Defence Production, the Department of Defence Research and Development, and the Department of Ex-Servicemen Welfare. LCH Prachand chopper, Pinaka rocket launchers, and Nag anti-tank missiles are some of the Indian-made military weapons.

Benefits to Poors and Migrants

Under the Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyaan, the Indian government has encouraged the local and state governments to work for the welfare of the poor and migrants.

• Migrants are given food grain supply for up to 2 months.
• Poor people are given access to education and learn technical skills so that they can participate in technological-related activities.
• To offer affordable housing complexes for migrant workers and urban poor people, the One Nation One Ration Card scheme was introduced.
• The Shishu Mudra loan service was launched, under which a 2% interest subvention for 12 months was offered. This scheme offered a total of INR 12,000 crore loans all over India.
• Another INR 70,000 crore was invested in the housing sector for middle-class people under the PMAY (Urban).
• INR 30,000 crore was invested in the Emergency Working Capital for farmers under the NABARD scheme.
• INR 2 lac crore was invested to help more than 25 million farmers under the Kisan Credit Card Scheme.

When a country’s exports are more than its imports, its economy grows at a positive rate. We have a long way ahead of us. The major focus of the Atmanirbhar Bharat Scheme is on producing indigenous products by encouraging local businesses so that their production is sufficient to sustain them and to export outside the country.

Ans: The Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyaan is a national mission to make India, Bharat a self-reliant country in terms of trade, economy, defence and technology.

Ans: The Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyaan or mission is an Indian government initiative, launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 12th May 2020. The Prime Minister laid down all the objectives, responsibilities, pillars and names of the ministries which will be working to achieve all the goals of this scheme. The objective of this scheme is to make India a self-reliant nation and a global economic power. 

Ans: The Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyaan or Self-reliant India mission was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, with the vision to make India a self-reliant and self-sustaining nation.

Related Articles

We hope the essays above will help school students with their essay-writing skills. For more information on such interesting topics, visit our essay writing page and follow Leverage Edu .

Shiva Tyagi

With an experience of over a year, I've developed a passion for writing blogs on wide range of topics. I am mostly inspired from topics related to social and environmental fields, where you come up with a positive outcome.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Contact no. *

Connect With Us

45,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. take the first step today..

Resend OTP in

Need help with?

Study abroad.

UK, Canada, US & More

IELTS, GRE, GMAT & More

Scholarship, Loans & Forex

Country Preference

New Zealand

Which English test are you planning to take?

Which academic test are you planning to take.

Not Sure yet

When are you planning to take the exam?

Already booked my exam slot

Within 2 Months

Want to learn about the test

Which Degree do you wish to pursue?

When do you want to start studying abroad.

January 2024

September 2024

What is your budget to study abroad?

How would you describe this article ?

Please rate this article

We would like to hear more.

Have something on your mind?

Make your study abroad dream a reality in January 2022 with

India's Biggest Virtual University Fair

Essex Direct Admission Day

Why attend .

Don't Miss Out

South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal

Home Thematic Issues 10 ‘India, that is Bharat…’: One Cou...

‘India, that is Bharat…’: One Country, Two Names

The politics of naming is shaped by broad socio-political conditions and can be studied from several angles. Adopting a cultural history perspective, this paper considers some of the inherited discourses on ‘Bhārata’ both prior to and at the time of its official equation with ‘India’ in the Constitution (1950). It focusses on three successive definitional moments: the Puranic definition of Bhārata; the shift to its colonial definition, when the old toponym became the ‘indigenous’ name for a budding nation exposed to the imported political and geographical conceptions of (British) India; and, lastly, the choice of the Constitutional assembly to register the nation under a dual and bilingual identity: ‘India, that is Bharat’. The paper concludes with a sample of contemporary reactions that show that this double-name formula remains a baffling subject for Indian citizens.

Index terms

Keywords: , introduction 1.

• 1 This paper is an extended version of a communication delivered on 13 November 2012 in the workshop (...)

1 In The Discovery of India , a book that he composed in the Ahmednagar Fort during his years of captivity (1942-1946) and published in 1946, Jawaharlal Nehru (1946: 38-39) wrote:

2 ‘Often, as I wandered from meeting to meeting, I spoke to my audiences of this India of ours, of Hi (...) Often, as I wandered from meeting to meeting, I spoke to my audiences of this India of ours, of Hindustan and of Bharata, the old Sanskrit name derived from the mythical founders of the race. 2

• 3 The expression is a hybrid, it associates a Sanskrit word ( jaya -hail) with an Arabic word ( Hind- Ind (...)

2 When The Discovery of India was published, these names, Hindustan, Bharat (also Bharata), India, coexisted in the subcontinent. Of constant usage also was Hind, as in ‘ Jai Hind ’ (Victory to Hind), the battle-cry that Nehru, like several other political leaders, liked to proclaim at the end of his speeches. 3 To capture these various meanings today is not an easy task. It entails being aware of the simple and yet too often forgotten fact that words have a history of their own; they do not maintain the same signification throughout time. The terms with which we name reality participate in the construction of reality, in the perception that we have and give of it.

• 4 4 The name given by Yule and Burnell (1996) to their dictionary of Anglo-Indian terms. See also the (...)
• 5 The Persian Hindustān , the Greek Indikê , the latin India , and the Arabic Al-Hind are all derived fr (...)

6 See Barrow 2011: 41. I am grateful to Aminah Mohammad-Arif for this reference.

• 7 See Barrow 2011: 47. In 1894 Strachey (1894: 2), then member of the council of the Secretary of sta (...)
• 8 Savarkar wrote Hindutva (in English) during his imprisonment in Andaman and Nicobar Islands between (...)

3 Take the name India. Since its ancient use by Greek ( Indikê ) and Latin ( India ) authors, it has been applied to a variety of territories as, for example, Yule and Burnell remind us in their famous Hobson-Jobson . 4 Or take the word Hindustan, which was already used in Persia in the third century B.C. to refer to the land lying beyond the Indus River. 5 Its definition too has always been accompanied by some confusion. A comparison of 18 th and 19 th century British maps shows that the size and political designation of the territory corresponding to Hindustan changed over time along with historical developments (Barrow 2011). It was associated with the land of the Moghuls as, for example, in The History of Hindostan by Alexander Dow (1792) or in the Memoir of a Map of Hindoostan or the Mogul Empire (1793) by Rennell. 6 Did it then refer only to North India (the South being called Deccan) or was it equivalent to the whole subcontinent as in the maps of the British Empire by the 1840s? 7 And then in the compound of Hindustan the word ‘Hindu’ itself raised a difficulty of interpretation. It too had changed as everything changed around it. From being a geographic and ethnic term, it became a religious term, as in the late nineteenth century slogan ‘Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan’ that linked national identity to one language, one religious denomination and one territory or, as we will see later, in the sanskritized Hindusthāna (the Persian - stān and the sanskrit - sthāna both mean ‘place’) of the radical political activist Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s Hindutva , published in 1923, which referred to the land of the Hindus, to a people therefore, and not to a river. 8

4 At the time of independence then, the names Bharat, India, Al-Hind and Hindustan coexisted to designate the Indian subcontinent. Those who, like Nehru, used them side by side understood their differences and knew how to interpret their contrasting usages, even if, given the complicated history of each, they did not agree on the nature of their differences. What they all agreed upon was that their meaning and usage were context—and language—sensitive.

• 9 The First article reads: ‘(1) India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States. (2) The States and (...)
• 10 The Hindi translation reads: ‘ bhārata arthāt indiyā, rājyoṃ kā saṅgha hogā .’ See http://bharat.gov. (...)

5 In 1950, four years after the publication of Nehru’s Discovery of India , the drafters of the Constitution of the larger of the two successor states of British India decided how the country should be known. In the opening article of the Constitution of India they wrote: ‘India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States’. 9 Two names: one, India, associated with the foreigners whose rule was coming to an end; the other, Bharat (skt. bhārata , also bhāratavarṣa ), perceived as native because it was found in ancient Sanskrit literature. Henceforward no other name besides these two was to be used legally. In this juridico-political conception, India and Bharat were to be interchangeable terms. 10

6 What are we to make of the equation of Bharat and India in the Constitution? How did such a double-name formula come about? This is the main question dealt with here. My argument is that the Constitutional assembly’s decision should be understood as the outcome of a long historical process with deep cultural roots. I will also make the point, though more briefly, that this process did not stop with the promulgation of the Constitution.

• 11 Reports of the Constituent Assembly Debates (Proceedings) (9 December 1946 to 24 January 1950) publ (...)

7 Critical to an enquiry of how Bharat could be equated with India at all, I contend, are preexisting definitions of Bharat, and also of Hindustan, found in different textual sources. I present some of them in the first part of the paper, focusing more particularly on the definition of Bhārata given by the Purāṇas . Then I consider the shift from the Puranic Bhārata 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. I also briefly examine the pre-independence destiny of the word Hindustan. In the next part of the paper I analyze the arguments exchanged by the members of the Constitutional assembly when they adopted and discussed the double naming of the new nation. For this section I rely on the official recordings of the debates (in English) found on a website maintained by the Indian government. 11 Finally I thought it interesting to give a sample of contemporary reactions on the basis of information published in the printed press and on the internet. These indicate that to this day the Constitutional Assembly’s decision to give their country two names remains a baffling subject for Indian citizens.

Bhārata is a native name, but a native name for what?

• 12 Manu 2.21-24: ‘The land between the Himalaya and Vindhya ranges to the east of Vinashana and west o (...)

8 Bhārata is indeed an old name. In the Purāṇas and other Sanskrit texts of the first centuries of the Christian era, it refers to the supraregional and subcontinental territory where the Brahmanical system of society prevails. It seems to have absorbed the older and spatially narrower toponym Ᾱryāvarta (the land of the Ᾱryas ) described in the Laws of Manu. 12 We have hardly any historical evidence of the way in which the name Bhārata was used in actual life, in what circumstances and by whom. We are more assured in our knowledge of its religious and cultural imagination since we can rely on textual sources. We also have reasons to believe that the traditional depiction of Bhārata was transmitted over many generations down to the colonial period thanks to the fact that the recitation of the Purāṇas was part of the spiritual education sponsored by temples, and not only for the literate circles, since the Purāṇas were not meant to be their exclusive prerogative.

• 13 Taken together the seven islands constitute the world. They are separated from each other by oceans (...)
• 14 ‘The country that lies north of the ocean, and south of the snowy mountains, is called Bharata, for (...)

15 See Ali 1966: 109.

16 See Renou & Filliozat, 1947-1949: 547.

9 The main feature of Puranic Bhārata is its insularity. This insularity has two dimensions: one is spatial, the other is social. The territory of Bhārata is situated on Jambudvīpa or the ‘apple-tree island’ ( Jambosaeugenia ). Annular in its form, the island of Jambudvīpa is itself surrounded by six other similarly annular-shaped continents that are concentrically organized around Mount Meru, the axis mundi situated just beneath the polar star. 13 Bhārata is said to be situated between the sea in the south and the ‘Abode of snow’ ( himālaya) in the north (see for example Viṣṇupurāṇa  2. 3.1-2). 14 Its shape cannot be clearly determined for it varies from text to text. It is described as a half-moon, a triangle, a trapezoid, or a bended bow, as in Mārkaṇḍeyapurāṇa , 57.59, for example (Ali 1966: 109). In this Purāṇa , Bhārata is said to be surrounded by the ocean on the east, west and south and by the Himalaya ( himavant ) in the north, a description evoking a familiar shape. However geography is not the main concern here: the text also compares Bhārata to a tortoise floating on water and looking towards the east. 15 Though in the Purāṇas Bhārata is not per se an island but a section of the island of Jambudvīpa , it is nevertheless fairly isolated, being cut off from the main land by a high mountain and surrounded by seas. In some other ancient Indian texts it is coextensive to Jambudvīpa , as in the inscriptions of King Ashoka, and in the Buddhist (and Jain) literature. 16

• 17 ‘In the Bharatavarsha it is that the succession of four Yugas, or ages, the Krita, the Treta, the D (...)

10 From the spatial perspective, Bhārata is thus a naturally bounded territory. It is also a territory on which a specific social order prevails. As a socialized territory it shelters an organization of time and modes of living whose specificities are essentially expressed in soteriological terms. We get some idea of what Bhārata represents by examining the notions with which it is correlated. It is on its territory alone, not in the other regions of the world, that time is properly divided into cosmic ages ( yuga ), that humans who celebrate rites ( karman ) correctly can expect appropriate consequences: there and there only can they reap the fruits of acts (also karman ) committed in previous births; there and there only can they strive to obtain the permanent release from transmigration ( saṃsāra ), which entails the cessation of karman . Such considerations are summarized in the well-known classical characterization of Bhārata as the ‘land of works’ ( karmabhūmi ), as for example in the Viṣṇupurāna . 17

18 See Bhardwaj (1973: 7).

11 In Brahmanical literature Bhārata is moreover associated with an internal principle of unity. Its naturally bounded territory is unified by a network of pilgrimage sites ( tīrtha ). It is organized around some key natural sites found within it. Its mountains and rivers in particular are made objects of worship. Therefore one also finds the idea that the land of Bhārata itself is sacred. 18

• 19 In a way, contemporary orthodox Brahmans still mentally reside in Bhārata , as their ancestors did: (...)

12 Bhārata then refers to a spatially delimited social order, but not to a politically organized entity. 19 In this respect, it differs from Hindustan, at least since Moghul times, and from (British) India, two toponyms correlated with political regimes. Nobody puts it better than P.V. Kane. In the third volume of his opus magnum the History of the Dharmaśāstra (which was also published in 1946, like Nehru’s Discovery of India ), after reviewing the definitions of Bhārata in their original Sanskrit, this well-known historian of Hindu codes of law (Kane 1973: 134, 137) observed:

The Viṣṇu (II, 3, 2), Brāhma , Mārkaṇḍeya (55, 21-22) and other purāṇas proudly assert that Bharatavarṣa is the land of action ( karmabhūmi ). This is patriotism of a sort but not of the kind we see in western countries. Bharatavarṣa itself has comprised numerous countries from the most ancient times. […] There was no doubt a great emotional regard for Bharatavarṣa or Ᾱryāvarta as a unity for many centuries among all writers from a religious point of view, though not from a political standpoint. Therefore one element of modern nationhood viz. being under the same government was wanting.

13 And yet… Kane introduces a caveat: ‘But it must be noted that from very ancient times there was always the aspiration among great kings and the people to bring the whole of Bharatavarṣa ‘under one umbrella’ (Kane 1973: 137).

