essay writing about jai ho bharat in english

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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

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Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru Essay in English for Kids

Pandit jawaharlal nehru essay in english for students.

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru Essay in English has been offered here for your ready reference. In elementary classes, children are often asked to write 10 lines on Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. The given essay will assist kids in drafting an impressive essay on this notable personality.

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was a prominent figure in India. He was the first Prime Minister of Independent India. He was among the freedom fighters who fought hard for our country’s independence. He served as the Prime Minister until his death in 1964 due to a heart attack.

Born to a Kashmiri Pandit family, Nehru was popularly known as Pandit Nehru. His affection for children made him lovingly called Chacha Nehru by kids. Click on the link provided below to download this essay on Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru in a printable PDF format.

The below essay on Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru will give kids an idea of how they can frame a simple essay on the given topic. The topic “10 lines on Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru” is frequently asked in primary classes. You can check out more such amazing essays for kids on other topics that are very popular in the formative years of learning of children.

Download “10 Lines on Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru Essay” PDF For Free

• Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was the first Prime Minister of independent India.
• He was born on 14th November 1889 in Allahabad. His birthday is celebrated as Children’s Day.
• His father’s name was Pandit Motilal Nehru and his mother’s name was Swaroop Rani.
• He married Kamala Kaul on 8th February 1916. They had a daughter Indira in the subsequent year.
• He was known as Pandit Nehru as he belonged to the Kashmiri Pandit community. He was better known as Chacha Nehru among children.
• He did his graduation from Trinity College in Cambridge. He practised law at the Inner Temple in London.
• He was an Indian independence activist and fought for India’s freedom along with other freedom fighters.
• He wrote an autobiography “Discovery of India” during his time in prison from 1942 to 1946.
• His inaugural speech as the Prime Minister of independent India “Tryst with Destiny”, is highly popular among the Indian masses.
• He died on 27th May 1964 due to a cardiac arrest.

A Short Essay On Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was born on November 14, in Allahabad. His father was a barrister. Mahatma Gandhi and his principles deeply influenced him. He wanted to set India free. He studied law, and under Gandhi’s shadow, he was a part of the freedom movement. When he fought for independence, he was jailed several times. Later, in 1929 he was elected as the President of the Indian National Congress. India was freed from British rule in 1947, and he was the first Prime Minister of free India. After a long service to the nation, he died on May 27, 1964.

Essay writing develops sound creativity and imagination prowess in students. It works on the overall advancement of linguistic skills. It enhances vocabulary and sentence formation understanding.

The above given Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru Essay in English is our attempt to offer a good example of writing an essay on Pandit Nehru. The language and structure of this 10 line Essay on Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru have been kept simple and easy to understand keeping in mind the thought process of children.

We have a huge collection of useful and engaging learning resources for kids – intriguing worksheets, brain-tickling general knowledge questions, interesting stories from most popular genres, poems for children, NCERT Solutions, easy trivia questions, etc. on our Kids Learning section . Explore this section and find everything you need for your child’s education in one place.

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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.

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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 26 April 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

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• 23 | 2020 Unique Identification in India: Aadhaar, Biometrics and Technology-Mediated Identities
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Essay on Lal Bahadur Shastri for Students and Children

500+ words essay on lal bahadur shastri.

Lal Bahadur Shastri was born on 2nd October 1904 at Mughal Sarai in Uttar Pradesh in India . His father’s name was Sharda Prasad and he was a school teacher. His mother’s name was Ramdulari Devi. Lal Bahadur Shastri’s father died when he was only one year old. He has two sisters. After his father’s death, his mother Ramdulari Devi took him and his two sisters to her father’s house and settled down there.

Education and Marriage

Since childhood, Lal Bahadur Shastri was very honest and laborious. Lal Bahadur Shastri was graduated with a first-class degree from the Kashi Vidyapeeth in 1926 then he was given the title Shastri Scholar. Lal Bahadur Shastri acquired virtues like boldness, love of adventure, patience, self-control, courtesy, and selflessness in his childhood. In order to participate actively in the freedom movement, Lal Bahadur Shastri compromised even with his studies.

