Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Malik Ambar: The African slave who built Aurangabad and ruined the game for Mughals in the Deccan

The story of Malik Ambar, an African slave turned warrior, is an unusual one. Sold and bought several times by slave dealers during his youth, fate brought him miles away from his home in Ethiopia to India.

Malik Ambar was known by the name of ‘Chapu’ until he fell into the hands of slave dealers. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Among several allegorical paintings created by Abu’l Hasan, a chief painter at Emperor Jahangir’s court, is one depicting the Mughal sovereign shooting arrows at the severed head of an Abyssinian slave. Created somewhere in 1620, the painting is a perfect depiction of Jahangir’s furore towards a man considered his arch-nemesis, the one he lambasts as “the ill-starred” and “the black fated” and who, throughout his life, remained a thorn in the flesh for the Empire in the Deccan.

The story of Malik Ambar, an African slave turned warrior, is an unusual one. Sold and bought several times by slave dealers during his youth, fate brought him miles away from his home in Ethiopia to India. In India, not only did Ambar get his freedom back, but he also rose up the social ladder, got an army, vast estates, and founded a city that today goes by the name ‘Aurangabad’.

Sold and resold many times

Born in 1548 in southern Ethiopia’s Khambata region, Ambar is believed to have been associated with the Oromo tribe, an ethnic group that now represents over 35 per cent of the country’s population. He was known by the name of ‘Chapu’ until he fell into the hands of slave dealers. Historians believe either he was captured during a war or was sold into the trade by his poor parents due to poverty.

Soon, the young Abyssinian was paraded with other slaves in markets across the Middle East where he was bought by an Arab. Thereafter, he was bought and resold on several occasions.

Citing a contemporary European source and Persian Chronicles, Historian Richard M Eaton, in his book A Social History of the Deccan, 1300–1761 Eight Indian Lives, writes that Chapu was sold in the Red Sea port of Mocha (in Yemen) for the sum of eighty Dutch guilders. From there, he was taken to Baghdad and “sold to a prominent merchant who, recognising Chapu’s superior intellectual qualities, raised and educated the youth, converted him to Islam, and gave him the name ‘Ambar’.”

In the early 1570s, Ambar was taken to the Deccan as southern India was then called. Here he was purchased by a certain Chengiz Khan. Khan himself was a former slave who had risen to hold the office of Peshwa, or chief minister of the Nizam Shahi sultanate of Ahmadnagar in India.

The rise of the African slave

Ambar was amongst one of a thousand other ‘Habshi’ (a term used to refer to members of various ethnic communities from the Abyssinian highlands) purchased by Khan, when fate brought him to the Deccan.

Eaton notes that the Deccan sultanates were systematically recruiting the Habshis as slaves in the 16th century. They were highly valued for their physical strength and loyalty, and were frequently put to mThe 14th-century Medieval Moroccan scholar and traveller Ibn Battuta in his writings mention that the Habshis were “guarantors of safety” for ships travelling in the Indian Ocean. He notes that the slaves had such a reputation that even if one was on board, the ship would be avoided by pirates.

However, in Deccan society, the slaves did not have a permanent status. Upon the death of their masters, they were usually “set free” and served as per their free will in service of powerful commanders in the Empire. Some even reached such highs that they were soon seen as political game-changers, as it happened in the case of Ambar.ilitary service.

Five years after taking him on, Ambar’s master and patron Chenghiz Khan died, and Ambar was set free. For the next 20 years, he served as a mercenary for the Sultan of neighbouring Bijapur. It is here he was given charge of a small troop and bestowed with the title “Malik”.

‘Ambar’s land’

In 1595, Malik Ambar returned to the Ahmadnagar Sultanate and served under another Habshi lord. This was the time when Mughal Emperor Akbar laid eyes on the Deccan and began a significant military expedition towards Ahmednagar. This was also Akbar’s last expedition before he passed away.

“It was really during the Mughal invasion of Ahmednagar in the late 1590s that Malik Ambar truly came into his own,” historian Manu S Pillai writes in his book Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji.

“At the time of the first siege, he had less than 150 cavalrymen in his command, and he joined himself to a more established Habshi lord. But as war shred to pieces the nobility, and challenged the loyalties of large numbers of men, within a year Ambar held in his control 3,000 warriors; by 1600, this number rose to almost 7,000, now including Marathas and other Dakhnis – a ‘multiracial, multi-ethnic force that broadly shared a regional identity distinct from the northern Mughals’,” writes Pillai.