20 In the Matsyapurāṇa 114, 9-10, see Kane (1973: 67).

14 And yet… Bhārata is said to be named after King Bharata, one of the ‘mythical founders of the race’ mentioned by Nehru. And yet…the king who conquers the whole of Bhāratavarṣa is styled samrāṭ, universal sovereign. 20 Such conceptions contrast with most descriptions of Bhārata as having natural borders—borders of the sort not likely to move under the control of humans. They do raise the question of the immutability of its limits. Moreover, one important law code at least mentions the spatial expansion through conquest of Ᾱryāvarta , the older and smaller Brahmanical territory. The often quoted 9 th century commentary on Manu by Medhatithi (2.23) says:

21 Quoted by Kane (1974: 16). If a kṣatriya king of excellent conduct were to conquer the Mlecchas, establish the system of four varṇas (in the Mleccha country) and assign to Mlecchas a position similar to that of cāṇḍālas in Ᾱryāvarta, even that (Mleccha country) would be fit for the performance of sacrifice, since the earth itself is not impure, but becomes impure through contact (of impure persons or things). 21

22 See Halbfass (1988: 178).

23 See for example Pollock (2006: 572).

• 24 Killingley (1997:126) compares Bhārata to dār al-islām , the territory where according to Islamic ju (...)

15 There is undoubtedly here an idea that the size of the Brahmanical territory can expand as more and more people are integrated into its settled social order and made to accept its norms of conduct. But besides telling us that the world is divided between the pure Ᾱrya and the impure Mleccha and that the earth is not per se impure (two key Brahmanical representations), it is open to debate whether this commentary on Manu offers sufficient evidence for the historian to explain the actual extension of the hierarchical social system of the varṇāśramadharma in political terms. 22 The notion of samrāṭ offers another ground for debate depending on its translation and interpretation. In its original context, it refers to a universal sovereign. A samrāṭ is the ideal ‘Hindu’ king who maintains the cosmic order ( dharma ), and whose ambition is to take the whole (Hindu) world under his unique umbrella so that dharma may prevail. In royal eulogies this goal is rhetorically claimed to have been achieved. 23 But in practice Bhārata was never politically unified by any known samrāṭ . It was never co-terminus with a political regime. 24

16 ‘ Bhārata ’, then, as found in the Brahmanical tradition, belongs to a cosmological discourse that inscribes human activity within a grand spatio-temporal frame ( dvīpa , yuga ). It is associated with a vision of human beings, of their condition and experience and of their interpersonal relationships within a given social structure. Outside its territory non-order prevails. Nowhere does it refer to a country in the modern sense.

Bhārata becomes India’s ancient name

• 25 Edney (1997) explores the relationship between cartographic knowledge and power, showing how map ma (...)

26 See Embree (1977: 256, 259); Cohn (1996: introduction); Khilnani (2003: 21).

17 Bhārata is a discourse on space, but a discourse that does not allow a visual representation of that space. It is not possible, on the basis of that discourse, to draw a map in the modern sense of the word. To say that Bhārata denotes all regions comprised between the sea and the mountain range of the Himalaya is not to describe the shape of India as we know it from modern maps. The maps that associate India with a given space, that is to say with a precisely bounded space, are so familiar to us that we might easily forget that they were not introduced to the educated Indian public before the 1870s. By then, moreover, what became represented was not only a geographical space but also a political space enclosed in boundaries or administrative units drawn by the colonial power. 25 This new national space was inseparable from the equally new idea of ‘country’. 26

27 See Goswami 2003.

18 Manu Goswami has written eloquently on the conditions that allowed the emergence of new ways of viewing Indian past and has shown how the old Puranic conception of Bhārata acquired a new meaning for the Hindu intelligentsia during the colonial period. 27 Whereas Bhārata was conceived as a social order, a space where specific social relations and shared notions of a moral order prevailed, (British) India referred to a political order, to a bounded territory placed under the control of a single centralized power structure and an authoritarian system of governance. By the mid-nineteenth century what educated Hindus called ‘Bharat’ was the territory mapped and organized by the British under the name ‘India’.

• 28 See Muir [1858] 1890: Chapter 6. He also equates Bhāratavarsha with Hindustan, Muir ([1861] 1890:14 (...)

19 The old and native name Bhārata became a workable concept for the national cause despite the forcefulness with which the British conception of ‘India’—and all it entailed in terms of spatial and political unity—was propagated and imposed. Now the reason why it retained its prestige for the educated Hindus is not only to be found in the uninterrupted transmission of the Puranic conception within their class. It is also due to the fact that from the mid-nineteenth century Orientalists gave ‘ Bhārata’ a very special place in their discourse. Thus in the first volume of his Original Sanskrit Texts on the Origin and History of the People of India published in 1858, John Muir, while describing the geographical conceptions of the Purāṇas, equated Bhāratavarṣa with India as a matter of course; needless to add that he made no attempt to identify the other equally fabulous varṣas of J ambudvipā with any region of the world as we know it. 28

20 To project Bhārata as the ‘ancient name’ of India was to transform it into a political conception. Muir was quite aware of the implications if one is to judge by what he wrote in 1860 in the preface of the second volume of Original Sanskrit Texts :

My primary object in this volume, as in its predecessor, has been to produce a work which may assist the researches of those Hindus who desire to investigate critically the origin and history of their nation, and of their national literature, religion, and institutions; and may facilitate the operations of those European teachers whose business it is to communicate to the Hindus the results of modem inquiry on the various subjects here examined. (Muir [1860], 1890: vii).

21 In 1893, the German Orientalist Gustav Oppert went one step further than Muir when he declared that Bhāratavarṣa was the only relevant national designation for India:

I prefer as India’s name the designation Bharatavarsa, or land of the Bharatas. […] Such a name will bridge over the great social chasms, which divide at present the Hindus, and perhaps bring together in union the two great antagonistic sections of the original inhabitants, which since the earliest times of antiquity have lived estranged from each other [ i.e. what he calls further ‘Aryanised and non-Aryan Indian clans’]. […] by accepting such a time-honoured and honourable name as their national designation, a great step towards national unity would be taken in India (Oppert 1893: 621-23).

29 See Khilnani 2003: 17.

22 Bhārata was now fully prepared to embark on a career on the political stage, as politics had become ‘the unavoidable terrain on which Indians would have to learn to act.’ 29 In The Soul of India published in 1911, Bipin Chandra Pal (1858-1932) proclaimed it to be the only real indigenous name for India. The Bengali nationalist and social reformer, well-known for the part he had taken in the organization of the swadeshi movement after the Partition of Bengal, wrote (2010 [1911]: 65):

We never called her either India or Hindoostan. We knew her of old by quite a different name (p. 57). […] 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 and students have been able to do (p. 62). […] Our own name was, and is still today, among the Aryan population of the country, Bharatvarsha.

23 In this language of ‘you’ and ‘we’, whereas ‘you’ refers to a young foreigner desirous to understand India with whom Bipin Chandra Pal is supposedly corresponding ( The Soul of India is in the form of four letters), ‘we’, which includes the author himself, is associated with ‘Ᾱrya’ . At a time when the definition of one’s nation was woven into the self-definition of Indian, Ᾱrya appears to have been the best ‘non-foreign’ word at Bipin Chandra Pal’s disposal. The ethnonym was popular both with the representatives of the orthodox Hindu set-up—against whom Bipin Chandra Pal stood squarely, and with the Ᾱryasamāja, the religious organization that claimed India as the natural homeland of the Ᾱryas —whose views he did not espouse either. Like many Hindu reformists of his days, he combined nationalism with religious symbolism taken from Hinduism with outright rejection of basic aspects of that tradition.

Bhārata ? Hindustān ? Hindusthāna ?

• 30 ‘Some pre-requisites of nationhood had […] been achieved by the time that the British conquests beg (...)

24 Supported from all sides as it was, then, not only had the old name Bhārata not fallen into oblivion, but it had been invested with a new meaning and was ready to serve the emerging country. But Hindustan remained a worthy candidate for the same cause, as, among other reasons, it could claim a political career that was associated with the Moghul Empire and therefore predated the colonial period. 30 It is noteworthy that although Bipin Chandra Pal stigmatized Hindustan as ‘foreign’, he was keen to draw the attention of his young correspondent to the contribution of the Moghuls to the development of an Indian national consciousness. For unlike Puranic Bhārata , Hindustan had been associated with political sovereignty and administrative centralization, two dimensions, he stressed, that were ‘foreign to the genius of the Aryan people of India’ (Pal 2010 [1911]: 67):

The unity of India was […] neither racial nor religious, nor political nor administrative. It was a peculiar type of unity, which may be best described as cultural (p. 69) […] at a very early period of our history we had fully realized a very deep, though complex, kind of organic unity at the back of all the apparent diversities and multiplicities of our land and people. (p. 87) […] The Moslem rulers of India came into these invaluable inheritances of the Hindus. (p. 89) […] To the old community of socio-religious life and ideals the Mahomedans now added new elements of administrative and political unity. (p. 90) […] all irrespective of castes or community, became equally subject to certain laws and obligations, known only to Islam. (p. 90) […] Thus we had, under the Moguls [sic], a new and more united, a more organic, though not yet fully organized, national life and consciousness than we had before. The British came to this India; and not to an unorganized, unconscious, and undeveloped chaos, having simply a geographical entity. And in view of this, it is unpardonable ignorance to say that […] the Indians have always been and still are a chaotic congregation of many peoples, an incoherent and heterogenous collection of tribes and races, families and castes, but not in any sense a nation.’ (p. 93)

25 It was during Moghul rule rather than during British rule, at a time when India was called Hindustan, that political unity had been achieved and added to the already existing cultural unity of Bhārata , allowing Indians to develop a complete sense of belonging together, irrespective of their religions.

26 In 1904 when he penned his famous patriotic poem in Urdu Ham ā rā deśa , ‘Our country’, Mohammad Iqbal (1877-1938) also associated Hindustan with Indians at large and with a composite religious culture:

Sare jahāṃ se acchā Hindustāṃ hamārā

Ham bulbuleṃ haiṃ us kī, yi gulistāṃ hamārā […]

Mażhab nahiṃ sikhātā āpas meṃ bair rakhnā

Hindī haiṃ ham, vatan hai Hindūstān hamārā

The best in the whole world is our Hindustan

We are his robin, he is our rose-garden […]

Religion does not teach mutual hatred

31 On the history of the song and on how it was rewritten by Iqbal, see Pritchett ( http://www.columbia (...) We are Hindī, Hindustān is our native country 31

• 32 Jana-gaṇa-mana adhināyaka jaya he/Bhārata bhāgya vidhātā: Thou art the ruler of the minds of all pe (...)

27 The sense of belonging to a country ( vaṭan ) here overrides other loyalties. It is with this nationalist understanding of Hindustan that Iqbal’s song, which became immediately popular in anti-British rallies, was solemnly chanted on 15 August 1947, the day of the proclamation of India’s independence, along with Jana Gana Mana , composed by Rabindranath Tagore. 32 Iqbal’s song is still widely sung in India today.

• 33 On Savarkar, see note 8. Savarkar wrote Hindutva in English but he gave the Devanāgarī spelling of (...)
• 34 In the Saṃkṣipta hindī ṣabdasāgara (‘Abbreviated Dictionary of Hindi’), hindī as an adjective is de (...)
• 35 āsindhu sindhu-paryantā yasya bhārata-bhūmikā/ pitṛbhūḥ puṇyabhūścaiva sa vai hindur iti smṛtaḥ : ‘H (...)
• 36 ‘[…] we have left the thread of our enquiry at the point where the growing concept of an Indian nat (...)
• 37 ‘[…] the epithets Hindu and Hindusthan had been the proud and patriotic designations signifying our (...)
• 38 The ‘h’ is dropped by most authors, academics or otherwise, who quote Savarkar, though he himself t (...)
• 39 (Savarkar 1923: 31). ‘Sindhu in Sanskrit does not only mean the Indus but also the Sea which girdle (...)

28 The attempt by Savarkar to hinduize the name Hindustan was another crucial moment in the naming of the budding nation. 33 Whereas Iqbal called the inhabitants of Hindustān by the old appellation Hindī , which signifies ‘Indian’ in the ethno-geographical sense, 34 Savarkar called them Hindus, and reserved the term only for those Indians who considered Bharat both as their Holy land ( puṇyabhūmi ) and as their fatherland ( patṛbhūmi ), by which he meant the Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs but not the Muslims and Christians. 35 It is not, therefore, that Savarkar did not think of Bhārata as a suited designation for the country of his dreams. But he found the name Sindhusthāna (or Hindusthāna , given the phonetic evolution) more ‘authentic’, and he also preferred it to Ᾱryāvarta , a notion that he found too ‘parochial and narrow-minded’. 36 It was more authentic, he argued, because Hindusthan was not, as was commonly held, a foreign term, but a purely Sanskrit term, just like Hindu and Sindhu. 37 Hindu was the name by which the Hindus had always referred to themselves, Sindhu the name they had given to the Indus River and Hindusthan, the name they had given to their nation. Thus Savarkar constructed the genealogy of Hindus, demonstrating the autochthony of the three terms with due etymological and phonetic explanations. 38 In his conception, the key element was Sindhu: the Indus River was made ‘the vital spinal cord that connects the remotest past to the remotest future’. 39 To territorialize Hindu identity, Savarkar needed to associate the territory with the word Sindhu even when he called that territory Bharat . Under his pen Bharat becomes the land delimitated by the Indus River ( sindhu ) and by the sea (also sindhu in Sanskrit ) , an unheard of definition in Brahmanical literature.

40 See Oberoi (1987: 38).

29 With Hindusthan, Savarkar produced an exclusive Hindu vision of India. This vision that stressed religious differences was to remain influential in the Hindu nationalist milieu and beyond. It also left its mark on those Sikhs who from the 1940s onwards had begun visualizing the Panjab as their natural homeland and who were heard demanding in the early 1950s: ‘the Hindus got Hindustan, the Muslims got Pakistan, what did the Sikhs get?’ 40

The Constitutional debates on the naming of the nation

• 41 The Draft Constitution was being finalized when Gandhi was assassinated (31 January 1948). Its firs (...)

30 On 14 August 1947 at midnight, India became independent. Two weeks later, on 29 August 1947, the Constituent Assembly, that had been meeting since December 1946, set up a Drafting Committee under the Chairmanship of B.R. Ambedkar. From February 1948 to November 1949, the members of the Constituent Assembly examined the draft, moving and discussing in the process almost 2,500 amendments. 41 On 26 November 1949, they finally adopted the Constitution of India and signed it on 24 January 1950. On 26 January 1950, the Constitution of India officially came into force, and the Constituent Assembly became the Provisional Parliament of India until the first general elections of 1952.

• 42 The following quotations unless otherwise mentioned are from the reports of the debates mentioned i (...)