Lal Bahadur Shastri got married to Lalita Devi. And both Lal Bahadur Shastri and his wife blessed with 6 children. The name of their children was Kusum, Hari Krishna, Suman, Anil, Sunil, and Ashok.

Contribution in Freedom Movement

Lal Bahadur Shastri was drawn towards the national struggle for freedom when he was a boy. He was very impressed by Gandhi’s speech which was delivered on the foundation ceremony of Banaras Hindu University. After that, he became a loyal follower of Gandhi and then after jumped into the freedom movement. Because of this, he had to go to jail many times. Lal Bahadur Shastri was always believed that self-sustenance and self-reliance as the pillars to build a strong nation. Lal Bahadur Shastri wished to be remembered by his work rather than well-rehearsed speeches proclaiming lofty promises. He was always against the prevailing caste system and therefore decided to drop his surname and after his graduation, he get Shastri surname.

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Political Career of Lal Bahadur Shastri

In 1947, after India got independence Lal Bahadur Shastri got the portfolio of transport and Home ministry. In 1952, he was given the Railway ministry. When Jawaharlal Nehru died Lal Bahadur Shastri succeeded him as the Prime Minister for a very short time of only 18 months. In 1965 war he got his achievements after the victory on Pakistan. On 11 th January 1966, he got a severe heart attack and he died.

Lal Bahadur Shastri was the second prime minister of India. He was a great man as well as a great leader and was rewarded by “ Bharat Ratna “. He gave a famous slogan “Jai Jawan Jai Kissan”. Lal Bahadur Shastri utilized the time in reading the social reformers and western philosophers. He was always against the “dowry system” and so refused to take dowry from his father in law. Lal Bahadur Shastri tackled many elementary problems like food shortage, unemployment, and poverty. To overcome the acute food shortage, Shastri asked the experts to devise a long-term strategy. This was the beginning of the famous “Green Revolution”. Lal Bahadur Shastri was a very soft-spoken person.

After the Chinese aggression of 1962, India faced another aggression from Pakistan in 1965 during Shastri’s tenure and Lal Bahadur Shastri showing his mettle and made it very clear that India would not sit and watch. While granting liberty to the Security Forces to retaliate he said: “Force will be met with force”. Lal Bahadur Shastri was first as the Minister for Transport and Communications and then as the Minister of Commerce and Industry. In 1961 he was the Minister for Home and formed the “Committee on Prevention of Corruption” headed by of K. Santhanam.

Lal Bahadur Shastri was also known for his simplicity, patriotism, and honesty. India lost a great leader. He had given the talent and integrity to India. His death was still a mystery. Lal Bahadur Shastri had political associations is Indian National Congress. He had the political ideology such as nationalist, liberal, right-wing. Lal Bahadur Shastri is a Hinduism religion. He was always self-sustenance and self-reliance as the pillars to build a strong nation.

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One phrase, many meanings — what ‘Jai Hind’ is to us all

The indian express explores the origins of a martial salutation, now to be used by schoolkids as well..

In September, Madhya Pradesh School Education Minister Vijay Shah introduced the practice of children answering their roll call in schools with ‘Jai Hind’. Initially tried on an experimental basis in Satna district, Shah has now gone ahead on his promise to extend the practice to other districts in the state, making it compulsory for schoolchildren in Madhya Pradesh’s 1.22 lakh government schools to answer their roll call by saying ‘Jai Hind’.

The most famous speech in independent India, Jawahar Lal Nehru’s ‘Tryst with Destiny’, uttered at midnight on August 15, 1947, also ended with the salutation ‘Jai Hind’. Nehru repeated this from the ramparts of the Red Fort the next day too, which was unusual for a slogan that had been coined just a few years earlier. Moreover, it was not a slogan coined by the Congress party or the independence movement in India.