In the coming years, Ambar married one of his daughters to a 20-year-old scion of Ahmadnagar’s royal family in neighbouring Bijapur, projecting him as a future ruler of the Nizam Shahi state against the Mughals.

“Cleverly, using muscle when it was needed and trickery when that suited his ends, Ambar emerged as the principal force in what used to be the Ahmednagar state. At the height of his power, it was said that the Nizam Shahi of the western Deccan was simply referred to as ‘Ambar’s land’,” Pillai writes.

Along with the Marathas, Ambar’s feud with the Mughals – now led by Emperor Jahangir – lasted for decades. He was widely known for unleashing guerrilla warfare on the Mughal army.

Eaton’s book mentions that ‘general after general’ were dispatched from Delhi towards the south to beat the Ethiopian, but failed. “The more times he defeated superior Mughal armies, the more men rallied to his side; in 1610, he even managed to expel the Mughals from Ahmednagar fort,” Eaton notes.

Builder of Aurangabad

Apart from being an able fighter, Ambar was also a fine administrator. In 1610, after briefly expelling the Mughals from Ahmednagar, Ambar established a new capital, a city named Khirki (present-day Aurangabad in Maharashtra) for the sultanate.

The city eventually became home to over 2,00,000 people including the Marathas after whom several suburbs such as Malpura, Khelpura, Paraspura, and Vithapura came to be named.

“It was around 1610-11 that Ambar made Khirki his base, and this slowly emerged as a major urban centre, where like Ambar, much of his Maratha nobility and military leadership also built houses and developed localities,” Pillai says in an email interview with Indianexpress.com. “Waterworks and an underground canal were among the early developments he brought about, which is how a lot of cities in the dry Deccan area were able to expand. We see it with Bijapur as well, a few decades before, and this required considerable expertise in engineering and planning.”

In the coming wars, the city along with the Ahmadnagar Sultanate fell to the Mughals. It was under the reign of the 17th-century Mughal monarch, Aurangzeb, that the city came to be renamed as ‘Aurangabad’. “They too added to the city’s infrastructure and allowed the city to grow. This included improving and expanding the waterworks. But in the middle, there were also one or two devastating attacks on the city that ruined much of its beauty, even though it managed to recover and rebuildPillai says Ambar in building a new city in the first place seemed to mark his legacy. “This was, after all, a time of great builders and it would not be surprising that the Habshi warlord also wished to follow in that tradition. He is also supposed to have built both the Jama Masjid and Kali Masjid in Aurangabad, as the city was later named by the Mughals.”

The Abyssinian is also credited with establishing a more efficient land revenue model of the time which was used by the Marathas under Shivaji, whose grandfather (Maloji) was a close aide of Ambar. In years to come, Shivaji in his grand epic poem ‘Sivabharata’ also mentioned Ambar, referring him “as brave as the sun”. itself with time,” says Pillai.

Ambar died in 1626 and was laid to rest in a mausoleum, designed by him in Khuldabad.

Surprisingly, upon his death, Emperor Jahangir’s surrogate diarist, Mutamid Khan made an entry noting: “He had no equal in warfare, in command, in sound judgment, and in administration. History records no other instance of an Abyssinian slave arriving at such eminence.”

Further reading– ‘A History of the Deccan.’ In Sultans of Deccan India: Opulence and Fantasy, 1500–1700,’ by Richard M Eaton; ‘Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji,’ by Manu S Pillai; A Social History of the Deccan, 1300–1761 Eight Indian Lives by Richard M Eaton

Source: Indian Express, 15/05/2020

Black death: The great plague that killed millions, and feudalism

In Europe though, the catastrophic plague eventually played out to be a boon for some -- the serfs who were legally committed to providing labour to landlords in exchange for allowing them to live and work in their lands.

In autumn of 1347 CE, when a fleet of 12 ships reached the docks of a Sicilian port, people gathered there were horrified to meet with a pile of corpses. Most of the sailors in the ships were brought dead, and those alive were a shocking sight, all covered in boils dripping blood. While the ships were immediately moved out of the harbour, the demon of a disease it brought aboard was there to stay, claiming the lives of nearly one-third of the European population in the next three years.