31 As we know, the Constitution was drafted under the extremely difficult circumstances of the immediate post-partition period, just two years after horrendous chaos and bloodshed. It was a time, then, when the unity and stability of the new born country were in doubt. Was it because it was linked to its identity or for another reason that the question of its naming is found to have come relatively late in the long process of the adoption of the Constitution? Whatever the case, the section ‘Name and territory of the Union’ was examined only on 17 September 1949. The very touchy nature of its first article was immediately perceptible. It read: ‘India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States’. A division arose among the delegates between those who, like B.R. Ambedkar, wanted it to be adopted within the half an hour that was left for the meeting of the day and those who wished that it be discussed at length the next day. At the risk of taxing the patience of the main author of the Draft Constitution, there followed the next day a thorough examination of the implications of the first article. It bore on two points: 1) the relationship between the two words ‘India’ and ‘Bharat’, 2) the political and administrative implications of the terms ‘Union’ and ‘States’. The second point was by far the most hotly debated one (not only during that particular session but throughout the long Constitutional proceedings). Here I will deal only with the arguments exchanged about the first point. As we can expect, they illustrated contrasting visions of the budding nation. 42

• 43 He had in fact also proposed ‘Hind’ along with ‘Bharat’ but withdrew it when it was pointed to him (...)
• 44 ‘I represent the people of the Northern part of India where sacred places like Shri Badrinath, Shri (...)

32 The main speakers (recorded) were Seth Govind Das (‘C.P. [Central Province]’ & Berar: General’) and Kamalapati Tripathi, two Congress leaders, Shri Ram Sahai (‘representing Madhya Bharat’), Hargovind Pant (‘United Provinces’), and Hari Vishnu Kamath, a leader of the All India Forward Block, a party then situated to the left of the Congress Party. Introducing the first amendment, P.V. Kamath proposed that the sentence ‘India, that is Bharat shall be a Union of States’ be replaced by ‘Bharat, or, in the English language, India, shall, be and such’. 43 He explained that he had been inspired by the Constitution of ‘the Irish Free State’ (1937), Article 4 of which read: ‘The name of the State is Eire, or, in the English language, Ireland.’ A while later, Seth Govind Das proposed: ‘Bharat known as India also in foreign countries…’. He was followed by Kamalapati Tripathi who wanted ‘Bharat, that is India’ (instead of ‘India, that is Bharat’), and by Hargovind Pant according to whom the people ‘of the Northern part of India’ that he represented ‘wanted Bharatvarsha and nothing else’. 44 None of these proposals were accepted by the Assembly. The above named delegates nonetheless made their point, which was to dwell at length on their ‘satisfaction’ that the word Bharat had been at all retained by the drafters. As Ram Sahai observed: it had ‘been felt that this name may lead to some difficulties’ and it was therefore ‘a matter for pleasure that we are going to accept the name Bharat without any opposition [emphasis added by the speaker]’.

33 The ‘opposition’, it is safe to guess, would have been to a vision of the new India that could not be shared by most delegates of the Constitutional Assembly because it clashed with their understanding of what the emerging secular state ought to be. Kamalapati Tripathi’s declaration of ‘satisfaction’ left little doubt that Bharata could indeed be associated with a conception of the nation that was potentially divisive:

When a country is in bondage, it loses its soul. During its slavery for one thousand years, our country too lost its everything. We lost our culture, we lost our history, we lost our prestige, we lost our humanity, we lost our self-respect, we lost our soul and indeed we lost our form and name. Today after remaining in bondage for a thousand years, this free country will regain its name and we do hope that after regaining its lost name it will regain its inner consciousness and external form and will begin to act under the inspiration of its soul which had been so far in a sort of sleep. It will indeed regain its prestige in the world.

• 45 On the presence of ‘Hindu traditionalists’ (whom he distinguishes from ‘Hindu nationalists’) in the (...)

34 This one-sided history, containing a distinctly anti-Muslim tone, came from an important North Indian leader of the Indian National Congress: a reminder of the fact that this party was not of one mind regarding India’s past and future. 45 K. Tripathi’s vision of the new India did demonstrate the presence of near-communalist concerns. Such an understanding of Bharat was likely to be seen as undermining national unity. What seems to have been at work with the other delegates equally keen on the name Bharat was the Hindu rhetoric of the more traditionalist sort. See, for example, the statement of Seth Govind Das, a Congress fellow of Kamalapati Tripathi. The name Bharat, he said, was ‘befitting our history and our culture’, because it was found in the old Hindu literature, whereas the ‘word India does not occur in our ancient books’, adding, to stress his point: ‘We fought the battle of freedom under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi by raising the slogan of ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’.’ A statement like that could be said to be parochial perhaps, but was it necessarily divisive or potentially detrimental to the interests of non-Hindus? In any case, it was not completely without political acumen:

We should indeed give such a name to our country as may be befitting our history and our culture. It is a matter of great pleasure that we are today naming our country as Bharat. I said many a time before too that if we do not arrive at correct decisions in regard to these matters the people of this country will not understand the significance of self-government.

35 A point of view shared by Hargovind Pant:

So far as the word ‘India’ is concerned, the Members seem to have, and really I fail to understand why, some attachment for it. We must know that this name was given to our country by foreigners who having heard of the riches of this land were tempted towards it and had robbed us of our freedom in order to acquire the wealth of our country. If we, even then, cling to the word ‘India’, it would only show that we are not ashamed of having this insulting word which has been imposed on us by alien rulers. Really, I do not understand why we are accepting this word […].

• 46 See Singh (2005: 911-912). As the debates on the name were going on, an unnamed female renouncer un (...)
• 47 Nehru was not adverse to using it either: ‘Sometimes as I reached a gathering, a great roar of welc (...)

36 Pritam Singh has recently argued that ‘the symbolic significance of ‘Bharat’ in the opening article [of the Constitution] was meant to suggest a sense of Hindu ownership of the new India—the India which was perceived to have achieved self-rule after many centuries of foreign rule. The name Bharat signified the birth of a new India, with whose government and state the Hindus felt a sense of identification.’ 46 The basic question at stake here is how to separate religion from culture when one speaks from within one’s own tradition, as had been the case for most Hindus during the national struggle. It had been the case even for Gandhi, as his use of the expression Bhārata mātā kī jaya testified. 47 Smith raised this very question when he wrote that:

Nationalism inevitably drew part of its inspiration from India’s ancient cultural traditions, and these were mainly Hindu. India was the only home of the Hindus, and whatever patriotic demands were made in the name of the majority would naturally appear to be expressions of Indian nationalism. (Smith 1963: 455)

37 This was never more obvious than at the time of choosing the name of the nation despite the fact (but also thanks to the fact) that the delegates whose words I have quoted functioned within the secular framework of politics.

38 At this point, the reader who has not forgotten that Iqbal’s Sare jahāṃ se acchā Hindustāṃ hamarā was sung on 15 August 1947 may well wonder about the whereabouts of the name ‘Hindustan!’ ‘Hindustan’ received different treatments during the Constituent Assembly. Let us start by quoting the observation that Mohammad Tahir (‘Bihar, Muslim’) made on 24 November 1949, two days before the final adoption of the Constitution:

I would like to submit that it is a matter of shame that our Constitution could not fix a name for our country. This is a proof of the intelligence of Dr. Ambedkar that he suggested a hotch-potch sort of name and got it accepted. Well, if somebody would have asked Doctor Saheb about his home land, he could have replied with pride that he belonged to Bharat or India or Hindustan. But now the Honourable Dr. will have to reply in these words: ‘I belong to India that is Bharat’. Now, Sir, it is for you to see what a beautiful reply it is.

39 Here was a subtle way of saying that three names had been at the start of the race, but at the end two had been placed on equal footing and one dropped. And the absentee was staring them in the face. But the very next day, ‘Hindustan’ reappeared. At that point of time, however, the discussion did not bear on the name of the whole country but on the demand made by certain Provinces (such as Orissa) to change their own particular names.

40 The name Hindustan popped up again when from there the discussion shifted to the naming of the United Provinces. At some point, R. K. Sidhva (‘C.P. [Central Province] & Berar, General’) recalled that there had been a serious objection when ‘the U.P. [United Provinces] Government and U.P. Assembly decided that the name should be changed into Aryavarta.’ But now, since Aryavarta had not been accepted, he feared that they might take the name Hindustan, as he recalled that in 1938: ‘when the Indian National Congress held its session in Cawnpore in the All-India Congress Committee my friends from U.P. brought a resolution that the name of the U.P. Congress Committee should be changed into Hindustan Congress Committee.’ So the prudent R. K. Sidhva had another suggestion:

Why not U.P. be called Samyukt Pradesh? If that is not acceptable there are other very fine names like Avadh, Ayodhya, Ganga, etc. Why should they usurp the name of the whole of India and tell us they are the people who are the only custodians of India? I strongly resent their monopolising the name of India.

41 Mohan Lal Gautam (‘United Provinces, General’) equally strongly objected to this:

I assure you that U.P. has a gift and it is perhaps the only province in the country which can claim that it has no provincialism. […] This function of Brahmins—of giving names ought to have some background. You say why not give it the name of Avadh. Avadh is one of the very important parts of U.P. but it is only a part. Avadh has a tradition of Nawabs and feudal lords which we do not want. […]. The solution is that the Provinces must be consulted and it must be acceptable to all-India authority and the all-India authority is the President and the President means the President and the Cabinet.

42 But for Shri R.K. Sidhva, this solution was no guarantee:

The purpose of consulting the legislature also will not be served because the majority of the Members there would say, ‘Have it Aryavarta or Hindustan’. Supposing they change it to Hindustan, what will be the remedy if the Provincial Legislature also says that U.P. will be known as Hindustan? India in future will be called Bharat but that does not mean that we discard the name Hindustan. Therefore you must tell me Sir how to safeguard the interests of the country in seeing that this word Hindustan is not adopted by the U.P. as they did make a venture in the past unofficially to introduce it in the Congress Committee but in which they failed?

43 Pandit Balkrishna Sharma (‘United Provinces, General’) had the last word when he said: ‘If it will satisfy my honourable friend, I may say I hate the word ‘Hindustan’.

44 What was the gist of this exchange about the proper naming of U.P.? Was it that Hindustan is ‘the name of India’? This was known already. No, what was said here with force was that it is not because the Constituent Assembly had decided to name India ‘Bharat’ that Indians were going to discard the name Hindustan.

• 48 I have found this ‘search engine’ a very useful tool to look into the India Constitutional debates: (...)

45 Now anyone who reads carefully the proceedings of the Constitutional debates will come to the conclusion that ‘India’ and in second position ‘Hindustan’ were the two names that came most naturally to the delegates when speaking about their country as long as they were not debating the issue of its name. 48 These two names kept reappearing throughout the debates for the simple reason that the country whose Constitution was being written had to be constantly referred to in one way or another. But when it came to the naming question, Bharat was the first name to appear. Bharatvarsh, Aryavarta and Hind were but marginally mentioned. Hindustan was never considered in this context.

• 49 This proposition came from Rajendra Prasad, the President of the Constituent Assembly, see http://p (...)

46 On 24 January 1950, the Constituent Assembly held its last meeting. The delegates rose to sing solemnly Jana Gana Mana , Tagore’s hymn to Bharat. Then instead of singing Iqbal’s Sāre jahāṃ se acchā Hindustāṃ hamarā , as they had done two-and-a-half years earlier, they chanted Vande Mātaram , ‘Mother I bow to thee’ written by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1882) in honour of the Mother land identified with the Goddess. On that same day, Tagore’s composition was chosen as new India’s ‘national anthem’ and Bankim’s song was given an ‘equal status’ because it had ‘played a historic part in the struggle for Indian freedom’. 49 Meanwhile Iqbal had been (posthumously) declared the national poet of Pakistan.

Naming the nation: a complex and sensitive issue to this day

47 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. The task of describing them is enormous in scope and would require consulting an immense variety of sources. In this final section I merely look at some of the prevailing demands and statements at the time of writing this article. I do so on the basis of information found on internet (blogs, personal pages and also printed materials appearing on the net such as newspapers, all in English).

48 A first type of demand one comes across is to altogether do away with ‘India’ in the Constitution. As one would expect, the most likely place where this occurs is the Hindu nationalist milieu. A case in point is the article published in July 2005 by V. Sundaram, a retired member of the IAS and a freelance journalist known for his Hindutva leanings. According to V. Sundaram, it is because ‘Bharat’ was thought to be too Hindu by the drafters of the Constitution that they introduced ‘India’ as a guarantee to the minorities that they would not be Hinduized. But, he argued, this was a misconception: the word Bharat carries no communalist overtones and therefore it should be the sole official name of the country. However, this Hindutva sympathiser also wants to keep ‘India’, for which he has in mind a usage presently given to ‘South Asia’:

50 ‘India that is Bharath [sic]’ by V. Sundaram, IAS (July 14 2005), see http://www.ivarta.com/columns (...) […] it will not be historically or culturally or geographically correct to call our country by the general name India. Pakistan is also India, Bangladesh is also India, our country India is also India—all these three Indias together can legitimately be called India in the larger geographical sense. […] It is quite possible that in the future countries like Pakistan, Ceylon, Bangladesh, India and Burma may get together and form themselves into an Indian Federation. We can possibly think of the name India as being appropriate for such a Federation if and ever it becomes relevant in the future. 50

51 http://www.indianexpress.com/news/bharat-versus-hindustan/1065278/

49 According to Hindu nationalists there is a basic philosophical difference between India and Bharat. This point was never made so clear as in December 2012, when commenting on the appalling gang rape that had just occurred in Delhi Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS chief, said: ‘Such crimes hardly take place in Bharat, but they frequently occur in India’. 51

50 But Hindu nationalists are not alone in thinking that Bharat is the only legitimate name for the Republic of India. There is at least one Congress MP (Goa) who entertains the idea, if one is to judge by the Bill Shantaram Naik introduced on 9 August 2012 in the upper house of parliament (Rajya Sabha) to amend the first article. He proposed three main changes: 1) that in the Preamble to the Constitution the word ‘Bharat’ be substituted for the word ‘India’; 2) that for the phrase ‘India, that is Bharat’ the single word ‘Bharat’ be substituted; 3) that wherever the word ‘India’, occurs in the Constitution, the word ‘Bharat’ be substituted. Stating his reasons, the Member of Parliament declared:

52 See http://164.100.24.219/BillsTexts/RSBillTexts/asintroduced/cons-peamble-E.pdf . The allusion is t (...) ‘India’ denotes a territorial concept, whereas ‘Bharat’ signifies much more than the mere territories of India. When we praise our country we say, ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ and not ‘India ki Jai’. There are various grounds for changing the name of the country into simply ‘Bharat’. The name also generates the sense of patriotism and electrifies the people of this country. In this regard it is relevant [to recall] a popular song: ‘Jahan dal dal par sone ki chidiyan karatin hai basera wo Bharat Desh hai mera’ [‘where marvellous birds sit on every branch, this is Bharat my country’]. 52

53 See http://www.hindu.com/2004/04/10/stories/2004041006051100.htm , retrieved October 2012.

54 http://www.deccanherald.com/content/101476/banner-300x250.swf , retrieved October 2012.

