the word "india" refers to present day pakistan

[k s ahmed]

"Gangadesh" means nothing to me, me being someone from the Deccan. Even though I am an Internationalist I am irritated by someone attaching to me the badlands of UP.

I would wish for you to relate Tipu Sultan's legacy to me. However, Tipu is not only relatable to Deccani culture but also to entire South Asia, as there was no one like him in the entire Subcontinent.

Hyderabad is in South of India ?
Can you open your private messages ?

 

[Indos]

Are the directions similar to - uttar, paschim, purab, dakshin

No, the similarity is only for North. We have Utara (north), Selatan (south), Barat (west), Timur(east).

 

[jamahir]

Hyderabad is in South of India ?

Yes.

Can you open your private messages ?

I am not staff or mod so I don't have PM facility.

I am not even TT.

 

[Chhatrapati]

This is basically one of the longest poorly researched art on a non-issue in PDF. Which basically says, Persians are the first to name India, Europeans came second, Arabs came third, all named it in varying degrees of geography.

This guy used to be in PDF, got perma-banned I don't know why, could've been a great value addition, since the historical revisionism has died down in PDF now it's mostly cherry-picking negative news.

Anyway, from what I read, this is a nice attempt at historical revisionism by picking and choosing what the gallery likes and nobody raises an objection to the so-called 'facts'. Take the mistakes in this para for example.

The word for the Indus river in Sanskrit is “Sindhu” and hence “Sapta Sindhu” meant the land of the seven rivers, which is what the Vedic clans of the Indus Valley called Punjab. Six of these rivers were all tributaries to the Indus river and hence the Indus was viewed as the “Sindhu par excellence”. In the ancient Persian language, a relative of Sanskrit, the initial 'S' of a Sanskrit word was invariably rendered as 'H' and thus Sindhu became Hindhu in Persian. When the word found its way into Greek, the initial ‘H’ was dropped, and it began to appear as the root “Ind”. In this form, it reached Latin and most other European languages, giving rise to “Ind + ia” or India. In Arabic, Persian and Turkish, the “H” was retained and the term “Hindhu” would eventually give rise to Hind and Hindhustan, by which Arabs, Turks, Persians and Mughals would know India. The word Hindhu also reached Europe much later and was used to define the country's indigenous people – the Vedic clans of the Indus Valley (ie. Sindhu, Kasmiras, Kambojas, Gandhara etc).

The word for Indus river in Sanskrit is Sindhu, but he wrongly says Sapta Sindhu means land of seven rivers, but it simply means "seven rivers" or more specifically the tributaries of Indus. Vedic clans never knew anything about Punjab, or Panchanada (actual name of Punjab) this name came nearly a thousand years later.
Sindhu, Kashmira and Kambojas were not vedic Clans, Kambojas were considered 'mlecha' or outcastes.

Carefully missed Megasthenes (290BC), who approximated the shape of India to be a close quadrilateral with sea surrounding it. Besides the Persians never determined the Boundary of their version of H or I ndia. They just considered people living beyond the River as Hindu.

thats why you are not in this league dude..buddhism was here from before As A RELIGION....whereas hinduism existed as a CULTURE before it.. which included many things like caste and roles. the word 'HINDU' was originally used to refer to the people living along the Indus river..IT WAS NOT A RELIGION BACK THEN. HINDUISM later on started developing as a religion DURING VEDIC TIMES....
Also dont confuse Vedic religions with contemporary hinduism. which has many influences from Buddhism.

haha... you guys really can't think beyond having more than one book, that you consider each book as a religion. Well, there must be 4 Vedic religions.

 

[Crusher]

No...did I say that you have to stamp labels on your forehead??

Don't you already have a Chinese label on your forehead?



Sindhu is the local name of the Southern Indus River part....go read a history book.



Source??