It is widely acknowledged that Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose started and popularised ‘Jai Hind’ as a salutation for soldiers of his Indian National Army (INA), which fought alongside Japan in the Second World War. In his 2014 book Lengendotes of Hyderabad , former civil servant Narendra Luther says that the term was coined by Zain-ul Abideen Hasan, the son of a collector from Hyderabad, who had gone to Germany to study engineering. In Germany, Hasan came in touch with Bose, left his studies and joined Bose as his secretary and interpreter.

Hasan later became a Major in the INA and participated in the war on the Burma Front. After independence, he joined the Indian Foreign Service (IFS), taking on the surname ‘Saffrani’ after the colour saffron in the Indian flag, and retired having served as Ambassador to Denmark. Hasan’s grand-nephew, Anvar Ali Khan, later wrote in an article that his grand-uncle was tasked by Bose to look for a military greeting and/or salutation for the INA’s soldiers, a slogan which was not caste or community-specific.

Unlike the British Indian Army, or its successor Indian Army, both of which have been organised on the basis of caste and communities, the INA was organised on an all-India basis. Unlike ‘Sat Sri Akal’ or ‘Salaam Alaikum’ or ‘Jai Ma Durge’ or ‘Ram Ram’ which were used by different regiments of the British Indian Army from which soldiers of the INA were drawn, Bose needed a unifying greeting, one which represented the whole of India.

Also Read:  Answer roll call with Jai Hind, BJP minister tells Madhya Pradesh schools

Luther’s book says that Hasan had initially suggested ‘Hello’, which was rejected by Bose. According to Anvar Ali Khan, the idea for ‘Jai Hind’ came to Hasan when he was wandering around the Konigsbruck POW camp. He overheard two Rajput soldiers greet each other with the slogan ‘Jai Ramji ki’. That triggered off the idea of ‘Jai Hindustan ki’ in his mind, the phrase soon shortened to ‘Jai Hind’.

This became a rousing slogan during the later stages of the independence movement, capturing the imagination of the masses. But Mahatma Gandhi was against compelling anyone to say it. A year before independence, demonstrators in Bombay who were supporting the Indian naval mutineers of February 1946 tried to force the locals to shout ‘Jai Hind’. Gandhi responded to the event in Harijan in March 1946, remarking that to ‘compel a single person’ to ‘shout ‘Jai Hind’ was in fact to drive a nail ‘into the coffin of Swaraj in terms of the dumb millions of India’.

However, Gandhi himself immortalised the slogan when he sent a piece of crocheted cotton lace, made from a yarn spun himself, with the central motif ‘Jai Hind’ on it, to Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, as a wedding gift in 1947. The ‘Jai Hind’ slogan also became the first commemorative postmark of independent India, issued on the day of independence.

In one of the many ironies of independent India, ‘Jai Hind’ was soon adopted by the armed forces as a military salutation, incorporating a slogan used by an army which had fought bitterly against it only a few years ago.

Yet, the beauty of the phrase lies in its twin meanings: while the military can take it as ‘victory to India’, the more pacifist can take it to mean ‘long live India’.

Jai Hind indeed.

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Essay on Viksit Bharat: A Path to India’s Development

• Updated on  
• Apr 15, 2024

Essay on Viksit Bharat: The Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi, has an ambition for India; that is to make India a ‘Developed Country’. The Leader has stated that every action of an Indian civilian should be done to make India a developed country; that is, Viksit Bharat.

The formal launch of the Viksit Bharat Mission was a major milestone in India’s development. It is an opportunity for India to show its true potential and become a developed country by 2047, which will complete the 100 years of India’s independence. With the rapid development in major sectors of the economy , experts have predicted that this mission will be accomplished within its time limit. 

Table of Contents

• 1 Viksit Bharat History
• 2 Viksit Bharat Key Objectives
• 3 Developments So Far

Quick Read: Essay on Labour Day: 1 May

Viksit Bharat History

On 11 December 2023, the Indian Prime Minister launched the Viksit Bharat @2047 scheme via a video conferencing platform. In this video conference, he declared the formal launch of this scheme along with its four pillars: Yuva (Youth), Garib (Poor), Mahila (Women) and Kisan (Framers).