51 Finally, the argument that ‘India’ should be replaced by ‘Bharat’ is not encountered only within the political frame of ‘communalist versus secular’. It also finds its way in a context of anti-English or rather anti-Western crusades. For example in April 2004, the Samajwadi Party proposed to adopt the sole name ‘Bharat’ in the Constitution ‘as a step to protect the identity of the country’, to ‘ban the import of luxury goods’ and ‘to take other suitable economic and political measures to end the cultural degeneration being encouraged by the Western consumerist lifestyle.’ 53 In October 2012, the Chief Minister of Karnataka, B. S. Yeddyurappa, proposed to amend the Constitution to rename India as ‘Bharat’, and announced that ‘programs will be launched to promote Kannada as a classical language, at a cost of Rs 50 crore.’ 54 Here the ethical dimension of the argument comes with a chauvinistic stance, the implication being that the domestic product is morally superior to anything that is imported.

• 55 ‘We are all moolnivasis (original inhabitants) of this land and that is why we are called Adivasis. (...)

56 See http://www.rediff.com/news/2003/feb/22vhp.htm , retrieved October 2012.

• 57 ‘ How to Wipe Out Islamic Terrorism ’, Daily News and Analysis, http://jahnabibarooah.wordpress.com/ . (...)

52 Equally relevant to this section of our enquiry are arguments in favour of or against the use of the name Hindustan. Some reject ‘Hindustan’ as being too offensive to ‘minorities’ (read non-Hindus). ‘Bharat’, they argue, is to be preferred to ‘Hindustan’ because it is less divisive. Here ‘Hindustan’, even with the Persian suffix, is understood with Savarkar’s meaning of ‘land of the Hindus’—with Hindu receiving a religious signification. In contrast, ‘Bharat’ is associated with the capacity to generate and tolerate internal differences. Words do have a life of their own! Some argue that ‘Hindustan’ should be avoided by Indians because it is being used in Pakistan to refer to India. Some tribals from Gujarat have declared preferring ‘Bharat’ to ‘Hindustan’ because they are not Hindus. 55 On the opposite side, there are those who argue that ‘Hindustan’ should be used precisely to stress the Hindu character of India. Thus in February 2003 the VHP demanded that India be renamed as Hindustan in order to restore ‘the honor of the Hindu rashtra (nation)’. 56 And in July 2011, Dr. Subramanian Swamy, the president of the Janata Party who was then teaching economics at Harvard, made the same demand. He also recommended that a civil code be implemented, the learning of Sanskrit and singing Vande Mātaram be made mandatory, and non-Hindus be allowed to vote only if they acknowledged Hindu ancestry. 57 These demands reflect the legacy of Savarkar, even though they overlook that he spoke of Hindust h an.

53 The politics of naming is part of the social production of the nation. Its processes are shaped by broad socio-political conditions and can be studied from several angles. In this paper I have adopted a cultural history perspective. My purpose has been to look at some of the inherited discourses on ‘ Bhārata ’ both prior to and at the time of its official equation with ‘India’ in the Constitution of 1950. To begin with I attempted to characterize the memory that was taken in by those who in the 19 th century used the name Bhārata to refer to the geographical , political and administrative entity that the colonial power called ‘India’. The evidence presented shows that it was the Puranic memory of a naturally bounded (sea, mountains) and specifically socially organized territory where human beings could fulfill the specific sets of socioreligious duties required to maintain their cultural identity. That Bhārata —a cultural space whose unity was to be found in the social order of dharma —was a pre-national construction and not a national project. Then I argued that at the time of independence, India and Bhārata were equally worthy candidates to baptize the newly-born nation, along with ‘Hindustan’. But the opening article of the Constitution discarded Hindustan and registered the nation under a dual and bilingual identity: ‘India, that is Bharat’. One name was to be used as the equivalent or the translation of the other as exemplified on the cover of the national passport, where the English ‘Republic of India’ corresponds to the Hindi ‘ Bhārata gaṇarājya’ , or, perhaps even more telling, on India postage stamps, where the two words Bhārata and India are collocated. Pursuing the history of the reception of the Constitutional equation of Bharat and India in all its social and political complexities was beyond the scope of my enquiry. I have merely pointed to two contemporary phenomena: the name Hindustan has continued to be widely used in spite of, or may be thanks to, its plurality of meanings and the implication of the equivalence of Bharat with India has remained a subject of debate. It is likely that all these names will continue to be interpreted to fit new circumstances, to give new meanings to India’s national identity, an ongoing, open-ended process.

Bibliography

Ali, S.M. (1966) The Geography of the Purāṇas , New Delhi: People’s Publication House.

Austin, Granville (2004) The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation , Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Barrow, Ian J. (2003) ‘From Hindustan to India: naming Change in Changing Names’, Journal of South Asia Studies , 26(1), pp. 37-49.

Bayly, Christopher A. (1988) Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire , The New Cambridge History of India, vol. II, part. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Beveridge, Annette Susannah (1970) Bābur-Nāma (Memoirs of Bābur), Translated from the original Turki Text of Zahiru’dīn Muḥammad Bābur Pādshāh Ghāzī, New Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corporation, [1922].

Cohn, Bernard S. (1996) Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India , Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Dalmia, Vasudha (1997) The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bhāratendu Hariścandra and Nineteenth-century Banaras , Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Edney, Matthew (1997) Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843 , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Embree, Ainslie T. (1977) ‘Frontiers to Boundaries: From the Traditional to the Modern State’, in Thomas G. Fox (ed.), Realm and Region in Traditional India , Durham, NC Duke University Program in Comparative Studies on Southern India, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Pvt Ltd, pp. 255-80.

Gole, Susan (1989) Indian Maps and Plans from the Earliest Times to the Advent of European Surveys , New Delhi: Manohar.

Goswami, Manu (2004) Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Habib, Irfan (1997) ‘The Formation of India: Notes on the History of an Idea‘, Social Scientist , 25(7/8), pp. 3-10.

Halbfass, Wilhelm (1988) India and Europe: An essay in Understanding , New York: State University of New York Press.

Hay, Stephen (ed.) (1991) Sources of Indian Tradition , vol. 2, Modern India and Pakistan , Delhi: Viking, [1958].

Jaffrelot, Christophe (2004) ‘From Indian territory to Hindu Bhoomi: The Ethnicization of Nation-State Mapping in India, in John Zavos, Andrew Wyatt & Vernon Hewitt (eds.), The Politics of Cultural Mobilization in India , Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 197-215.

Kane, Pandurang Vaman (1974) History of Dharmaśāstra (Ancient and Medieval Religious and Civil Law) , vol. II, part 1, Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, [1941].

Kane, PandurangVaman (1973) History of Dharmaśāstra (Ancient and Medieval Religious and Civil Law) , vol. III, Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, [1946].

Khilnani, Sunil (2003) The Idea of India , London: Penguin Books, [1997].

Killingley, Dermot (1997) ‘Mlecchas, Yavans and Heathens: Interacting Xenologies in Early Nineteenth-Century Calcutta’, in Franco Eli & Preisendanz Karin (eds.), Beyond Orientalism: The Work of Wilhem Halbfass and its Impact on Indian and Cross-Cultural Studies , Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, pp. 123-39.

Lobo, Lancy, (2002) ‘‘We belong to Bharat, not Hindustan’: Adivasis from South Gujarat Assert their Distinct Religio-Cultural Identity and Press for their Rights’, Communalism Combat , Jan-Feb, http://www.sabrang.com/cc/archive/2002/feb02/forum.htm.

Lorenzen, David, N. (1999) ‘Who Invented Hinduism?’, Comparative Studies in Society and History , 41(4), pp. 630-59.

Matringe, Denis (2011) ‘‘L’appel de la cloche’: spiritualité, écriture poétique et vision poétique chez Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938)’, in Catherine Clémentin-Ojha (ed.), Convictions religieuses et engagement en Asie du Sud depuis 1850 , Paris : Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient, pp. 49-82.

Miśra, Rāmabhavana (2000) Nityakarma-pūjāprakāśa , Gorakhpur : Gita Press.

Muir, John (1890) Original Sanskrit Texts on the Origin and History of the People of India, their Religions and Institutions , vol. 1, Mythical and Legendary Accounts of the Origin of Caste with an enquiry into its existence in the Vedic Age , London: Trübner and Co., [1861].

Muir, John (1890) Original Sanskrit Texts on the Origin and History of the People of India, their Religions and Institutions , vol. 2, Inquiry Whether the Hindus Are of Trans-Himalayan Origin, and akin to the Western of the Indo-European Race Mythical and Legendary Accounts of the Origin of Caste with an Enquiry into its Existence in the Vedic Age , London: Trübner and Co., [1860].

Nehru, Jawaharlal (1985) The Discovery of India , Delhi: Oxford University Press, [1946].

Oberoi, H. (1987) “From Punjab to ‘Khalistan’: Territoriality and Metacommentary’, Pacific Affairs, 60(1), pp. 26-41.

Olivelle, Patrick (2004) The Law Code of Manu : A New translation by Patrick Olivelle , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Oppert, Gustav (1893) The Original Inhabitants of Bharatavarṣa or India , Westminster: Archibald Constable & Co., Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz.

Pal, Bipin Chandra (2010) The Soul of India: A Constructive Study of Indian Thought and Ideals , Delhi: Rupa 1 Co., [1911].

Pollock, Sheldon (2006) The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Pre-modern India , Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.

Prasad, Durga (1908) An English Translation of the Satyarth Prakash of Maharshi Swamy Dayanand Saraswati , Lahore: Virjanand Press.

Renou, Louis; Filliozat, Jean (1947-1949) L’Inde classique: Manuel des études indiennes , tome I, Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient Adrien Maisonneuve.

Rocher, Ludo (1986) The Purāṇas: A History of Indian Literature , vol. 2., Fasc. 3, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.

Rocher, Ludo (1988) ‘The Concept of Boundaries in Classical India’, in Peter Gaefkke & David A. Utz (eds.), The Countries of South Asia: Boundaries, Extensions, and Interrelations , Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania, Department of South Asia Regional Studies (Proceedings of The South Asia Seminar, III, 1982-83), pp. 3-10.

Saṃkṣipta hindī śabdasāgara (1981) Kāśī: Nāgarīpracāriṇī sabhā , [1933].

Satyārthaprakaśa , see Prasad.

Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar (1969) Hindutva. Who is a Hindu?, Bombay: Veer Savarkar Prakashan, [5 th ed.].

Sharma, Arvind (2002) ‘On Hindu, Hindustān, Hinduism and Hindutva’, Numen, 49(1), pp. 1-36.

Singh, Pritam (2005) ‘Hindu Bias in India’s ‘Secular’ Constitution: Probing Flaws in the Instruments of Governance’, Third World Quarterly , 26(6), pp. 909-26.

Smith, Donald E. (1963) India as a Secular State , Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Strachey, John, India , London, K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. Ltd, [1894].

Wilson, Horace Hayman (1840) The Vishnu Purana , Book II, translated from the original Sanskrit and illustrated by notes derived chiefly from other Puranas, London: John Murray.

Yule, Henry; Burnell, Arthur Cole (1996) Hobson-Jobson: The Anglo-Indian Dictionary , Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, [1886].

1 This paper is an extended version of a communication delivered on 13 November 2012 in the workshop on ‘The Idea of South Asia’ organized by the Centre d’Etudes de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud, Paris. I am grateful to four anonymous SAMAJ reviewers for their close reading of the manuscript and to Aminah Mohammad-Arif and Blandine Ripert for their editorial assistance. Their suggestions were very helpful. Responsibility for the content of my article is entirely my own.

2 ‘Often, as I wandered from meeting to meeting, I spoke to my audiences of this India of ours, of Hindustan and of Bharata, the old Sanskrit name derived from the mythical founders of the race. […] I spoke of this great country for whose freedom we were struggling, of how each part differed from the other and yet was India, of common problems of the peasants from north to south and east to west, of the Swaraj that could only be for all and every part and not for some. I told them of my journeying from the Khyber Pass in the far north-west to Kanya Kumari or Cape Comorin in the distant south, and how everywhere the peasants put me identical questions, for their troubles were the same—poverty, debt, vested interests, landlords, moneylenders, heavy rents and taxes, police harassment, and all these wrapped up in the structure that the foreign government had imposed upon us—and relief must also come for all’ (Nehru 1946: 38-39).

3 The expression is a hybrid, it associates a Sanskrit word ( jaya -hail) with an Arabic word ( Hind- India). It was coined by Chempakaraman Pillai (1891-1934), a revolutionary from Kerala who went abroad during the First World War to organize an armed resistance against the British; it was later used by Subhas Chandra Bose as the battle cry of his Azad Hind Fauj (literally ‘Army of Independent India’—rendered as ‘Indian National Army’).

4 4 The name given by Yule and Burnell (1996) to their dictionary of Anglo-Indian terms. See also the entries for ‘Deccan’ and ‘Hindustan’.

5 The Persian Hindustān , the Greek Indikê , the latin India , and the Arabic Al-Hind are all derived from the old-Persian hindu (found in an inscription in Persepolis which mentions the 20 th province—satrapy—of Darius’ empire, the country of the Lower-Indus). Hindu is the Persian for Sindhu , the name for the Indus River in ancient Sanskrit literature. The Persian Hindustān got introduced in India and became very commonly used in the Moghul period. Notwithstanding their diverse linguistic forms, all these terms share the same etymology and connect an inhabited land with the Indus River.

7 See Barrow 2011: 47. In 1894 Strachey (1894: 2), then member of the council of the Secretary of state for India, observed: ‘The name Hindustan is never applied in India, as we apply it, to the whole of Indian subcontinent; it signifies the country north of the Narbada River, and especially the northern portion of the basins of the Ganges and Jumna.’

8 Savarkar wrote Hindutva (in English) during his imprisonment in Andaman and Nicobar Islands between 1911 and 1921, but it was only published in 1923. On the semantic history of the word ‘Hindu’, see Lorenzen (1999); Sharma (2002). On the import of the slogan ‘Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan!’ raised to mobilize the Hindus of Northern India at the end of the nineteenth century, see Dalmia (1997: 27  sq .).