There's nothing to "copy".....please get this 3rd grade public Pakistani school thing out of your head....if 2 people call the region a same name...it doesn't mean they're "copying" each other or that one is copying the other....similar names can come out of 2 different places like how Greeks called Indians east of Indus "Indou" and the Persians called the Indians "Hindu".....spoken.....the words are very familiar.

Just because I say Tomayto & you say Tomahto.....doesn't mean we're copying each other...




And what did Sindhis practice before Islam??? They practiced Hinduism so they're Hindus.




LOL

Buddhism came after Hinduism....please stop spreading bs...Buddhism and Hinduism co-existed in modern day Pakistan in ancient times.....and what do you think being a pagan means???

Paganism = the worshipping of multiple god/goddesses......the same thing Hindus do!



I grew up in Pakistan.....although not in a random village with a 300 year old education system.

Again, your making things out of thin air like typical low life Pakistanis when they don't have anything to say.

Seen that all around Pakistan, heck even in old uncles and aunties in the West also.

You are a gangu, hiding behind a fake id.

 

[k s ahmed]

This time you have presented somethjng concrete unlike last time where you kept bullshitting around my Urdu history post , just because it didn't fit the narrative you have been fed and funnily , you couldn't pin point any single mistake. So ,w done this time . You are progressing
So , 7 rivers means 7 rivers and not land of it. How come ? Why would any one mention the number of rivers , without actually associating it with anything else.
Mention your sources of those "corrections"
I would rather truSt a snake than an India. Since 27th february 2019

Historian revisonis is done by Bharat now a days. Don't you agree ? Writing all bullshit posts all over the internet and specially quora, whijc is hub of Bharati "intellectuals " , trying to act educated.

This is basically one of the longest poorly researched art on a non-issue in PDF. Which basically says, Persians are the first to name India, Europeans came second, Arabs came third, all named it in varying degrees of geography.

This guy used to be in PDF, got perma-banned I don't know why, could've been a great value addition, since the historical revisionism has died down in PDF now it's mostly cherry-picking negative news.

Anyway, from what I read, this is a nice attempt at historical revisionism by picking and choosing what the gallery likes and nobody raises an objection to the so-called 'facts'. Take the mistakes in this para for example.

The word for Indus river in Sanskrit is Sindhu, but he wrongly says Sapta Sindhu means land of seven rivers, but it simply means "seven rivers" or more specifically the tributaries of Indus. Vedic clans never knew anything about Punjab, or Panchanada (actual name of Punjab) this name came nearly a thousand years later.
Sindhu, Kashmira and Kambojas were not vedic Clans, Kambojas were considered 'mlecha' or outcastes.

Carefully missed Megasthenes (290BC), who approximated the shape of India to be a close quadrilateral with sea surrounding it. Besides the Persians never determined the Boundary of their version of H or I ndia. They just considered people living beyond the River as Hindu.


haha... you guys really can't think beyond having more than one book, that you consider each book as a religion. Well, there must be 4 Vedic religions.

7u

 

[Chhatrapati]

This time you have presented somethjng concrete unlike last time where you kept bullshitting around my Urdu history post , just because it didn't fit the narrative you have been fed and funnily , you couldn't pin point any single mistake. So ,w done this time . You are progressing
So , 7 rivers means 7 rivers and not land of it. How come ? Why would any one mention the number of rivers , without actually associating it with anything else.
Mention your sources of those "corrections"
I would rather truSt a snake than an India. Since 27th february 2019

Historian revisonis is done by Bharat now a days. Don't you agree ? Writing all bullshit posts all over the internet and specially quora, whijc is hub of Bharati "intellectuals " , trying to act educated.


7u

Next time when you quote, write with good comprehensibility. Try again, this time straight, and to the point. But, then again I don't expect much from someone who copy-pastes articles.

 

[Mighty Lion]

Source /proof ?

See the first page of Indian constitution dated Novemebr 1949.