Viksit Bharat represents a blueprint for India’s development. It aims to achieve the ‘India Great’ target by the year 2047; which was termed as ‘Amrit Kaal’. On 3rd March 2024, the Prime Minister chaired the Council of Ministers, where he talked about a plan for the next five years to work on the ‘Viksit Bharat 2047’ vision.

He stated that if the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) forms a government after the upcoming Lok Sabha elections in 2024, the government will aim to make India a global power in terms of economic growth, social development, technological innovations and soft diplomacy. 

‘ Today, the goal of the country is Viksit Bharat, Shrestha Bharat!’ – PM Narendra Modi

Viksit Bharat Key Objectives

The Viksit Bharat has been the prime focus of the NDA. The Prime Minister has expressed his ministry’s action plan to make India a developed nation by 2047. The immediate objectives of the Viksit Bharat scheme are economic growth and sustainable development goals, better standard of living, ease of doing business, infrastructure, social welfare, etc.

To achieve the Viksit Bharat objectives, the Indian Prime Minister aims to enable every Indian citizen to participate in the country’s development at their own level. PM Modi’s vision is strong and sustainable, where every individual will be offered decent living standards and an opportunity to serve their mother country. 

The government is encouraging investors to invest in India for advanced economic growth in the subsequent years. The sub-schemes launched under this mission show the government’s dedication to creating a favourable environment for economic growth and business development.

The government is constantly encouraging the youth to actively participate in the government’s schemes and engage in entrepreneurial activities. With schemes like Startup India, Made in India, and Digital India, more and more people are encouraged to participate in the government’s plans for India’s development.

The government is launching schemes on its digital platforms that encourage people to understand the importance of indigenous products and rely on their skills.’

Developing world-class infrastructure to promote sustainable development and an enhanced standard of living for everyone is another objective of the Viksit Bharat scheme. The government is launching large-scale projects to develop the country’s infrastructure, which includes the construction of world-class roads and highways, trains and railway stations, ports, etc. Some of the popular projects launched by the government are the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana , Smart Cities Mission, Bharatmala, Sagarmala, etc. 

Quick Read: 200+ English Essay Topics

Quick Read: Essay on My Vision for India

Unveiling the 10 pillars of Viksit Bharat Abhiyan with #economy at the core- paving the way for a #prosperous and #Developed India. India’s model of #development should lead the way for the world to follow. To know more, visit: https://t.co/sqRvRGJePp pic.twitter.com/qhYT2UqeLf — Viksit Bharat Abhiyan (@ViksitBharat) March 5, 2023

Developments So Far

India is currently ranked #5 in economic development in the world, where the nominal GDP is approximately USD 4 Trillion. However, the Indian government is planning to secure the 3rd spot in economic development by surpassing Japan and Germany. 

On 3rd March 2024, the Prime Minister discussed the entire roadmap of this scheme with the Cabinet Ministers. Viksit Bharat is a result of over 2 years of intensive preparation. It involves a holistic approach where all the ministries are involved to achieve its prime objective: Make India Great.

The government strategised its planning by consulting its ministers, state governments, academic institutions, private organizations, and ordinary people to come up with innovative and sustained ideas for India’s growth.

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Ans. The Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi, has an ambition for India; that is to make India a ‘Developed Country’. The Leader has stated that every action of an Indian civilian should be done to make India a developed country; that is, Viksit Bharat. The formal launch of the Viksit Bharat Mission was a major milestone in India’s development. It is an opportunity for India to show its true potential and become a developed country by 2047, which will complete the 100 years of India’s independence. With the rapid development in major sectors of the economy, experts have predicted that this mission will be accomplished within its time limit. 

Ans. Individuals can visit the MyGov portal to participate in the Viksit Bharat scheme at https://www.mygov.in/.

Ans. On 11 December 2023, the Indian Prime Minister launched the Viksit Bharat @2047 scheme via a video conferencing platform. The four pillars of the Viksit Bharat scheme are Yuva (Youth), Garib (Poor), Mahila (Women) and Kisan (Framers). The immediate objectives of the Viksit Bharat scheme are economic growth and sustainable development goals, better standard of living, ease of doing business, infrastructure, social welfare, etc.