9 The First article reads: ‘(1) India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States. (2) The States and the territories thereof shall be the States and their territories for the time being specified in Parts I, II and III of the First Schedule.’ For the text of the Constitution of India, see http://india.gov.in/my-government/constitution-india.

10 The Hindi translation reads: ‘ bhārata arthāt indiyā, rājyoṃ kā saṅgha hogā .’ See http://bharat.gov.in/govt/documents/hindi/part1.pdf , retrieved 27 September 2012.

11 Reports of the Constituent Assembly Debates (Proceedings) (9 December 1946 to 24 January 1950) published online on http://parliamentofindia.nic.in/ls/debates/debates.htm .

12 Manu 2.21-24: ‘The land between the Himalaya and Vindhya ranges to the east of Vinashana and west of Prayāga, is known the ‘Middle Region’. The land between the same mountain ranges extending from the eastern to the western sea is what the wise call Ᾱryāvarta—the region of the Ᾱryas’ (translated from the Sanskrit by Olivelle 2004).

13 Taken together the seven islands constitute the world. They are separated from each other by oceans of different composition (saltwater, syrup, wine, ghee, milk and fresh water), a configuration that suggests that they are mutually inaccessible and reinforces their insularity. Each island is divided in varṣa —a word meaning ‘rain’, hence it is usually understood as a climatic zone. Jambudvīpa (which of the seven islands is the only one inhabited by human beings) is divided in 9 varṣa , and Bhārata lies on its most southern section. See Rocher 1986: 130-131; see also Rocher 1988: 3-10 and Pollock 2006: 193ff.

14 ‘The country that lies north of the ocean, and south of the snowy mountains, is called Bharata, for there dwell the descendants of Bharata. It is nine thousand leagues in extent, and is the land of works, in consequence of which men go to heaven, or obtain emancipation.’( Viṣṇupurāṇa , 2, 3, 1-2, translated from the Sanskrit by Wilson 1840).

17 ‘In the Bharatavarsha it is that the succession of four Yugas, or ages, the Krita, the Treta, the Dvapara, the Kali, takes place; that pious ascetics engage in rigorous penances; that devout men offer sacrifices; and that gifts are distributed; all for the sake of another world. […] Bharata therefore is the best of the divisions of Jambudwipa because it is the land of works: the others are places of enjoyment alone.’( Viṣṇupurāna III, 2, 19-20, 22, translated from the Sanskrit by Wilson 1840). See also Kane (1974: 17), Kane (1973: 137).

19 In a way, contemporary orthodox Brahmans still mentally reside in Bhārata , as their ancestors did: at the beginning of their daily rituals when they express their intention ( saṃkalpa ) and identify themselves, they not only give their name, caste, lineage, etc., the period of the year, the date, but also their location in space, and this they do by using the word Bhāratavarṣa ; see, for example, Miśra (2000:19). See also Pollock (2006: 190).

21 Quoted by Kane (1974: 16).

24 Killingley (1997:126) compares Bhārata to dār al-islām , the territory where according to Islamic juridical theory Islamic law is protected.

25 Edney (1997) explores the relationship between cartographic knowledge and power, showing how map making accompanied empire building and was fundamental to the creation of British India.

28 See Muir [1858] 1890: Chapter 6. He also equates Bhāratavarsha with Hindustan, Muir ([1861] 1890:148).

30 ‘Some pre-requisites of nationhood had […] been achieved by the time that the British conquests began: in 1757, the year of Plassey, India was not only a geographical expression, it was also seen as a cultural entity and a political unit. It is, however, important to realise that, notable as these advances were in the long process of the formation of India, these did not yet make India a nation’ (Habib 1997: 8). Curiously, Hindustan is outside the enquiry of Goswami (2004: 1). Her quotation of Nehru’s text even omits the word: ‘Often, as I wandered from meeting to meeting, I spoke to my audiences of this India of ours, of Bharata, the old Sanskrit name derived from the mythical founders of the race.’ Compare with note 2 above.

31 On the history of the song and on how it was rewritten by Iqbal, see Pritchett ( http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00urdu/taranahs/juxtaposition.html ); on the evolution of the political vision of the poet, see Matringe (2011).

32 Jana-gaṇa-mana adhināyaka jaya he/Bhārata bhāgya vidhātā: Thou art the ruler of the minds of all people/ Dispenser of Bhārata's destiny. See http://parliamentofindia.nic.in/ls/debates/debates.htm on 14 August 1947.

33 On Savarkar, see note 8. Savarkar wrote Hindutva in English but he gave the Devanāgarī spelling of words he deemed important in footnotes. Those words have been rendered with diacritical marks in what follows.

34 In the Saṃkṣipta hindī ṣabdasāgara (‘Abbreviated Dictionary of Hindi’), hindī as an adjective is defined as ‘ hindustān kā [of Hindustan], bhāratiya ’, as a masculine substantive as ‘ hind kā rahanevāla [inhabitant of Hind], bhāratavāsī [dwelling in Bharat]’; in the feminine the substantive means the language: ‘ hindustān kī bhāṣā’ [language of Hindustan].

35 āsindhu sindhu-paryantā yasya bhārata-bhūmikā/ pitṛbhūḥ puṇyabhūścaiva sa vai hindur iti smṛtaḥ : ‘He is known as a Hindu he whose Fatherland as well as Holy land is the land of Bhārata that goes from the Indus ( sindhu ) to the Ocean ( sindhu )’ (Savarkar 1969: 116). Let it be kept in mind that for Savarkar (1969: 80) a Hindu is not to be identified by religion alone. Hindu does not mean a believer of Hinduism, it is a national and cultural designation. Jains, Buddhists and Sikhs too are Hindus. However, not all Indians are Hindu because Hindus ‘are united not only by the bonds of the love they bear to a common ‘fatherland’ but also by the bonds of a common blood. They are not only a Nation ( rāṣṭra ) but also a race ( jāti )’ (Savarkar 1969: 84). Hindus are also bound by their culture ( saṃskṛti ) (Savarkar 1969: 92, 100-101, 115-116).

36 ‘[…] we have left the thread of our enquiry at the point where the growing concept of an Indian nation was found to be better expressed by the word Sindhusthan than by any other existing words. It was precisely to refute any parochial and narrow-minded significance which might, as in the case of Aryavarta be attached to this word that the definition of the word Sindhusthan was rid of any association with a particular institution or party-coloured suggestion.’ (Savarkar 1969: 38-39). Here the accusation of narrow-mindedness is clearly aimed at the Ᾱryasamāja, whose founder, Dayananda Saraswati (1824-1883), had chosen Ᾱryāvarta as the only possible name for the nation in his Satyārthaprakāśa (1875), see Prasad (1908: 250, 291, 545).

37 ‘[…] the epithets Hindu and Hindusthan had been the proud and patriotic designations signifying our land and our nation long before the Mohammedans or Mohammedanized Persians were heard of […].’ (Savarkar 1969: 73).

38 The ‘h’ is dropped by most authors, academics or otherwise, who quote Savarkar, though he himself took great pains to justify the spelling Hindust h an rather than Hindustan.

39 (Savarkar 1923: 31). ‘Sindhu in Sanskrit does not only mean the Indus but also the Sea which girdles the Southern peninsula—so that this one word Sindhu points out almost all frontiers of the land at a single stroke […] the epithet Sindhusthan calls up the image of the whole Motherland: the land that lies between Sindhu and Sindhu—from the Indus to the Seas’ (Savarkar 1923: 32).

41 The Draft Constitution was being finalized when Gandhi was assassinated (31 January 1948). Its first reading was held from 21 February 1948 to 26 Oct. 1948, the second between 15 November 1948 to 17 October 1949 and the third between November 14 1949 and November 26 1949.

42 The following quotations unless otherwise mentioned are from the reports of the debates mentioned in note 11.

43 He had in fact also proposed ‘Hind’ along with ‘Bharat’ but withdrew it when it was pointed to him that he had to choose one name only.

44 ‘I represent the people of the Northern part of India where sacred places like Shri Badrinath, Shri Kedarnath, Shri Bageshwar and Manasarovar are situated. […] I may be permitted to state, Sir, that the people of this area want that the name of our country should be 'Bharat Varsha' and nothing else.’

45 On the presence of ‘Hindu traditionalists’ (whom he distinguishes from ‘Hindu nationalists’) in the Congress at the time of independence, see Jaffrelot (1996: 81-84); on the inner diversity or lack of coherence of the Congress, see Khilnani (2003: 26, 28, 33-34).

46 See Singh (2005: 911-912). As the debates on the name were going on, an unnamed female renouncer undertook to fast till her death unless India be renamed Bharat and Hindi adopted as a national language. Upon Nehru visiting her, she broke her fast on 12 August claiming that Nehru and other Congress leaders had assured her that Hindi would be adopted. See Austin (2004: 293).

47 Nehru was not adverse to using it either: ‘Sometimes as I reached a gathering, a great roar of welcome would greet me Bharat Mata ki Jai [sic]—Victory to Mother India! I would ask them unexpectedly what they meant by that cry, who was this Bharat Mata, Mother India, whose victory they wanted? […] And so question and answer went on, till they would ask me impatiently to tell them about it. I would endeavour to do so and explain that India was all this that they had thought, but it was much more. The mountains and the rivers of India, and the forest and the broad fields, which gave us food, were all dear to us, but what counted ultimately were the people of India, people like them and me, who were spread out all over this vast land. Bharat Mata, Mother India, was essentially these millions of people, and victory to her meant victory to these people. You are parts of Bharat Mata, I told them, you are in a manner yourself Bharat Mata, and as this idea slowly soaked into their brains, their eyes would light up as if they had made a great discovery’ (Nehru 1946: 39).

48 I have found this ‘search engine’ a very useful tool to look into the India Constitutional debates: http://viveks.info/search-engine-for-constituent-assembly-debates-in-india/ . It should perhaps be observed here that outside Article One, ‘India’ is the only name for the country found in the Indian Constitution.

49 This proposition came from Rajendra Prasad, the President of the Constituent Assembly, see http://parliamentofindia.nic.in/ls/debates/debates.htm on 24 January 1950.

50 ‘India that is Bharath [sic]’ by V. Sundaram, IAS (July 14 2005), see http://www.ivarta.com/columns/OL_050714.htm , retrieved in September 2012.

52 See http://164.100.24.219/BillsTexts/RSBillTexts/asintroduced/cons-peamble-E.pdf . The allusion is to a popular patriotic song written by Rajinder Krishan and sang by Rafi in the film Sikandar e Azam , 1965.

55 ‘We are all moolnivasis (original inhabitants) of this land and that is why we are called Adivasis. Indian civilisation is the oldest in the world but ours is older still. We belong to Bharat, not Hindustan. We should call ourselves moolnivasis, Adivasis [First inhabitants], Bharatvasis [Inhabitants of Bharat]. […] We are fragmented today by the different religious sects that seek our membership. We have our own religion. We are fragmented by different political parties. We need to become one. Religion is a private matter. We need to come together as Adivasis and not as Hindu or Christian, or Muslim tribals.’ See Lobo (2002).

57 ‘ How to Wipe Out Islamic Terrorism ’, Daily News and Analysis, http://jahnabibarooah.wordpress.com/ . As a consequence he was expelled from Harvard Summer School, http://www.forbes.com/sites/harveysilverglate/2012/01/17/censorship-at-harvard-comes-as-no-surprise/ , retrieved October 2012. On Subramanian Swamy, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subramanian_Swamy ).

Electronic reference

Catherine Clémentin-Ojha , “ ‘India, that is Bharat…’: One Country, Two Names ” ,  South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal [Online], 10 | 2014, Online since 25 December 2014 , connection on 08 September 2024 . URL : http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/3717; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.3717

About the author

Catherine clémentin-ojha.

Professor in anthropology, EHESS, Paris

The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 . All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

• Book Reviews

Full text issues

• 31 | 2023 Art & Activism in South Asia
• 30 | 2023 The Digitalization of Urban Governance in India
• 29 | 2022 South Asia in Covid Times
• 28 | 2022 Subalternity, Marginality, Agency in Contemporary India
• 27 | 2021 Political Mobilizations of South Asians in Diaspora: Intertwining Homeland Politics and Host-Society Politics
• 26 | 2021 Engaging the Urban from the Periphery
• 24/25 | 2020 The Hindutva Turn: Authoritarianism and Resistance in India
• 23 | 2020 Unique Identification in India: Aadhaar, Biometrics and Technology-Mediated Identities
• 22 | 2019 Student Politics in South Asia
• 21 | 2019 Representations of the “Rural” in India from the Colonial to the Post-Colonial
• 20 | 2019 Sedition, Sexuality, Gender, and Gender Identity in South Asia
• 19 | 2018 Caste-Gender Intersections in Contemporary India
• 18 | 2018 Wayside Shrines: Everyday Religion in Urban India
• 17 | 2018 Through the Lens of the Law: Court Cases and Social Issues in India
• 16 | 2017 Changing Family Realities in South Asia?
• 15 | 2017 Sociology of India’s Economic Elites
• 14 | 2016 Environment Politics in Urban India: Citizenship, Knowledges and Urban Political Ecologies
• 13 | 2016 Land, Development and Security in South Asia
• 12 | 2015 On Names in South Asia: Iteration, (Im)propriety and Dissimulation
• 11 | 2015 Contemporary Lucknow: Life with ‘Too Much History’
• 10 | 2014 Ideas of South Asia
• 9 | 2014 Imagining Bangladesh: Contested Narratives
• 8 | 2013 Delhi's Margins
• 7 | 2013 The Ethics of Self-Making in Postcolonial India
• 6 | 2012 Revisiting Space and Place: South Asian Migrations in Perspective
• 5 | 2011 Rethinking Urban Democracy in South Asia
• 4 | 2010 Modern Achievers: Role Models in South Asia
• 3 | 2009 Contests in Context: Indian Elections 2009
• 2 | 2008 ‘Outraged Communities’
• 1 | 2007 Migration and Constructions of the Other

Other Contributions

• Free-Standing Articles
• What is SAMAJ?
• Editorial Board
• Advisory Board
• Partnership with EASAS
• Information for authors
• Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement
• Subscribe to our newsletter

Informations

• Publishing policies

Newsletters

• OpenEdition Newsletter

In collaboration with

• Journal supported by the Institut des sciences humaines et sociales (InSHS) of the CNRS, 2023-2024

Electronic ISSN 1960-6060

Read detailed presentation  

Site map  – Syndication

Privacy Policy  – About Cookies  – Report a problem

OpenEdition member  – Published with Lodel  – Administration only

You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search

• Personal Finance
• Today's Paper
• Partner Content
• Web Stories
• Entertainment
• Social Viral

Necessary for every Indian to say Jai Bharat, Jai Hind: Union Minister Mandavia

Disclaimer: No Business Standard Journalist was involved in creation of this content

Gujarat govt directs students to answer roll call with 'Jai Hind' or 'Jai Bharat'

Gujarat students to answer roll call by saying 'Jai Hind' or 'Jai Bharat'

Guj govt in dock over 'Jai Hind' roll call; Opp asks it improve edu quality

School children in Gujarat to say 'Jai Hind' to mark attendance

Mamata pays tribute to INA soldierS

Don't miss the most important news and views of the day. Get them on our Telegram channel

First Published: Jan 01 2019 | 6:55 PM IST

Explore News

• Suzlon Energy Share Price Adani Enterprises Share Price Adani Power Share Price IRFC Share Price Tata Motors Share Price Tata Steel Share Price Yes Bank Share Price Infosys Share Price SBI Share Price Reliance shares
• Latest News Company News Market News India News Politics News Cricket News Personal Finance Technology News World News Industry News Education News Opinion Shows Economy News Lifestyle News Health News
• Today's Paper About Us T&C Privacy Policy Cookie Policy Disclaimer Investor Communication GST registration number List Compliance Contact Us Advertise with Us Sitemap Subscribe Careers BS Apps
• ICC T20 World Cup 2024 Business Standard at 50 Paralympics 2024 Jammu Kashmir Elections 2024 Haryana Elections 2024 Happy Teacher's Day wishes

• Entertainment
• Life & Style

To enjoy additional benefits

CONNECT WITH US

India, Bharat and a host of implications Premium

The tradition of using india in english and bharat in hindi is wise and constitutionally correct.

