Hindustan

• 1. Introduction

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  Hindustan is described in one ancient telling as the "fifteenth domain" created by the god Ahura Mazda. It was, in that telling, a land of "abnormal heat," set apart from the rest of creation. Persian speakers first attached the word to a small strip of territory near a single river. By 1947, when a new nation was drawing its own borders, the same word meant something different to nearly everyone who used it. How did a term for one river basin come to describe an entire subcontinent? And why did the people forming a new republic ultimately reject it as their country's official name?

• 2. Origins of the Name

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  Hindustan derives from the Persian word Hindū, itself cognate with the Sanskrit word Sindhu, meaning "Indus River." Linguists trace part of that shift to a broader sound change in Proto-Iranian speech. The sound s became h sometime between 850 and 600 BCE, according to Asko Parpola. Under that same shift, the Rigvedic phrase sapta sindhava, "the land of seven rivers," became hapta hindu in the Avesta. In 515 BCE, Darius I annexed the Indus Valley, including the region known today as Sindh, and Persian speakers called it Hindu. Under Xerxes, the same term stretched to cover the lands east of the Indus as well. Sometime around the first century CE, Persian speakers added the suffix stan, meaning country or region, turning Hindu into Hindustan. By 262 CE, an inscription of Shapur I at Naqsh-e-Rustam already used Hindustan to refer to Sindh. The historian B. N. Mukherjee has argued that the name began in the lower Indus basin. From there, he says, it gradually spread until it covered more or less the whole subcontinent. The Greek and Roman name India followed a similar path of expansion, and so did the Chinese name Shen-tu. That same drift toward a wider meaning would only accelerate once the Delhi Sultanate took shape in northern India centuries later.

• 3. A Word with Shifting Borders

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  The 10th century text Hudud al-Alam drew Hindustan's borders with some precision. It set the Indus River as the western edge, the Great Sea as the southern limit, and Kamarupa, present-day Assam, as the eastern boundary. For roughly the next ten centuries, both Hind and Hindustan carried this same broad meaning within the subcontinent, along with adjectives like Hindawi, Hindustani, and Hindi. In 1220 CE, the historian Hasan Nizami described Hind as stretching "from Peshawar to the shores of the Indian Ocean, and in the other direction from Siwistan to the hills of Chin." Arab traders, meanwhile, used the expansive term Al-Hind for a much wider zone, running from Tis in western Balochistan, near modern Chabahar, all the way to the Indonesian archipelago. Hindustan itself never picked up that elaborate reach. According to André Wink, the older distinction between Sind, roughly today's western Pakistan, and Hind, the lands east of the Indus, faded. Other sources argue instead that Sind and Hind had been used as synonyms from early times. After Islamic rule arrived in India, they say, both names applied interchangeably to the whole subcontinent. Everything narrowed again once Turko-Persian conquerors arrived in the 11th century. Conquering rulers began calling only the lands under their own control Hindustan, ignoring the rest of the subcontinent. In the early 11th century, a satellite state of the Ghaznavids in the Punjab, ruled from Lahore, was itself named Hindustan. After the Delhi Sultanate was established, the term came to mean north India specifically, above all the Gangetic plains and the Punjab. The scholar Bratindra Nath Mukherjee noted that this narrower sense existed alongside the older, wider one. Some writers, he added, used both meanings at once. Under the Delhi Sultanate, from 1206-1526, and the Mughal Empire, from 1526-1857, Persian-writing historians of the ruling elite drew a further line. Hindustan, in their usage, meant the Muslim-controlled territories of the Doab and nearby regions, while Hind meant the rest of India. The Mughals called their own lands Hindustan, even though they themselves never used the word Mughal to describe that land. As their empire grew, so did the territory the word Hindustan was taken to cover. Texts including the Baburnama and the Ain-i-Akbari nonetheless still used Hindustan for the entire subcontinent. Mughal writers went further still, distinguishing Hindustani, meaning Muslims living in Hindustan, from Hindu, meaning the region's non-Muslim inhabitants. The Delhi Sultanate had used the same split. Its ruler Ghiyas ud din Balban, for instance, commanded troops known as "Hindustani," who were attacked by the people chroniclers called "the Hindus." That same distinction, between Hindustan and Hindu, would resurface far from Delhi, when a king in Nepal claimed the name Hindustan for his own country.