The ‘Black death’ as it came to be called later, spread out from Italy to most parts of Southern Europe. By 1348 CE, it had reached England, France and Spain, and by1349 CE, it made an appearance in the Scandinavian countries while making its way to more remote countries like Iceland and Greenland. It also hit the great Arab cities of Alexandria, Cairo, and Tunis. The plague caused by Yersinia Pestis, the same bacterium that caused the Justinian Plague in the sixth century, played out as the biggest human tragedy of medieval Europe.

The scholar, Ibn Khaldun, who was a contemporary witness to the plague, wrote of its magnitude: “Civilisations both in the East and West were visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish… the entire inhabited world changed.”

In Europe though, the catastrophic plague eventually played out to be a boon for some — the serfs who were legally committed to providing labour to landlords in exchange for allowing them to live and work in their lands. The impact of the plague was such that it put an end to the feudal system of economy that persisted in Europe for centuries, allowing the serfs to move up the social and economic ladder.

The Silk route origins of the plague

Between the second and fifteenth centuries of the Common Era, a network of land and sea routes connecting the East and West, known as the ‘Silk route’ was the prime source of economic, cultural and religious interactions between communities. The route carried everything from spices to languages, and is believed to have been the one carrying the disastrous plague as well.

The rise in trading activities during the medieval era is known to have been one of the foremost reasons for the widespread impact of the plague. Flea infected rodents travelled along with freight to China, India, the Middle East, and Europe.

“To many Europeans, the pestilence seemed to be the punishment of a wrathful creator,” writes historian John Kelly, in his book ‘The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time’. “To many others, the only credible explanation for death on so vIn its most common form, the Bubonic plague showed itself on people when egg-shaped swellings appeared on their bodies. Bruise Like purplish splotches often appeared on the chest, back, or neck, and were referred to as ‘God’s tokens’. These tokens became inspiration for the popular children’s rhyme that remains common till today- ‘Ring around the rosie, pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes (hemorrhages), we all fall down’. A stench from the body and delirium were other symptoms associated with the disease.

The 14th century Italian chronicler, Agnolo di Tura, wrote what he saw of the plague. “And the victims died almost immediately. They would swell beneath the armpits and in their groins, and fall over while talking… And in many places in Siena great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of dead.”

Extremes of human behaviour resulted. While on one hand there were those who blamed and murdered Jews for the outbreak of the disease, there were also those who put their lives at stake to take care of the plague victims.

Close to 25 million people are believed to have been wiped out by the early 1350s, which was approximately one-third of the European continent. The plague lingered on for centuries, manifesting itself in recurrent outbreaks. One of the measures adopted for checking its spread was to hold arriving sailors on their ships for 30 or 40 days before allowing them to move around- the practise which was the origin of the term ‘quarantine’.

A boon to the serfs

The strongest impact of the plague though was in the way it overturned the economic structure prevalent in Europe. Europe in the 14th century was a feudal society, with the king at the apex, and peasant labourers at the lowest rung of the social ladder. In the middle were the landlords, on whose land the peasants were given the right to live and work. In return the peasants were expected to pay part of their harvest produce to the landlords as rent. It meant that the landlords could survive on the service and produce of the peasants, while for the latter it resulted in never-ending cycles of unpaid work and no hope to rise up the social ladder.ast a scale was human malfeasance,” he adds.

The drastic reduction in the population of the continent after the plague resulted in dire shortage of labourers to work the lands. The economic historian Walter Scheidel notes in his book: “Such a shortage of labourers ensued that the humble turned up their noses at employment, and could scarcely be persuaded to serve the eminent for triple wages.”

The unprecedented sharp rise in wages became a cause of worry to the landlords who requested the monarchy to intervene. In June 1349, the Crown in England passed the Ordinance of Labourers, mandating that all those who do not own lands and are not involved in trade practices be obliged to take up employment offered and accept wages as applicable five or six years ago. The Ordinance also prohibited any landlord from offering higher wages.

Despite the order though, wages continued to show an upward trend, resulting in the Crown passing a second ordinance in 1351.

Each of these measures failed to contain the new found economic freedom of the serfs. The contemporary ecclesiastical historian, Henry Knighton wrote of the situation in his chronicles: “The workers were so above themselves and so bloody-minded that they took no notice of the king’s command. If anyone wished to hire them, he had to submit to their demands, for either his fruit and standing corn would be lost or he had to pander to the arrogance and greed of the worker.”