Updated - September 07, 2023 07:46 am IST

Published - September 07, 2023 12:16 am IST

‘The country’s international personality was and continues to be denoted by the word India’ | Photo Credit: THE HINDU

There are historical, ideological, constitutional and international implications associated with the words Bharat and India. A political dimension has been added to these names/words arising out of some Opposition parties coming together under the banner and acronym INDIA (for the ‘Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance’) . For these parties in the Opposition, the unprecedented use of ‘President of Bharat’ instead of ‘President of India’ (as seen in an invitation card by the President to the heads of States and governments and Chief Ministers for an official banquet on the occasion of the G-20 summit) is on account of the Narendra Modi government’s concern that ‘INDIA’ may become politically potent.

Editorial | India that is Bharat: On a name game

Keeping politics aside it would be useful to examine some of the other aspects, mentioned in the first sentence, to arrive at a degree of clarity on Bharat and India.

From the pages of history

A brief look at the controversy raised by the Muslim League over the name India in 1947 would be in order. The transfer of power from the British to Indian hands in 1947 was through the British Parliament’s Indian Independence Act of 1947. It created two dominions — India and Pakistan — and released the Princely States from British paramountcy, thereby, technically making them independent and sovereign. At the same time, the British advised the Princely states to join one of the two dominions. Most did so before August 15, 1947. Thus, two dominions came into being in what was British India and the Princely states in the sub-continent.

Pakistani leaders favoured that India should be named either Hindustan or Bharat. They argued that two ‘successor’ states had emerged from the dissolution of the British Indian empire: Pakistan and Hindustan or Bharat. India’s position was that it was the successor state to British India, in terms of international law, and that Pakistan had seceded from India. Hence, while India retained its international personality, including its membership of the United Nations (UN), Pakistan, as a new state created through secession, would have to take steps to acquire an international personality. The matter was finally decided in India’s favour, and Pakistan was compelled to take steps to establish its international status, including applying for a membership of the UN, which, incidentally, Afghanistan opposed.

India retained the name ‘India’ in all international and multilateral fora. Thus, the country’s international personality was and continues to be denoted by the word India. Generally, whenever the English language is used in international, multilateral or bilateral settings, the word India is used. The latest example is the Joint Statement issued on August 25 on Prime Minister Modi’s visit to Greece. It is available on the Ministry of External Affairs website and it is entitled ‘India-Greece Joint Statement’. The last sentence of this document says “Prime Minister Narendra Modi extended an invitation to Prime Minister Mitsotakis to visit India”. In letters of credence in English given by the President of India to Ambassadors-designate, under the lion’s emblem the words (in Hindi), Rashtrapati, Bharat Gantantra are written and under them the words President, Republic of India written in English. Thus, in Hindi, Bharat is used while in English it is India.

Under the 58th Amendment

For an authoritative background of the English and Hindi versions, it is best to turn to the 58th Amendment of the Constitution done in 1987. Its ‘Statement of Objects and Reasons’ mentions that “The Constitution of India was adopted by the Constituent Assembly in English. A Hindi translation of the Constitution, signed by the members of the Constituent Assembly, was also published in 1950 under the authority of the President of the Constituent Assembly in accordance with a resolution adopted by that Assembly”.

The 58th Amendment empowered the President to have published under his authority the authoritative text ‘in the Hindi language’ of the Constitution which could be used in the legal process too. Thus, the Hindi text of the Constitution published by the government following the amendment is ‘authoritative’.

The English language version of the Constitution is entitled “Constitution of India’ Its Article 1(1) is “India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States”. The primacy in this formulation is given to the word India. The Hindi version is titled ‘Bharat ka Samvidhan’. Article 1(1) in the Hindi version reads “Bharat artharth India, rajyon ka sangh hoga”. The word “artharth” means “that is”. Clearly, in the Hindi version, primacy is given to the word Bharat. The logic of the formulations has led to the practice of using the word India in the English language and Bharat in Hindi. That practice has prevailed in internal documents as well as international documents which are generally in English. Thus, the Gazette published in English is called the ‘Gazette of India’, and in Hindi it is ‘Bharat ka Rajpatra’.

It is true that the words India and its variants such as Hind in Arabic are of foreign origin. It is generally believed that these were used by foreigners to denote the land south and east of the Indus or Sindhu river. During Afghan and Mughal rule, the northern areas of the Indian subcontinent were largely referred to as Hindustan, and later the Europeans, especially the British, roughly referred to not only the northern region but also to all the subcontinent as India. However, for them, it was a geographical expression. The rise of a consciousness that all the people living in the Indian subcontinent constituted a single nation was a product of the Indian Renaissance; one of its streams sought ancient roots for Indian nationalism. That gave rise to the idea, especially among sections particularly devoted to the revival of India’s ancient civilisational past, that it was unacceptable that the country and nation should carry a name given by foreigners. For them the preferred word was Bharat with its variations in different languages. For others such as Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, a syncretic word, perhaps acceptable to most people, including those believing in different faiths, was more useful. That word was Hind. It is used even today and the emotive expression “Jai Hind” is used by public personalities and the highest office holders. In her speech on Independence Day this year, the President of India, Droupadi Murmu, concluded by saying “Jai Hind, Jai Bharat”.

The risk of alienation

It is now clear that the Sangh Parivar and the Narendra Modi government wish to use the word, Bharat. Their preference for Bharat instead of the word India is clear. The use of the formulation ‘President of Bharat’ in the G-20 invitation is a giveaway. They may also begin to use ‘Bharat’ in the English language in the government’s internal documents. The problem is that they cannot do so internationally unless they officially change the country’s name to Bharat and drop India. By doing so, they may alienate parts of the country which prefer India to Bharat.

In any event, the tradition of using India in English and Bharat in Hindi is wise and constitutionally correct. Should its change be a priority now?

Vivek Katju is a retired Indian Foreign Service officer

Related Topics

politics / G20 / history / laws / India / Pakistan / United Kingdom / United Nations / Prime Minister Narendra Modi / constitution / English / Hindi / international relations

Top News Today

• Access 10 free stories every month
• Save stories to read later
• Access to comment on every story
• Sign-up/manage your newsletter subscriptions with a single click
• Get notified by email for early access to discounts & offers on our products

Terms & conditions   |   Institutional Subscriber

Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.

We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of The Hindu and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.

• My Result Plus
• Download App
• आज का काव्य
• आज का विचार
• सोशल मीडिया
• मेरे अल्फ़ाज़
• किताब समीक्षा

आप अपनी कविता सिर्फ अमर उजाला एप के माध्यम से ही भेज सकते हैं

बेहतर अनुभव के लिए एप का उपयोग करें

लोकप्रिय विषय

• विश्व काव्य
• शायरी संग्रह
• प्रेरणादायक

जय हिंद जय भारत

Recommended

‘क्या बिगाड़ के डर से न्याय की बात नहीं करोगे’ – प्रेमचंद का यह वाक्य आज बहुत प्रासंगिक

मार्टिन कार्टर की कविता 'तुम्हारे हाथों को देखते हुए'

Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena Poetry: आज रात वर्षा होगी, कहाँ हो तुम?

Bob Dylan Poetry: छिछला, निरुद्देश्य और लक्ष्यहीन जीवन हमें स्वीकार नहीं

शकील जैसे शायर की दास्तान उनकी पैदाईश से शुरू तो होती है लेकिन मौत पर खत्म नहीं होती...

जब अज्ञेय ने शिवमंगल सिंह से कहा "नाम 'सुमन' रख लेने से क्या होता है अगर सवेरे खिल भी न सकें"

Amar Ujala Kavya brings you a collection of news related to poetry and literary world with hindi poems, hindi shayari , urdu poetry. Read shayari and one line shayari in hindi of different flavors like love shayari, sad shayari, romantic shayari, life shayari and masterpieces of great poets

• Advertise with us
• Cookies Policy
• Terms and Conditions
• Products and Services

अमर उजाला एप इंस्टॉल कर रजिस्टर करें और 100 कॉइन्स पाएं

केवल नए रजिस्ट्रेशन पर, अब मिलेगी लेटेस्ट, ट्रेंडिंग और ब्रेकिंग न्यूज आपके व्हाट्सएप पर.

सभी नौकरियों के बारे में जानने के लिए अभी डाउनलोड करें अमर उजाला ऐप

• Classroom Programme
• Interview Guidance
• Online Programme
• Drishti Store
• My Bookmarks
• My Progress
• Change Password
• From The Editor's Desk
• How To Use The New Website
• Help Centre

Achievers Corner

• Topper's Interview
• About Civil Services
• UPSC Prelims Syllabus
• GS Prelims Strategy
• Prelims Analysis
• GS Paper-I (Year Wise)
• GS Paper-I (Subject Wise)
• CSAT Strategy
• Previous Years Papers
• Practice Quiz
• Weekly Revision MCQs
• 60 Steps To Prelims
• Prelims Refresher Programme 2020

Mains & Interview

• Mains GS Syllabus
• Mains GS Strategy
• Mains Answer Writing Practice
• Essay Strategy
• Fodder For Essay
• Model Essays
• Drishti Essay Competition
• Ethics Strategy
• Ethics Case Studies
• Ethics Discussion
• Ethics Previous Years Q&As
• Papers By Years
• Papers By Subject
• Be MAINS Ready
• Awake Mains Examination 2020
• Interview Strategy
• Interview Guidance Programme

Current Affairs

• Daily News & Editorial
• Daily CA MCQs
• Sansad TV Discussions
• Monthly CA Consolidation
• Monthly Editorial Consolidation
• Monthly MCQ Consolidation

Drishti Specials

• To The Point
• Important Institutions
• Learning Through Maps
• PRS Capsule
• Summary Of Reports
• Gist Of Economic Survey

Study Material

• NCERT Books
• NIOS Study Material
• IGNOU Study Material
• Yojana & Kurukshetra
• Chhatisgarh
• Uttar Pradesh
• Madhya Pradesh

Test Series

• UPSC Prelims Test Series
• UPSC Mains Test Series
• UPPCS Prelims Test Series
• UPPCS Mains Test Series
• BPSC Prelims Test Series
• RAS/RTS Prelims Test Series
• Daily Editorial Analysis
• YouTube PDF Downloads
• Strategy By Toppers
• Ethics - Definition & Concepts
• Mastering Mains Answer Writing
• Places in News
• UPSC Mock Interview
• PCS Mock Interview
• Interview Insights
• Prelims 2019
• Product Promos
• Daily Updates

Indian Polity

Make Your Note

India, that is Bharat: The Ongoing Debate

• 06 Sep 2023
• GS Paper - 2
• Indian Constitution

For Prelims: Article 1 , Origin of the Name Bharat and India, Vishnu Purana, Constituent Assembly.

For Mains : Historical Perspectives on the Names "India" and "Bharat"

Why in News?

Recently, invitations for the upcoming G-20 Summit in New Delhi have introduced a noteworthy alteration. Instead of the conventional "President of India," the invitations now bear the term "President of Bharat", renewing a broader conversation regarding the nation's nomenclature and its historical connotations.

What are the Historical Perspectives on the Names "India" and "Bharat"?

• Article 1 of the Indian Constitution already uses both "India" and "Bharat" interchangeably, stating, "India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States."
• Additionally, some government institutions, such as the Indian Railways, already have Hindi variants that include "Bharatiya."
• The term "Bharat" has deep historical and cultural roots. It can be traced back to Puranic literature and the epic Mahabharata.
• It signifies a religious and socio-cultural entity more than a mere political or geographical one.
• Bharata is also the name of a legendary ancient king , considered the ancestor of the Rig Vedic tribes of Bharatas, symbolizing the progenitor of all subcontinent's people.
• The ancient Greeks called the people living beyond the Indus as Indoi, which means “the people of Indus” .
• Later, the Persians and the Arabs also used the term Hind or Hindustan to refer to the land of Indus.
• The Europeans adopted the name India from these sources , and it became the official name of the country after the British colonial rule.
• Seth Govind Das from Jabalpur advocated for placing "Bharat" above "India," emphasizing that the latter was merely a translation of the former in English.
• Hari Vishnu Kamath cited the example of the Irish Constitution, which changed the name of the country upon achieving independence, as a precedent for using "Bharat."
• Hargovind Pant argued that the people wanted " Bharatvarsha " and rejected the term "India" imposed by foreign rulers.
• The Supreme Court has twice rejected pleas to rename 'India' to 'Bharat', once in 2016 and then in 2020, reaffirming that "Bharat" and "India" both find mention in the Constitution.

What is the Historical Significance of the Name “Hindustan”?

• The term "Hindustan" has historical significance and was popular in Punjab. Sikh founder Guru Nanak Dev mentioned "Hindustan" in Gurbani, and Guru Teg Bahadur is known as the protector of "Hind" and religion.
• Shah Muhammad documented conflicts between the British and Sikhs as a war between "Hind" and Punjab.
• The Ghadar Party and freedom struggle activists used "Hindustan" in their movements, making it relevant in Punjab's history.