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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.

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Essay on Atmanirbhar Bharat for Students in English [500 Words]

January 3, 2021 by Sandeep

Atmanirbhar Bharat Essay: Our beloved Prime Minister created a unique vision to make India self-reliant and portrays happiness, peace and prosperity for all our countrymen. Under this prestigious scheme, the PM has allocated a huge budget of INR 20 lakhs as a special economic package to fight the coronavirus pandemic. The PM has shared many stories of inspiration from the country’s citizens that prove India is slowly marching towards self-sufficiency and sustained development.

Essay on Atmanirbhar Bharat 500 Words in English

Below we have provided Atmanirbhar Bharat Essay in English for class 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 students.

On 12th May 2020, while addressing the country amid coronavirus pandemic, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the Atmanirbhar Bharat or self-sufficient India concept. He stated that the current state of the world has made us realize self-sufficiency is the only path for development. For many, this concept seemed covalent and put them in a tizzy.

So, the literal meaning is self-independence, where India needs to make sure that the 21st century belongs to it. COVID-19 has provided an excellent opportunity to prove our mettle in a world who is like a family. Rural India was left on its devices when the lockdown was imposed. Their challenges were different than in urban areas. The people who migrated to the cities for the job was left for starving, which coerced them to return to their homes.

Since India is an agrarian economy, availability of labour and machines, fear of police and lack of family labour caused significant hurdles in the harvest of several crops. Furthermore, they faced challenges in threshing, storage, transportation, closure of markets and mandis. Rubber and tea plantations in Kerala and Assam suffered a considerable loss due to the halt in farm operations.

The restricted mobility has obstructed the sales of vegetables and fruits. In such situations, the idea of Atmanirbhar Bharat seems futile. The intended objective of this concept is two-fold. First, for the poor people, interim measures like liquidity and direct cash transfer are released, which will act as shock absorbers. Second, the plan is to bring reforms in the growth-critical sector to make it globally attractive.

When these measures are applied, then it will revive the economic activity and create opportunities in micro, small, agriculture and medium sectors. Also, it will bring substantial growth in power, coal, defence, aviation and mining. The scheme formulated is a one-step towards the one nation one market and help India emerge as the food factory of the world.

The MGNREGA may help the distressed migrants in villages due to the infusion of 40,000 crore. For finance-starved sector, Rs 3 lakh crore has been provided as a collateral-free loan facility. As the MSME (micro, small and medium enterprise) is the largest employment generating sector, this plan would ensure their sustenance and thereby help in India comparative advantage.

Moreover, the newly launched PM e-vidya programme will secure schools, colleges and universities as it will assist them in conducting online courses without further loss in teaching. The expenditure on health will be increased by ramping up health and wellness centres in rural and urban places. A sum of rupees 3 lakh 10 crores is to be provided to dairy, animal husbandry and fisheries.

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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, nhrc takes cogizance of suicide of 49 students from 2013 to 2017, congress misused cbi against amit shah: smriti irani, 10 hurt in himachal road mishap, rs 94,726 crore total gross gst collected in december, it will be huge mistake to believe pak will mend its ways soon: pm modi.

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Short Essay on Subramania Bharati [100, 200, 400 Words] With PDF

Subramania Bharati was an eminent Tamil author. He is remembered for his great contributions to Tamil Literature. In this session today, you will learn how to write essays on the life of the great author Subramania Bharati that may be relevant for your upcoming exam.

Short Essay on Subramania Bharati in100 Words

Subramania Bharati was one of the greatest Tamil writers and poets of all time. He was born on 11 December 1882 in Tamil Nadu, India. He was fluent in many different languages but his favourite language was Tamil. Bharati was a court poet and also worked as a Tamil teacher for a short period of time. Later, he developed an interest in journalism and joined a Tamil daily as an assistant editor.

He was a gifted person and wrote on various revolutionary topics like the nationalist movements, the political state of the country, patriotism, the need for social reforms as well as spirituality. He translated Vedic literature, hymns and sutras to Tamil. He died on 12 September 1921, aged 38. Subramania Bharati will always be remembered as a great poet, writer, nationalist, freedom fighter, and social reformer. 