 

[Indus Pakistan]

Having read up on this over the last few years this is my take on it. There is no doubt that the etymology of India lies in coterminous Pakistan. Specifically root comes from the Indus River. However the exact definition has changed and drifted over time. It might have began in coterminous Pakistan but over time evolved and moved east into Ganga Basin. Over time it even moved into South East Asia and Americas.

However for much of the time India was akin to Europe, America, Balkans, Scandanavia, Iberia, Maghreb. These are regions and not countries. India was a generic name for a looselty defined region. In 1947 the Dominion going as Bharat branded it as a name of a modern republic called India. So it is today. We have to live with that any not get sore with it.

This drift happens all the time. Gay in 1950s mean't happy. Today it means homo. Asia in 50BC mean't Turkey. Today in USA that means Chinese, Japs, Koreans etc. I only have a issue when Indian's try to use this 'drift' to create false narrative or use as a tool to fabricate. Other than that let them be Indians. Red Indians. West Indians. Dutch Indians etc

 

[Pakistansdefender]

Is Pakistan The Real India?

When we refer to India today, are we also referring to the historic concept of India that ancient historians and explorers wrote about? Turns out it’s not. The India of today is not the historic India…ironically Pakistan is the real India. Confused? You should be! Unfortunately European colonialism played a big role in how the term “India” was misused and mislabeled.

Let’s discuss this more in detail by first defining some basic terms to avoid confusion: When ‘Republic of India’ is mentioned, we are referring to modern-day India (1947 to present). When ‘India’ is mentioned, we are referring to the historic definition of India (the Indus Valley) as cited by Vedic, Persian, Greek, Macedonian, Arab, Chinese and Roman sources.

~ Jinnah vs Mountbatten ~
Following independence in 1947, many maps printed in the Republic of India referred to the newly formed country as Bharat – in fact the constitution of India officially names the country as Bharat. The word Bharat derives from Bharatavarsha (the land of the Bharatas), with these Bharatas being one of the early Vedic clans who migrated from the Indus Valley to the Ganges plain sometime between 1200 BCE to 800 BCE. By adopting this name, the new republic in Delhi could, it was argued, lay claim to a revered Arya heritage that was geographically vague enough not to provoke regional jealousies yet doctrinally vague enough not to jeopardize the republic's avowed secularism.

Bharat would seem preferable since the term India was too redolent of colonial disparagement. It also lacked a respectable indigenous pedigree. In the whole colossal corpus of Sanskrit literature, nowhere is the term India ever mentioned. Nor does the term India appear in Buddhist or Jain texts and nor was it used in any of the Republic of India’s numerous languages.

Worse still, if etymologically the term India belonged anywhere, it was not to the republic proclaimed in Delhi by Jawaharlal Nehru but to its rival headed by Mohammed Ali Jinnah in Pakistan. Partition would have a way of dividing the subcontinent's spoils with scant reference to history. No tussle over the word India is reported because Jinnah preferred the newly coined and Islamic-sounding acronym Pakistan. Additionally, he was under the impression that neither state would want to adopt the colonial term India. He only discovered his mistake after Lord Mountbatten, the last British viceroy, had already acceded to Nehru's demand that his state be named Republic of India. Jinnah, according to Mountbatten, “was absolutely furious when he found out that they (Nehru and the Congress Party) were going to call themselves India”.

The use of the word implied a sub-continental primacy that Pakistan would never accept. It also flew in the face of history, since India originally referred exclusively to territory in the vicinity of the Indus River (with which the word is cognate) and its tributaries. Hence India was largely outside the Republic of India and largely within Pakistan.