Legal Insight: Legal Perspectives of Renaming India to Bharat

( https://www.drishtijudiciary.com/ )

• Firstpost Defence Summit
• Entertainment
• Web Stories
• Health Supplement
• First Sports
• Fast and Factual
• Between The Lines
• Firstpost America

Bharat Mata Ki Jai: How Jawaharlal Nehru's Discovery of India offers a peek into the soul of India

Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India offers a much-needed insight into the India that leaders of India’s Struggle for Freedom had in mind especially when the current leaders are aggressively professing their great love and reverence for Bharat Mata while proudly displaying ignorance of Indian history and culture

I read Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India for the first time, when I had just joined college. Since then, I must have re-read it at least half a dozen times, the latest being in October when I was preparing for recording a conversation with Shyam Benegal for Kitab — my weekly show on Rajya Sabha TV. This time, the reading acquired added poignancy given the current environment characterised by vulgar, in fact hostile rejection of intellectual vocation; and political scene populated by “leaders” who proudly display their ignorance of Indian history and culture while aggressively professing great love and reverence for “ Bharat Mata ”. Naturally, some of this environment reflected in the recording also, when nonchalantly admitting their ignorance of the text, some of the audience condemned it nonetheless. After all, “why should anybody bother to read such a thick and obviously dated book?”

The question was blunt enough and the answer can be similarly straight: “Going through this book will help you in knowing that leaders of our freedom movement were struggling not merely for political freedom, but for regaining the soul of India and for creating a just and compassionate society.”

The idea of India — a nation self-confident enough to look at itself critically, not suffering from self-pity of present or delusions of the past, committed to a just and inclusive growth-pattern, conscious of its historical role — was not Nehru’s alone. It was shared by all forward looking leaders and thinkers of his generation — their disagreements (sometimes quite acrimonious) notwithstanding. In fact, People like BR Ambedkar and Bhagat Singh were critical of the Congress party, precisely because they thought that it was not doing enough to realise the shared vision of an egalitarian and just society.

The slogan desiring the ‘ Jai’ or victory of Bharat Mata was popularised during the freedom struggle. Nehru recalls that he used to ask his audiences the “meaning of the expression Bharat Mata ”, and proceeds to decode the slogan. He writes, “…what counted ultimately were the people of India, people like them and me. who were spread all over this vast land. Bharat Mata — Mother India was essentially these millions of people, and victory to her meant victory to these people” (page 53).

There can be no “people” without shared memories, dreams and aspirations. And, “A nation like an individual has many personalities, many approaches to life. If there is sufficiently strong bond between these different personalities, it is well; otherwise those personalities split up and lead to disintegration and trouble” (page 562). To Nehru, “discovery” of India meant discovering the matrix of “strong bond” holding the personalty of India together and to identify the potential threats as well. It was a search of destiny, as given its human, material and cultural resources “India can only be in the frontline in the comity of nations; it is her destiny”.

Written in Ahmednagar Fort prison during April-September 1944, the “discovery” begins with reflections on national and international political situation of the time. In these, reflections are interwoven with the memories of his wife Kamla Nehru who after a prolonged illness, passed away in February, 1936. Nehru’s reflections on this admittedly less than perfect relationship reach to the fundamental “problem of human relationship” which is “often ignored in our fierce arguments about politics and economics”, he reminds his reader, “it was not so ignored in the old and wise civilisations of India and China” (page 34).

This book is an attempt to trace the evolution, nature and problems of the “wise civilisation of India”. Starting from reflections on contemporary political scene, the book turns into a poignant re-telling of the evolution of Indian society, its culture and economy. Nehru notes the remarkable continuity of Indian culture and its material context from Indus Valley Civilisation to his own time, and also the “break” in its natural growth caused by the British colonialism. Delving into the heritage of literature, art, science and philosophy, he underlines the crucial fact that one can not imagine Indian civilisation without diversity and dialogue amongst various viewpoints. He underlines the importance of scientific temper and method for understanding the mysteries of nature, but is clear about its limitations as well — science can hardly tell us anything about the purpose of life, hence there must be moral basis and ethical dimension to the life of individual, community and nation. To him, one of Gandhi_ji_’s greatest contributions was his “stress on right means” (page 16), ie, the ethical idea of the purpose of life.

Quite contrary to popular ignorance, Nehru did not dismiss religion summarily. He was, of course motivated by the desire to see a “culture less based on religion, and more on morality and ethics” (page 577). As a matter of fact, by making ethics more important than dogma and belief as a principle of social organisation, Nehru is speaking here in a quintessentially Indian way. He did not fancy himself as a crusader against religion, because, “…religion had supplied some deeply felt inner human needs of human nature” (page 13). As for himself, he felt attracted “towards the advaita philosophy of Vedanta” and felt at home “in the old Indian or Greek pagan and pantheistic atmosphere, but minus the conception of God or Gods that was attached to it” (page 16).

In Nehru’s own words, this book is an attempt to “travel into the past and peep into the future”. He borrows TS Elliot’s words to describe his venture as an attempt to “balance myself on that point of intersection of the timeless and time” (page 627). This book, so directly concerned with the events of that time has a timeless quality, because such a balance on the “point of intersection of the timeless and time” is always needed in the lives of individuals and nations. More so, these days, when we seem to be living under the illusions regarding past and confusions regarding future, coupled with a disastrous lack of a higher ethical vision.

(All page numbers are Discovery of India, Penguin edition, New Delhi, 2010)

Find us on YouTube

Related Stories

Book Review | Jaishankar's 'Why Bharat Matters' reveals diplomatic tapestry of Indian epics

Opinion | Narendra Modi, Naya Bharat and a war of narratives

Decoding PM Modi’s Rajya Sabha address: Shock and awe for Congress; vision for ‘Vikshit Bharat’, aspirational India

'Nehru thought Indians are lazy and less intelligent': PM Modi in Lok Sabha

• ₹ 10 Lakh,1" data-value="Loan ₹ 10 Lakh">Loan ₹ 10 Lakh
• Games & Puzzles

• Entertainment
• Latest News
• Kolkata Case Live Updates
• NEET PG 2024 Counselling Live
• UGC NET Answer Key 2024 Live
• Web Stories
• Mumbai News
• Bengaluru News
• Daily Digest

Essay: Of Bharat, India and Hindustan

The idea of decolonization forces us to confront the uneasy coexistence of three different ideas of india that have jostled for supremacy since the birth of the country in 1947.

There have, in recent years, been a number of books written by people with clear Hindu nationalist positions that present their critiques of liberal India. The idea of India as Bharat, and of decolonization, are common themes that often run through them. In 2020, for example, A New Idea of India: Individual Rights in a Civilizational State by Harsh Madhusudan and Rajeev Mantri, was published. It began with a section titled India, that is Bharat , and ended with one on Decolonizing the Indian State . Another more recent book, titled India, that is Bharat by J Sai Deepak, is described by its publishers, Bloomsbury, as an exploration of European “colonial consciousness” on “Bharat as the successor state to the Indic civilization and the origins of the Indian constitution”. Here, too, the ideal is decolonization for the establishment of a civilisational state of Bharat, or in other words, a Hindu Rashtra.

The desire on the part of the Bharatiya Janata Party and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh to establish a Hindu Rashtra is not something they have ever been shy of expressing. On the contrary, they have always championed the “decolonization” efforts that would restore a pristine Hindu India. Recent events such as the renaming of Rajpath to Kartavya Path are a clear part of such “declolonization”. Media reports after the renaming quoted unnamed government sources saying this was in line with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s panch pran or five resolutions announced from the ramparts of Red Fort in his latest Independence Day speech, of which the second resolution was the “removal of any trace of colonial mindset”. Other resolutions follow in similar vein; the third resolution was “taking pride in our roots”, and the last and fifth resolution was “sense of duty among citizens”.

The idea of decolonization itself is an interesting one, with a vast literature especially from Latin America. In the case of India, it forces us to confront the uneasy coexistence of three different ideas of India that have jostled for supremacy since the birth of the country in 1947: the ideas of the country as Bharat, Hindustan and India. The oldest of these, the idea of Bharat is generally considered the ancient Sanskrit name for the country. Hindustan is the name derived from Persian by which the country was known during the days of the Mughal Empire. India, a name of Greek origins, is the name that it emerged with during and after British rule.

When the Constitution of India was being framed, the issue of choosing one of these names came up for discussion. The drafting committee of the Constitution led by Dr BR Ambedkar presented a draft that evaded the choice by using the line “India, that is Bharat” – thus suggesting that these were one and the same. On 18th September 1949, in the Constituent Assembly, a member, Hari Vishnu Kamath, took issue with this. Kamath proposed an amendment: instead of saying “Bharat, that is India”, he wanted the line to be “Bharat or, in the English language, India”. India, he said, was the name of the country only in the English language.

At the time, Ambedkar’s view prevailed, and so our Constitution begins with the words “India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States”.

It was a fix that papered over the differences in the origins, imaginations and values of Bharat, Hindustan and India.

The struggle for supremacy between two of these ideas – Bharat and India – has arguably been the prime motor of Indian politics for at least the past 32 years, since September 1990, when BJP leader Lal Krishna Advani took off on a rath yatra for the cause of building a Ram temple at the site of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. The political rise to power of the Hindu Right in the subsequent years is, in one sense, a marker of the growing ascendancy of Bharat over India. The ongoing construction of the temple at Ayodhya, which is scheduled for inauguration in 2024, will mark its final triumph. Other, lesser projects such as the one of remaking the Central Vista in New Delhi are parts of the same campaign to “remove any trace of colonial mindset” from the country. Since Hindu nationalism views the entire thousand-year period of Muslim and British rule as colonial rule, the intent is obviously to erase all traces of the “mindsets” of Hindustan and India.

The trouble is that the ideas of modern nation-states and nationalism themselves are products of colonial rule. Ancient Bharat was a shifting territory linked by elements of a shared “high culture” whose social basis was the caste system. Catherine Clementin Ojha, a professor of Indian religious anthropology, described it in a paper as “a spatially delimited social order, but not to a politically organized entity”. Ojha quoted Pandit Pandurang V Kane, author of History of Dharmasastra , to buttress her point.

The existence of numerous warring kingdoms in ancient Bharat is well known. The most important aspect of modern nation-states, namely political unity, was therefore missing.

The idea of India as a nation-state first appears only during colonial rule – and rather late in the day at that. None other than the original Hindu nationalist, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, lamented this fact in an 1879 essay titled The Shame of Bharat which has recently reappeared in a new book, To Raise a Fallen People . In the essay, Chatterjee writes, “Only twice, in recorded history, did Hindus rise as a nation”. The two instances he cites are of the Marathas under Chhatrapati Shivaji and the Sikhs under Maharaja Ranjit Singh – the latter being an inclusion that stretches the definition of Hindu in familiar ways. “The British are our beneficiaries”, he says. “Many of the things they are teaching us are priceless. I have referred in this essay to two priceless jewels we have acquired in this manner: a love for freedom and the establishment of a nation. The Hindus did not know what these meant”.

India as it exists now is a colonial creation. So are Pakistan and Bangladesh. They were constructed during a period of roughly 150 years of imperial conquest over hundreds of kings and chieftains who ruled over territories from Arunachal Pradesh and Burma in the east to Afghanistan in the west, inhabited by vastly diverse peoples who shared no common language, culture, religion or history. The separate agreements concluded with each of these kings and chiefs is contained in volume after volume of a book called A Collection of Treaties, Engagements and Sanads Relating to India and Neighbouring Countries compiled by an officer of the Indian Civil Service, Charles U. Aitchison. Together, these treaties chronicle the long process of political integration by which the British Indian Empire was built.

India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are the three fragments into which that empire broke between 1947 and 1971. The process of tighter internal integration, however, continued in each of the three successor states to the British Indian Empire after independence. In India, under the leadership of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the 562-odd princely states were integrated into the country after Independence. A similar process also occurred in Pakistan, where princely states all over the country, from Kalat in Balochistan to Bahawalpur in Punjab to Chitral and Dir on the border with Afghanistan were integrated into the modern state.

The unification of the territory of British India was followed by a spread of ideas of governance and administration that we did not previously have. India’s maharajas and nawabs were renowned globally for their fabulous wealth – and the extreme poverty of their subjects. We had rulers topping the list of “richest in the world” while lakhs of their subjects died of starvation in famines. Our kings were despots. Despite two pioneering efforts by an enlightened Dewan in the states of Travancore and Baroda, there was not a single constitutional monarch to be found among them until the dying days of the British Raj when some of them scrambled to pivot to constitutional monarchy in a desperate effort to avoid merger with India.

The practice of ordinary people of all castes, classes and genders having constitutional rights was a foreign one that came in through British colonialism and a Western education; in our system, subjects just had kartavyas towards kings whom they were expected to flatter by sycophancy without limit and by service without question. To question or doubt are still considered insults in our subcontinental cultures. Teachers tend to be offended if students question them, parents are offended if children question them, bosses are offended if subordinates question them, and of course, rulers are offended if subjects question them.

Asking questions is of critical importance to both science and democracy but we did not have the Enlightenment that transformed Europe and eventually the world. Reason and science, which flourished in ancient Bharat, had departed our shores centuries before the Mughals and British arrived. Our way had become the way of faith, where questioning any belief is blasphemy. Superstitions and rituals ruled daily life.

Notions of egalitarianism are entirely foreign to us. Arguably the most essential aspect of the “spatially delimited social order” of ancient Bharat was observance of the caste system. Even as late as the 19th Century, the seas were called kala pani (black waters) and crossing them was anathema to conservative Hindus who believed it caused one to lose caste, because the caste taboos could not be properly observed outside Bharat. The idea that people of different castes, to say nothing of religions, can “inter-dine” was inconceivable.

Nor was caste the only system of exploitation and inequity. Several of the societies in India, including some tribal societies of Northeast India, even into the colonial period, were slaving societies. We have forgotten that slavery was practised here until it was abolished by the Indian Slavery Act of 1843, a law passed by the East India Company Raj. We do remember, though, that among genders, a strict patriarchy was the norm. The revolutionary idea of women getting educated and even going to work outside the home came to us through the “wayward” West.

The ideas of equality and liberty that shaped modern India came here through colonialism and Western education. They came to be guaranteed as fundamental rights by our constitution. No wonder Dalit icon Babasaheb Ambedkar, an alumnus of the London School of Economics and Columbia University, is seen in all his statues wearing a suit and holding the Constitution of modern India.

The historical evils of colonialism are well known, and unquestionable – but it was the costly experience of colonialism that forced open closed minds. Politically, those evils ended with the end of colonial rule on 15th August 1947. Since then, for the past 75 years, “India that is Bharat” has been ruled by its own rulers and its own Constitution. So, when we talk about decolonising our mind sets further now, what exactly are we aspiring to decolonize to? When Bharat triumphs over India, what will become of the modern ideas and values that came to us with British colonialism?

