Explainer: From Bharat, Sindhu, Indus, to India; how the country got its name

The India-Bharat debate was raised again when the official invitation for the G20 dinner had written 'The President of Bharat' instead of the usual 'President of India'. There are also speculations of an official change in the name of the country from India to Bharat. 

Article 1 of the Constitution uses the two names interchangeably, “India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States.” Also, several names such as the Reserve Bank of India and the Indian Railways already have Hindi variants with “Bharatiya” in them.

The Supreme Court dismissed a PIL seeking to remove “India” from the Constitution and retain only Bharat in order to “ensure the citizens of this country…get over the colonial past” saying: “India is already called Bharat in the Constitution itself.”

With all the controversy around the name of the country, do you know how our country got its name? 

The roots of “Bharat”, “Bharata”, or “Bharatvarsha” go back to Puranic literature and Mahabharata. As per Puranas, Bharata is the land between the "sea in the south and the adobe of snow in the north".

Bharata is also the name of the ancient king of legend who was the ancestor of the Rig Vedic tribe of the Bharatas, and by extension, the progenitor of all peoples of the subcontinent.

It is believed that the name Hindustan came from 'Hindu', the Persian cognate form of the Sanskrit 'Sindhu' (Indus). The Achaemenids used the term to identify the lower Indus valley and the suffix 'stan' came to be used with the name to create 'Hindustan' around the first century of the Christian era. 

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The Greeks then transliterated the name 'Hindu' as ‘Indus’. By the time the Macedonian king Alexander invaded India in the 3rd century BC, ‘India’ had come to be identified with the region beyond the Indus.

Even during the reign of the Mughal empire, India was known as 'Hindustan' but after British colonials took over, Hindustan gradually became popular as India.