~ European usage of the word India ~
Reservations about the word India, which convinced Jinnah no nation would use it, stemmed from its historical usage among European colonialists. India or Indies (its more generalized derivative) had come, as if by definition, to denote an acquisition rather than a specific territory. India was yet conceptually concrete to Europeans: it was somewhere to be coveted as an intellectual curiosity, a military pushover and an economic bonanza. While the historic term of India exclusively referred to the Indus Valley (today known as Pakistan), the European definition of India was used to describe acquired territories across the world. Let’s go over some of them:

*British East India Company – present-day Bangladesh, Republic of India (Ganges plain & Deccan)

*British West Indies – The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, Antigua, Virgin Islands, Dominica, Montserrat, Grenada, Cayman Islands, Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago

*Dutch East India Company – present-day Bangladesh, Republic of India (Ganges plain & Deccan)

*Dutch East Indies – present day Indonesia, Brunei & Malaysia

*Dutch West Indies – present-day Suriname & Netherlands Antilles

*French East India Company – present-day Puducherry

*French West India Company – present-day Dominica, Grenada, Guadeloupe & Haiti

*Portuguese East India Company – present-day Goa

*Portuguese East Indies – present-day Malacca (Malaysia) and Macau (China)

*Casa da India – managed all overseas territories including Brazil & Angola

*Spanish West Indies – present-day Puerto Rico, Cuba, Venezuela & Dominican Republic

*Spanish East Indies – present-day Philippines, Guam, and Papua New Guinea

*Danish East India Company – present-day Bangladesh, Republic of India (Bengal & Tamil Nadu)

*Danish West Indies – present-day US Virgin Islands

*Swedish East India Company – present-day Bangladesh & Bengal (but never lasted long).

You get the picture...India was geographically imprecise among the Europeans. This is in stark contrast to terms like Africa, Arabia, Britain, Scandinavia or America, where the territory was well defined. The term India on the other hand was indeed moveable if one took account of all the “Native Indians” in the Americas, and all the overseas Indies. Tulane University professor Rosanne Adderly says the phrase "West Indies" distinguished the territories encountered by Columbus or claimed by Spain from discovery claims by other powers in [Asia's] "East Indies". The term "Indies" was eventually used by all European nations to describe their own acquired territories in the world.

~ Historic India ~
Now that we have a clear picture of how the word India was misused by Europeans, let’s delve deeper into where the term India comes from and what it actually defines. The first occurrence of the word sets the trend. It's an inscription found at Persepolis, capital of the Achaemenid Empire of Darius I in Persia dated from 518 BCE, where it lists his numerous domains including that of “Hi(n)du”. Where does the word Hindu comes from? Let’s investigate.

The word for the Indus river in Sanskrit is “Sindhu” and hence “Sapta Sindhu” meant the land of the seven rivers, which is what the Vedic clans of the Indus Valley called Punjab. Six of these rivers were all tributaries to the Indus river and hence the Indus was viewed as the “Sindhu par excellence”. In the ancient Persian language, a relative of Sanskrit, the initial 'S' of a Sanskrit word was invariably rendered as 'H' and thus Sindhu became Hindhu in Persian. When the word found its way into Greek, the initial ‘H’ was dropped, and it began to appear as the root “Ind”. In this form, it reached Latin and most other European languages, giving rise to “Ind + ia” or India. In Arabic, Persian and Turkish, the “H” was retained and the term “Hindhu” would eventually give rise to Hind and Hindhustan, by which Arabs, Turks, Persians and Mughals would know India. The word Hindhu also reached Europe much later and was used to define the country's indigenous people – the Vedic clans of the Indus Valley (ie. Sindhu, Kasmiras, Kambojas, Gandhara etc).

On the strength of a slightly earlier Persian inscription, which makes no mention of Hindhu, it is assumed that the Indus Valley was added to Darius' Achaemenid Empire much earlier than 520 BCE. This earlier inscription mentions “Gadara” (or Gandhara), a Buddhist state located in an arc reaching the western Punjab through Khyber Pakhtunkhwa towards Kabul and perhaps into southern Afghanistan (where it is believed Kandahar got its name from). According to Xenophon and Herodotus, Cyrus The Great had conquered Gandhara, which means the first Achaemenid invasion may have taken place as early as the mid-sixth century BCE (~550 BCE) rather than 518 BCE. This invasion seems likely from a reference to Cyrus dying of a wound inflicted by the enemy. The enemies were the “Derbikes” who enjoyed the support of the "Sindhu" people and were supplied by war-elephants. In Persian and Greek minds alike, the association of "Sindhu" with war elephants was thereafter almost as significant as its connection with the mighty Indus River. To Alexander of Macedon, following in the Achaemanids' footsteps two centuries later, the river would be a geographical curiosity, but the elephants were a military obsession.