Samrat Choudhury is an author and a journalist

The views expressed are personal

Continue reading with HT Premium Subscription

• Terms of use
• Privacy policy
• Weather Today
• HT Newsletters
• Subscription
• Print Ad Rates
• Code of Ethics

• India vs Sri Lanka
• Live Cricket Score
• Cricket Teams
• Cricket Players
• ICC Rankings
• Cricket Schedule
• Shreyas Iyer
• Harshit Rana
• Kusal Mendis
• Ravi Bishnoi
• Rinku Singh
• Riyan Parag
• Washington Sundar
• Avishka Fernando
• Charith Asalanka
• Dasun Shanaka
• Khaleel Ahmed
• Pathum Nissanka
• Other Cities
• Income Tax Calculator
• Petrol Prices
• Reliance AGM 2024 Live
• Diesel Prices
• Silver Rate
• Relationships
• Art and Culture
• Taylor Swift: A Primer
• Telugu Cinema
• Tamil Cinema
• Board Exams
• Exam Results
• Admission News
• Employment News
• Competitive Exams
• BBA Colleges
• Engineering Colleges
• Medical Colleges
• BCA Colleges
• Medical Exams
• Engineering Exams
• Love Horoscope
• Annual Horoscope
• Festival Calendar
• Compatibility Calculator
• Career Horoscope
• Manifestation
• The Economist Articles
• Lok Sabha States
• Lok Sabha Parties
• Lok Sabha Candidates
• Explainer Video
• On The Record
• Vikram Chandra Daily Wrap
• Entertainment Photos
• Lifestyle Photos
• News Photos
• Olympics 2024
• Olympics Medal Tally
• Other Sports
• EPL 2023-24
• ISL 2023-24
• Asian Games 2023
• Public Health
• Economic Policy
• International Affairs
• Climate Change
• Gender Equality
• future tech
• HT Friday Finance
• Explore Hindustan Times
• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Use
• Subscription - Terms of Use

• Online Courses
• Unique Courses
• Scholarships
• Entrance Exams
• Study Abroad
• Question Papers

• Click on the Menu icon of the browser, it opens up a list of options.
• Click on the “Options ”, it opens up the settings page,
• Here click on the “Privacy & Security” options listed on the left hand side of the page.
• Scroll down the page to the “Permission” section .
• Here click on the “Settings” tab of the Notification option.
• A pop up will open with all listed sites, select the option “ALLOW“, for the respective site under the status head to allow the notification.
• Once the changes is done, click on the “Save Changes” option to save the changes.

Lal Bahadur Shastri's Enduring Legacy: Lessons for Today's Leaders

The Man of Peace is Lal Bahadur Shastri. He is well known as India's second prime minister after independence. He is also renowned for coining the slogan "Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan" ('Hail the warriors and farmers'). Let us study more about the life of this great Indian historical figure.

This article is helpful content for the students of classes 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 who wish to write a 1000-word essay on Lal Bahadur Shastri in English.

Lal Bahadur Shastri was the country's second Prime Minister and a major leader of the Indian National Congress. Mahatma Gandhi had a strong influence on him, and he joined the independence movement in the 1920s.

Following India's independence in 1947, Lal Bahadur Shastri joined Nehru's cabinet, eventually becoming one of Prime Minister Nehru's principals, first as Railway Minister and subsequently in a variety of ministries including Home Minister. He also led the country throughout the 1965 Indo-Pak war, coining the slogan "Jai Jawan Jai Kisan," which is still popular today. On January 10, 1966, the Tashkent Agreement formally terminated the war. He died the next day in Tashkent. Even though it was reported that Lal Bahadur Shastri died as a result of heart arrest, his family was not satisfied.

Early Childhood and Education

Lal Bahadur Shastri was born at Mughal Sarai on October 2, 1904. He was born in Mughal Sarai, the residence of his maternal grandparents. His paternal grandparents worked under the Zamindar of Ramnagar, which is located near Varanasi. Shastri's father was a school teacher who later worked as a clerk in Allahabad's tax office.

Shastri was the eldest son of his parents, but he had a younger sister named Kailashi Devi. Lal Bahadur Shastri's father died when he was one and a half years old, during an epidemic of bubonic plague. His mother, Smt. Ramdulari Devi, was just 23 years old at the time and pregnant with her third child when she took her children and moved to Ramnagar to live with her father. In July 1906, she gave birth to Shastri's younger sister Sundara Devi.

Lal Bahadur Shastri began his education at the age of four under the tutelage of a Muslim cleric, as Urdu/Persia remained the language of instruction for generations until it was superseded by English. Budhan Mian enrolled him at East Central Railway Inter-College in Mughal Sarai.

Bindeshwari Prasad's maternal grandpa died, and his cousin Ramdulari Devi, a schoolteacher at Mughal Sarai, took over as head of the family. Bindeshwari Prasad was transferred to Varanasi & the entire family of Shastriji shifted to Varanasi. There he joined Harish Chandra School, at this time he decided to drop his caste-derived surname of Srivastava.

Lal Bahadur Shastri's Role in India's Independence Movement and His Higher Education

There was no connection between the family with the independence struggle. Nishkameshwar Prasad Mishra, his teacher at Harish Chandra High School, was nationalistic and well-liked. He provided much-needed financial assistance to Shastri by allowing him to tutor his children.

Shastri became interested in the independence struggle and began researching the history of Indian ancestors, including Swami Vivekananda, Gandhi, and Annie Besant. He attended a public meeting in Benares hosted by Gandhi when he was in the tenth grade. Inspired by Gandhi's appeal to boycott government schools and join the Non-Cooperation movement, Shastriji left Harish Chandra the next day and joined the local branch of the Congress party as a volunteer, beginning to participate in anti-government protests.

J.B. Kriplani, a former lecturer at Banaras Hindu University who later became one of the most famous leaders of the Indian Independence movement and one of Gandhi's closest followers, was Shastri's direct supervisor.

Shastri received a first-class degree in philosophy and ethics from the National Institution of Higher Education known as Kashi Vidyapith, which was founded by J. B. Kripalani and VN Sharma with the support of a wealthy philanthropist and ardent Congress nationalist, Shiv Prasad Gupta. Shastri joined the Indian National Congress as an active member in 1928. He was imprisoned for two and a half years before working as a secretary for the U.P. parliamentary board in 1937. He was sentenced to one year in prison for offering individual Satyagraha support to the independence struggle.

Lal Bahadur Shastri's Political Career

Following India's independence, he was appointed as Parliamentary Secretary in his home state of Uttar Pradesh, where he later became Minister of Police and Transport under Chief Minister Govind Ballabh Pant. As the state's transport minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri was the first to appoint conductors. During his stint as a police minister, he was successful in quelling communal disturbances, and he was the first to advise police to utilize water jets to disperse crowds rather than lathi charges.

With Jawaharlal Nehru as Prime Minister in 1951, he was appointed General Secretary of the All India Congress Committee. It was his obligation to choose the candidates and direct them in electioneering and advertising efforts. His cabinet was made up of India's most successful business people. Lal Bahadur Shastri was instrumental in the Congress Party's landslide victory in India's general elections in 1952, 1957, and 1962. In 1962, he won the UP Vidhan Sabha seat of Saron with 69% of the vote. On May 13, 1952, Shastri was appointed as the first Railway Minister in the Republic of India's first cabinet. He was also the Minister of Commerce and Industry, and he laid the groundwork for Mangalore Port.

Lal Bahadur Shastri Ji as India's Prime Minister

Shastriji was appointed Prime Minister after Jawaharlal Nehru died on May 27, 1964. Then-Congress President K. Kamaraj assisted in making him the republic's second Prime Minister. Shastri retained many members of Nehru's Cabinet and placed Nehru's daughter Indira Gandhi as Minister of Information and Broadcasting.

During his tenure, he witnessed the anti-Hindu protest in Madras in 1965, when the Indian government was attempting to establish Hindi as the sole national language of India. He encountered opposition from non-Hindi-speaking states. To defuse the tension, he stated that English would remain the official language. Following the promise, the unrest and violence abated.

Personal and Family Life

Lal Bahadur Shastri married Lalita Devi on May 16, 1928, and they had four boys and two daughters. Throughout his life, he lived by Gandhi's principles.

Shastri Ji's New Political Revolution

Nehru's socialist economic plans were abandoned by Shastri. Lal Bahadur Shastri was instrumental in launching the white revolution, an effort to improve milk production and availability. He backed cooperative businesses and established the National Dairy Development Board. On October 31, 1964, Shastri Ji paid a visit to Anand and opened the Amul cattle feed factory at Kanjari.

Lal Bahadur Shastri spent the night there, interacting with the farmers and having dinner with them. As a result of this engagement, he established the National Dairy Development Board, which was led by Mr. Verghese Kurien, the General Manager of Kaira District Co-operative Milk Producer Union Ltd (Amul at the time).

Because of the country's food shortages, Shastriji advised individuals to give up one meal voluntarily so that the food saved might be delivered to the affected population. The response to his call was amazing; even restaurants and cafes closed their doors once a week. It was known as Shastri Vrat in many parts of the world.

How Lal Bahadur Shastri handled the India-Pakistan war

1965 India His most notable movement was the Pakistan War, in which he led India to victory. As conflict broke out on a large scale, he sent the Indian army across the Line of Control and threatened Pakistan near Lahore. The two countries engaged in massive tank battles.

Despite Pakistani victories in the north, Indian soldiers gained vital strongholds at Haji Pir in Kashmir and Lahore in Pakistan, which were under artillery and mortar fire from Indian forces. According to the United Nations-mandated truce, the war concluded on September 23, 1965.

Death of Lal Bahadur Shastri

Shastri died of a heart attack on January 11, 1966, in Tashkent, after signing a peace pact to terminate the 1965 Indo-Pak War. His relatives, however, refused to accept the circumstances of his death and claimed foul play. The Indian government did not divulge any information at the time, and the media remained mute as well. Many conspiracy theories continue to circulate in relation to his death.

500 word Essay on Lal Bahadur Shastri in english for class 4,5,6,7

Lal Bahadur Shastri was born in Mughal Sarai, Uttar Pradesh, India, on October 2, 1904. Sharda Prasad was his father's name, and he was a schoolteacher. Ramdulari Devi was his mother's name. When Lal Bahadur Shastri was one year old, his father died. He has two younger sisters. His mother Ramdulari Devi moved him and his two sisters to her father's house after his father died and placed them there.

Marriage and Education

Lal Bahadur Shastri had always been honest and hardworking since he was a child. Lal Bahadur Shastri received the title Shastri Scholar after graduating with honors from the Kashi Vidyapeeth in 1926. In his childhood, Lal Bahadur Shastri learned values such as bravery, adventure, patience, self-control, courtesy, and selflessness. Lal Bahadur Shastri sacrificed his schooling in order to actively participate in the liberation fight.

Lalita Devi married Lal Bahadur Shastri. Lal Bahadur Shastri and his wife were both fortunate with six children. Their children's names were Kusum, Hari Krishna, Suman, Anil, Sunil, and Ashok.

Involvement in the Freedom Movement

Lal Bahadur Shastri was captivated by the national freedom cause as a child. He was deeply moved by Gandhi's address at the Banaras Hindu University's foundation ceremony. Following that, he became a devoted Gandhian before joining the liberation movement. As a result, he was sent to jail several times.

Lal Bahadur Shastri always thought that self-sufficiency and self-reliance were the foundations of a strong nation. Lal Bahadur Shastri preferred to be remembered for his work rather than well-rehearsed speeches full of high promises. He was always opposed to the prevalent caste system, therefore he chose to drop his surname and, after graduation, take the Shastri surname.

Following India's independence in 1947, Lal Bahadur Shastri was given the portfolios of transport and home ministry. He was appointed to the Railway Ministry in 1952. When Jawaharlal Nehru died, Lal Bahadur Shastri succeeded him as Prime Minister for only 18 months. After the victory over Pakistan in the 1965 war, he received his achievements. He died on January 11, 1966, as a result of a severe heart attack.

Lal Bahadur Shastri was India's second prime minister. He was a great individual as well as a brilliant leader, and he was honored with the "Bharat Ratna." He gave a renowned motto "Jai Jawan Jai Kissan". Lal Bahadur Shastri used his spare time to read social reformers and western intellectuals. He was always opposed to the "dowry system" and hence refused to accept dowry from his father in law. Lal Bahadur Shastri addressed numerous fundamental issues such as food scarcity, unemployment, and poverty. Shastri requested the experts to design a long-term strategy to address the urgent food scarcity. The renowned "Green Revolution" had begun. Lal Bahadur Shastri was a very quiet man.

Following the Chinese attack of 1962, India faced another aggression from Pakistan during Shastri's tenure, and Lal Bahadur Shastri showed his mettle by making it apparent that India would not sit back and watch. While allowing the Security Forces to retaliate, he stated, "Force will be met with force." Lal Bahadur Shastri served as Minister of Transport and Communications before becoming Minister of Commerce and Industry. In 1961, he was the Minister of Home, and he established the "Committee on Prevention of Corruption," which was chaired by K. Santhanam.

Lal Bahadur Shastri was also noted for his honesty, patriotism, and simplicity. India has suffered the loss of a great leader. He had endowed India with brilliance and morality. His demise remained a mystery. Lal Bahadur Shastri was a member of the Indian National Congress. He held nationalist, liberal, and right-wing political ideologies. Lal Bahadur Shastri practiced Hinduism. As the pillars of a great nation, he was always self-sufficient and self-reliant.

More GENERAL KNOWLEDGE News  

University of Southampton Emerges as the First UK Institution to Establish a Campus in India

Central Government Approves Aadhaar-Based Authentication for UPSC Exams

Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya Opens Admissions for Class 6 for 2025 Academic Year

• Don't Block
• Block for 8 hours
• Block for 12 hours
• Block for 24 hours
• Dont send alerts during 1 am 2 am 3 am 4 am 5 am 6 am 7 am 8 am 9 am 10 am 11 am 12 pm 1 pm 2 pm 3 pm 4 pm 5 pm 6 pm 7 pm 8 pm 9 pm 10 pm 11 pm 12 am to 1 am 2 am 3 am 4 am 5 am 6 am 7 am 8 am 9 am 10 am 11 am 12 pm 1 pm 2 pm 3 pm 4 pm 5 pm 6 pm 7 pm 8 pm 9 pm 10 pm 11 pm 12 am

• India Today
• Business Today
• Harper's Bazaar
• Brides Today
• Cosmopolitan
• India Today Hindi
• Reader’s Digest
• Aaj Tak Campus

Download App