Short Essay on Subramania Bharati in 200 Words

Subramania Bharati was a great Tamil writer and poet. He was born on 11 December 1882 in the town of Etthyapuram in Tamil Nadu, India. He was fluent in many different languages, like Hindi, English, Telugu, French, and Sanskrit, but his favourite language was Tamil, his mother tongue. Bharati was the court poet of the Raja of Etthyapuram and also worked as a Tamil teacher for a short period of time. Later, he developed an interest in journalism and joined a Tamil daily as an assistant editor. 

Subramania Bharati was a gifted person and wrote on various topics like the nationalist movements, the political state of the country, the need for social reforms as well as spirituality. He wrote numerous patriotic poems, urging people to join the independence movements. The British tried their best to suppress him and many of his works were banned. However, this didn’t deter Bharati.

He escaped to the French-ruled Pondicherry and met many revolutionary leaders, including Mahatma Gandhi. He continued his work, writing revolutionary poems, translating Vedic literature, hymns, and sutras to Tamil. He died on 12 September 1921, aged just 38.

Subramania Bharati will always be remembered as one of the greatest Tamil poets, writers, nationalists, freedom fighters, and social reformers. 

Short Essay on Subramania Bharati in 400 Words

Subramania Bharati was one of the greatest Tamil writers, poets, and revolutionaries of all times. He was born on 11 December 1882 in the town of Etthyapuram in Tamil Nadu, India. He was fluent in many different languages, like Hindi, English, Telugu, French, and Sanskrit, but his favourite language was Tamil, his mother tongue.

The name ‘Bharati’ or ‘the one blessed by Goddess Saraswati’ was given to him by the Raja of Etthyapuram who was impressed by young Subramania’s poetic genius. He worked as the court poet of the Raja as well as a Tamil teacher for a short period of time. Later, he developed an interest in journalism and joined a Tamil daily as an assistant editor. 

Subramania Bharati was a gifted person and wrote on various topics like the nationalist movements, the political state of the country, the need for social reforms as well as spirituality. He attended several sessions of the Indian National Congress which focused on the boycott of British goods, swaraj, and swadeshi movement. He also met Sister Nivedita who influenced him to see women in a new light, as co-creators and not a gender inferior to men.

Bharati started editing several newspapers and regularly published poems urging people to join the independence movements and kindling the fire of patriotism within people. This led the British to ban his works and he had to escape to the French-ruled Pondicherry to save himself from being arrested. He continued his work, writing revolutionary poems, translating Vedic literature, hymns, and sutras to Tamil.

He also met several nationalist leaders during this time like Aurobindo and Lajpat Rai. Bharati was arrested by the British government when he entered India in 1918 but was released within a few months. The imprisonment had taken a toll on him and he was struck with poverty and ill health towards the end of his life. He died 12 September 1921, aged just 38. 

Subramania Bharati will always be remembered as one of the greatest Tamil poets, writers, nationalists, freedom fighters and social reformers. He was a pioneer of modern Tamil literature and used his poetry to express his revolutionary, reformist ideals. He saw all living beings as equals and voiced his opinions against the social evils, fighting against the oppressive caste system that existed in the Hindu society. Although he was religious, he strongly opposed false propaganda stories and twisted religious ideologies. Subramania Bharati was a great and wise man. 

The life of such an eminent person can not be completed within such a tight word limit. Still, I have tried my best to cover the important aspects of Subramania Bharati’s life in this session. Hopefully, you have now an overall idea about the context. If you still have any doubts regarding this session, let me know through some quick comments. For more such essays, please visit the categorized section of our website. 

To get the latest updates on our upcoming sessions, please join us on Telegram. Thanks for being with us. All the best.