“For all its severity, the initial wave of the Black Death alone would not have been sufficient to cause urban real wages to double and to sustain this increase for several generations,” writes Scheidel. He goes on to note repeated plague visitations well into the late medieval period, ensuring that wages remained high. There were about 15 in England alone between the 1370s and 1480s, 15 in the Netherlands between 1360 and 1494, and 14 in Spain between 1391 and 1457.

Consequently, feudalism in Europe came to an end by the 15th century. As Scheidel rightly described in his work: “Society experienced a wholesale reversal of the earlier trend that had made the landlord class stronger and richer and most people poorer: now it was the other way around.”

Further reading- ‘The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century’, by Walter Scheidel; The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time; by John Kelly; In the wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the world it made, by Norman F. Cantor.

Source: Indian Express, 8/05/2020

Friday, June 12, 2020

Quote of the Day

“Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.”

‐ Ralph Waldo Emerson

“प्रकृति की गति अपनाएं: उसका रहस्य है धीरज।”

‐ राल्फ वाल्डो इमर्सन

Living a virtual life in real time, courtesy corona

How happy they are with their virtual classes but they miss their friends terribly and evenings turn into drama parties for parents to handle

The past month has seen the social media content policy debate flare up to dizzying heights. At the centre of the controversy is United States (US) President Donald Trump, who suggested on Twitter that implementing mail-in ballot voting for the presidential election would rig the US elections this November. The underlying tensions he is facing are clear — many people who would likely use mail-in ballots to vote in the presidential election would likely favour Democrats. So he claimed, rather falsely, that mail-ins are “substantially fraudulent”.

Twitter’s response was forceful. The offence was clear: Trump’s tweet constituted harmful and politically-charged misinformation about voting, which is the most sanctified process in any democracy. For the first time, Twitter flagged a Trump tweet as potentially misleading — a bold act against a sitting president.

Trump hit back at the company. Within days, he issued an executive order that attempts to wrangle content moderation authority away from the industry and into the hands of the government. The presidential order is, according to most legal scholars, lazy and desperate. But it is perhaps one of the most legally challengeable policies in that it attempts to enforce overstepping the longstanding Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which grants immunity to Internet firms, including social media networks, over user-generated content that appears on the platform.

Refreshingly, Twitter did not back down. The next day, the company flagged yet another one of Trump’s tweets for inciting violence, this time on the George Floyd protests. Since then, Trump has raised the stakes, lashing out at Antifa (the anti-fascist movement who he blames for the protests) and describing the protesters as anarchists. This is significant as the company has essentially now asserted that he has both disseminated disinformation and incited violence.

If we were to judge Twitter’s actions, we have to say that the company has chosen to favour democratic interest over all else. Juxtapose Twitter’s response with the approach Facebook has taken — with chief executive Mark Zuckerberg suggesting that he does not wish to be the arbiter of truth. It now emerges that these two companies represent diametrically opposite forces. The employee walkouts and viral resignations in protest of Facebook’s shoulder-shrugging at Trump’s tweets are illustrative.

As many have argued, Facebook’s notion of protecting free speech is not protective at all. In fact, the policies espoused by Zuckerberg in Georgetown late last year are entirely in his firm’s commercial interest. It is quite possible that they have nothing to do with protecting users’ freedom of speech. In deciding not to flag or take down offensive content, Facebook protects its business. The company can leave offensive material, which is often among the most engaging content. This makes sure that it does not avoid alienating large constituencies that might see the president’s tweets favourably; and doesn’t voluntarily trigger the slippery slope of content regulation by setting policy boundaries itself.

At the heart of these issues is a fundamental tension: What does democracy mean when practised over digital platforms? Both Indian and western democratic systems have always had two fundamentally opposed ideals in institutionalism versus free speech. On the one hand, we have created institutional structures such as the government, the political system, and the radically capitalistic economic regime to build an intellectually free and open society. Over time, though, institutions may grow to enjoy excess power and germinate overbearing economic and social exploitation; we require individual intellectual independence — through freedom of expression — to push back on the undue concentration of power.

ndeed, free speech has always been applied to challenge governments and industries. But the commercial regime underlying the likes of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter has turned this checks-and-balance system internalised within functioning democracies upside down. Before the modern media age, citizens were naturally forced to be accountable for their speech — whether in print media, television, or public protest formats. Without the courage to publicly back your words, you couldn’t say them. Now, though, a new kind of economic logic has emerged that favours the algorithmic maximisation of consumer-media engagement at the expense of everything else. Such effects often favour the virality of extreme content because of its propensity to engage the mind. Thus, while Zuckerberg and his company hold to an even-harder free speech line, we must acknowledge that the norms of free speech themselves have been revolutionised by Facebook itself.