• 4. Hindustan Beyond India

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  Prithvi Narayan Shah, the last Gorkhali king, proclaimed his newly unified Kingdom of Nepal to be Asal Hindustan, or "Real Hindustan." He made the declaration because northern India was, at the time, ruled by Islamic Mughal rulers. The claim was meant to enforce the Hindu social code known as Dharmashastra throughout his reign. It also framed his kingdom as a place fit to be inhabited by Hindus. Prithvi Narayan Shah called northern India by a different name entirely, Mughlan, or "Country of Mughals." He described that region as a land infiltrated by Muslim foreigners. A very different kind of confusion over the word Hindustan was about to arrive with European mapmakers.

• 5. Colonial Confusion

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  In 1792, Rennel produced an atlas titled Memoir of a Map of Hindoostan or the Mogul Empire. Despite that title, the atlas actually depicted the whole Indian subcontinent, blurring the line between Hindustan and the Mughal Empire. J. Bernoulli, on the other hand, understood Hindustan to mean specifically the Mughal Empire. His own French translation carried the title La Carte générale de l'Inde, or General Map of India. British administrators eventually split their own version of Hindustan into two categories. One portion, more often called British India, was governed directly, and the rest was left under native rulers. British officials also believed that Indians themselves used the word Hindustan to mean only North India. An Anglo-Indian Dictionary published in 1886 recorded that belief. Hindustan meant India, the dictionary explained, but in everyday native usage the word had come to represent only the region north of the Narmada River, excluding Bihar and Bengal. That same North India would soon become the site of a much larger argument over what to call an entire nation.

• 6. A Name Divided

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  "Sāre jahāṉ se acchā Hindustān hamārā," wrote the poet Mohammad Iqbal in Tarānah-e-Hindī, "Anthem of the People of Hind." The line translates to "the best of all lands is our Hindustan," and it became a popular patriotic song among independence activists. During the independence movement, Indians referred to their land by three separate names: India, Hindustan, and Bharat. In 1940, the All-India Muslim League passed the Lahore Resolution, demanding sovereignty for Muslim-majority areas in the northwest and northeast of British India. Those areas came to be called Pakistan in popular usage, while the rest of British India, the Dominion of India, came to be called Hindustan. British officials adopted both terms for official use as well. Indian leaders, however, refused to accept this naming. Calling their new dominion "Hindustan" implied it was specifically the land of Hindus, and they objected to that framing. They insisted the new dominion be called India, not Hindustan. Probably for that same reason, "Hindustan" never received official sanction from the Constituent Assembly of India. "Bharat" was adopted as an official name instead, though it was recognized that "Hindustan" would keep being used unofficially. The Indian Armed Forces still use a version of the name today, in the battle cry "Jai Hind."

• 7. One Word, Two Nations

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  Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan and leader of the Muslim League, insisted on calling modern-day India "Hindustan." He did so specifically because of the country's Hindu-majority population. Today, the name is also used more casually to refer to the Republic of India. Slogans built around the word are commonly heard at sports events and other public gatherings involving Indian teams. Companies use it in marketing too, often as a signal of national origin, and it appears in many company names. The word Hindustan also gave its name to a language. Hindustani serves as the language of Hindustan and the lingua franca of the northern Indian subcontinent. It derives from Old Hindi, spoken originally in the Western Uttar Pradesh and Delhi areas. Its two literary standard forms, Modern Standard Hindi and Modern Standard Urdu, are written in different scripts. The Hindi register itself derives its name from that same shortened form, Hind, a word many of its speakers today would never think to call Hindustan.