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Writing 'Jai Hind' at end of essay doesn't necessarily hint towards malpractice in exam: Madras HC

• Salil Tiwari   
• 05:08 PM, 09 Nov 2023

Read Time: 10 minutes

The instructions to the candidates of the combined civil services stated that they shall not write irrelevant or impertinent remarks

While granting relief to a civil services candidate whose answer sheet was invalidated for concluding an essay with "Jai Hind," Justice Battu Devanand of the Madras High Court held that the use of the slogan by the candidate appeared natural, spontaneous and effective culmination of the essay rather than any tacit signal of attempting any malpractice.

He opined, "While writing an essay on 'Importance and conservation of the natural resources' some young scholar or educated youth would naturally become emotional and while discussing the ways and means of protecting nature and conserving natural resources in the interest of society at large, may spontaneously feel patriotic. In such a moment of reflection and soul searching, for some youth, it's a natural way of expression to end an essay or a speech with some patriotic slogan summarizing the essence of the topic such as 'Jai Hind'."

Court further emphasized that "Jai hind" or "victory to India" is the most commonly uttered slogan in India, whether it is at the end of the school prayers by children or at the end of a speech by eminent persons.

"It is the last word to be seen in several communications wherever the patriotic fervour is invoked towards the motherland i.e., India or Bharat," the judge highlighted. 

Court was dealing with a plea moved by one Kalpana seeking to overturn the invalidation of her answer sheet and to be considered for appointment to positions within the Combined Civil Services Examination-II Group II Services.

Kalpana explained that she discovered her answer paper in Part-B of the examination was invalidated because she had allegedly included irrelevant content.

The standing counsel for the Tamil Nadu Public Service Commission argued that Kalpana had violated examination instructions by adding "Jai Hind - Let us live united with nature" at the end of the essay, which was considered irrelevant to the question.

Coming to the defense of a candidate whose answer sheet was invalidated for concluding an essay with "Jai Hind," the Madras High Court recently stated that the inclusion of this patriotic phrase did not render the essay invalid. According to Justice Battu Devanand of the Madurai bench, "Jai Hind," meaning victory to India, is a commonly used slogan during patriotic expressions for the motherland. The court emphasized that, given the essay's focus on the importance and conservation of natural resources, incorporating "Jai Hind" was not only relevant but also an appropriate way to summarize the essence of the topic.

Justice Battu Devanand observed that individuals with a sense of patriotism are likely to protect natural resources for the benefit of future generations, as these resources are intricately connected to nature. The court argued that living in harmony with nature is a fundamental aspect of our existence. Therefore, when crafting an essay on the significance and preservation of natural resources, the petitioner's concluding statement, "Jai Hind-Let us live united with nature," was deemed highly relevant and fitting for the question. The court dismissed any notion that this inclusion could be perceived as an impertinent remark or an attempt to reveal the petitioner's identity to the examiner.

The petitioner, Kalpana, had approached the court seeking to overturn the invalidation of her answer sheet and to be considered for appointment to positions within the Combined Civil Services Examination-II Group II Services. Kalpana explained that she discovered her answer paper in Part-B of the examination was invalidated because she had allegedly included irrelevant content.

He referred to Part 16 (iii) of the Instructions to Candidates, wherein it was instructed that candidates should not write irrelevant or impertinent remarks and submitted that since the petitioner had violated the instruction, her answer sheet had been invalidated. 

Regarding the argument, the judge observed, "The ordinary meaning for the word 'impertinent' means not pertinent to a particular matter. While the respondent invalidating the answer paper of the petitioner on the ground that the petitioner made some impertinent remarks at the end of the essay, it ought to have considered the entire essay written by the petitioner".

He added that only a qualified examiner could determine whether the phrase "Jai Hind - Let us live united with nature" could be seen as a suitable conclusion for an essay on the conservation of nature.

The respondent could not take a decision invalidating the answer paper of the petitioner coming to a conclusion that the said words written by the petitioner at the conclusion of the essay were impertinent, Justice Devanand held. 

Consequently, the court instructed the TNPSC to validate Kalpana's answer papers, award marks accordingly, and if she met the required score, appoint her to the relevant post within the Combined Civil Services Examination-II Group-II Services within four weeks from the date of receiving the court order.

Case Title: M.Kalpana v The Secretary

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