If Gandhara was already under Achaemenid rule, Darius' Sindhu territory must have been beyond it, and so to the south or east. Later Persian records refer to Sindhu giving rise to the word Sind, today Pakistan's southern most province. It seems unlikely though that the present-day Sindh borders were that of Sindhu in the late sixth century BCE, since Darius subsequently found it necessary to send a naval expedition to explore Sindhu. Flowing through the middle of the Indus River would surely have been familiar to any naval explorer of the region. More probably then the territory of Sindhu lay east of Gandhara and in all likelihood would be the region between eastern Punjab and Thar Desert. Sindhu territory thus occupied what is today Cholistan and Thar (southern Punjab and northern Sindh provinces). Both Gandhara and Sindhu would later on become provinces or "satrapy" of the Persian Empire.

Under Xerxes (Darius' successor), troops from the satrapy of Gandhara and Sindhu were reportedly serving in the Achaemenid Army. These people were mostly archers, although cavalry and chariots are also mentioned. They fought as far as eastern Europe and some were present at the Persians' victory over Leonidas and his Spartans at Thermopylae, and then at the decisive defeat by the Greeks at Plataea. Through these and other less fraught contacts between Greeks and Persians, Greek writers like Herodotus gleaned some idea of India.

Compared to the intervening lands of Anatolia and Iran, it appeared a veritable paradise of exotic plenty. Herodotus told of an immense population and the richest soil imaginable from which kindly ants, smaller than dogs but bigger than foxes, threw up hillocks of pure gold dust. The ants may have intrigued entomologists, but the gold was registered in political circles. With several rivers to rival the Nile and behemoths from which to give battle (war-elephants), it was clearly a land of fantasy as well as wealth. Herodotus, of course, knew only of the Indus Valley and that too by hearsay. Hence, he did not report that the land beyond the sensational extent of the Thar Desert. Hence, the Indus Valley was considered “terra firma” or the end of the world to Greeks and Europeans.

In abbreviated form, Herodotus' history circulated widely throughout ancient Greece and Europe - and a hundred years after his death, people would still be reading his writings, including an avid teenager named Alexander of Macedon, who knew it well enough to quote its stories. It wouldn’t be until Alexander’s arrival in the Indus Valley (~330 BCE), that people would discover a land beyond the Indus Valley (the Gangetic plain and Deccan...or what is today the Republic of India). Up until this point, the Indus Valley was considered “one end” of the ends of the world. The rest as they say is history.

~ Moving Forward ~
If Pak Studies had been written properly, today we would not be having this discussion. It’s very easy to blame European colonialists for disparaging the word India, but why haven’t we claimed this name? What are we sitting around for twiddling our thumbs for? Pakistan should have done to the Republic of India as Greece did to the Republic of Macedonia.

The Macedonia naming dispute is a political dispute regarding the use of the name Macedonia between Greece and the Republic of Macedonia, formerly a federal unit of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. After the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991, the former Socialist Republic of Macedonia gained independence in 1991, naming itself Macedonia. Citing historical and territorial concerns resulting from the ambiguity between the Republic of Macedonia, the adjacent Greek region of Macedonia and the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedon which falls mostly within Greek Macedonia, Greece opposed the use of the name "Macedonia" by the Republic of Macedonia without a geographical qualifier such as "Northern Macedonia" for use by all and for all purposes. As millions of ethnic Greeks identify themselves as Macedonians, unrelated to the Slavic people who are associated with the Republic of Macedonia, Greece further objects to the use of the term "Macedonian" for the neighboring country's largest ethnic group and its language. The Republic of Macedonia is accused of appropriating symbols and figures that are historically considered part of Greek culture such as the Vergina Sun and Alexander the Great, and of promoting the irredentist concept of a United Macedonia, which involves territorial claims on Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, and Serbia. The dispute has escalated to the highest level of international mediation, involving numerous attempts to achieve a resolution. In 1995, the two countries formalized bilateral relations and committed to start negotiations on the naming issue, under the auspices of the United Nations. Until a solution is found, the provisional reference "the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" (sometimes unofficially abbreviated as FYROM) is used by international organizations and states that do not recognize translations of the constitutional name Republic of Macedonia. UN members, and the UN as a whole, have agreed to accept any final agreement on a new name resulting from negotiations between the two countries.

Similarly, Pakistan should have done the same to the Republic of India, which has no valid claim on the term India – neither geographically (Indus Valley vs Ganges plain), neither religiously (Vedic beliefs vs Brahminism) and neither culturally. The only reason the Republic of India is named India is purely due to European colonialist ignorance and greed. It remains to be seen if Pakistan would ever legally question the usage of the term India, however, it is our responsibility as a nation to educate not only our own people, but also the world. The Indus Valley is the true India…always has been and always will be.

Feel free to tag and share this post with everyone you know. I look forward to debates and questions and other views.


www.facebook.com/AncientPakistan.pk/posts/1652112598182051

One day when can get mature enough we can name us indus proudly.
And carry two name Islamic Republic of pakistan and Indus. Just like other countries have two names.

 

[W.11]

Carefully missed Megasthenes (290BC), who approximated the shape of India to be a close quadrilateral with sea surrounding it.

also greek historians saying chandragupta conquered entire ''india'', some historians also point to nanda references as indian king involved in west asian affairs. i have also pointed chinese later han hou hanshu sources.

regards

 

[Indus Pakistan]

Carefully missed Megasthenes (290BC), who approximated the shape of India to be a close quadrilateral with sea surrounding it

Indeed although he never used the name 'India' which is a English. In Megasthenes time even the English language hade not evolved. Also he defined a region, a geography rather than a country as we understand it today. Something like Magreb, Balkans, Europe etc

The issue is not the name or even the etymology. I only have a problem with this when citizens of the modern state Bharat use the tag 'India' to claim anything and everything that name carried from the past. That is mental gymnastics intended to apporopriate the heritage/history of a entire geography as belonging to the Bharat Republic.That is the issue. It's simple cheating.

It would be like modern Romanians claim everything Roman because they carry the name 'Roman-ia' and then tell the Italians they did not even exist 150 years ago.

 

[Mace]

Indeed although he never used the name 'India' which is a English. In Megasthenes time even the English language hade not evolved. Also he defined a region, a geography rather than a country as we understand it today. Something like Magreb, Balkans, Europe etc

The issue is not the name or even the etymology. I only have a problem with this when citizens of the modern state Bharat use the tag 'India' to claim anything and everything that name carried from the past. That is mental gymnastics intended to apporopriate the heritage/history of a entire geography as belonging to the Bharat Republic.That is the issue. It's simple cheating.

It would be like modern Romanians claim everything Roman because they carry the name 'Roman-ia' and then tell the Italians they did not even exist 150 years ago.

What is your confusion? Pakistan was partitioned from British India. There was no Pakistani before 1947.

 

[Indus Pakistan]

What is your confusion? Pakistan was partitioned from British India

And what is your confusion. British India was not Indian republic. What you deluded. Look at flow chart below. Should make it clear even to a kindergarten kid.

Fact: Myanmar, Bangla, India, Pakistan are equal successor states of British India.

 

[Kuru]

At least now Pakistanis started believing that Pakistan was part of Ancient India. So there's a hope of them getting rid of identity crisis after all.