Inevitably, Trump’s clash with Twitter will place more pressure on policymakers, particularly members of Congress, to change the way content regulation works. Trump’s actions clarify that we need to set standards on speech issues so that our democratic norms do not topple. The light at the end of the tunnel is emerging in the effort to reconstruct Section 230. This is a growing sentiment, including with both the President and his Democratic opponent Joe Biden. As this discussion progresses, Facebook will increasingly be seen as a media entity as opposed to agnostic global platforms — just fruits, perhaps, for a company that ranks and orders users’ online news and social feeds to determine what they see.

When seen in this light, Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey and his company, who have been far more proactive and progressive than Zuckerberg and Facebook, should receive high praise. Dorsey is telegraphing the actions of policymakers, projecting that there are elements of the democratic process that we should do our best to protect. This explains several of his and Twitter’s recent actions — the ban on political advertising, the statements against the marketised micro-targeting of communities with political communications, and this bevy of battles with President Trump included.

We can only hope, in our desire to preserve the structure of democracy as best as possible, that the other dominant digital platforms will follow suit.

Dipayan Ghosh is the co-director of the Digital Platforms & Democracy Project, Harvard. He worked at Facebook, and was also an economic adviser in the Obama White House. He is author of the forthcoming book:Terms of Disservice: How Silicon Valley is Destructive by Design

Source: Hindustan Times, 11/06/2020

Economic & Political Weekly: Table of Contents

Vol. 55, Issue No. 23, 06 Jun, 2020

Editorials

Migration Commission

Employment Insecurities in the Service Sector

From the Editor's Desk

Black Lives Matter

Gopal Guru

From 50 Years Ago

From 50 Years Ago: Rice Over Race

Alternative Standpoint

Of Whales and Wheels - Buddhist Lessons in Democracy

V Geetha

Commentary

Book Reviews

Insights into the Condition of Elderly in India

Tulika Tripathi

Women in the Puranas

Arshia Sattar

Perspectives

Understanding Citizenship and Refugees’ Status in India

Prachi Raj

Special Articles

PM-KISAN and the Adoption of Modern Agricultural Technologies

Deepak Varshney, Pramod Kumar Joshi, Devesh Roy, Anjani Kumar

The Naga Homeland Movement - Historical Trajectory and Contemporary Relevance

Kedilezo Kikhi

Use of Algorithmic Techniques for Law Enforcement - An Analysis of Scrutability for Juridical Purposes

Hans Varghese Mathews, Amber Sinha

Engage Articles

Digital Surveillance Systems to Combat COVID-19 May Do More Harm Than Good

Kritika Bhardwaj

Changes to Labour Laws by State Governments Will Lead to Anarchy in the Labour Market

K R Shyam Sundar, Rahul Suresh Sapkal

Open Data in India: In a Restrictive Copyright Regime, Voluntary Organisations Pitch in to Make Data Accessible

Thejesh G N

What Ails India's Data Economy?

Srikanth Lakshmanan

Current Statistics

Appointments/Programmes/Announcements

Advertisments

Letters

On Gautam Navlakha’s Jail Transfer

Radhika Chitkara, Vikas Kumar

Structuring Bailouts during Covid-19

Ayush Arora, Parul Garg

From Meluha to Hindustan, the many names of India and Bharat

Several nomenclatures have been applied across different points in time, and from multiple socio-political points of view, to describe the geographical entity or parts of it that we now know as India.

“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.”

These words were written by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru in ‘The discovery of India’, which he penned down as a tribute to the rich cultural heritage of the country that was just at the brink of being freed from the clutches of British rule. Nehru is believed to have consciously taken note of the different names that went into describing the idea of India, and the unity of its people that superseded all of them. Four years after the book was published, the Constitution of an Independent India came into force, its first Article, dropped one of the three names that Nehru had identified with the country, as it read- “India, that is Bharat, shall be a union of states’.

More than seven decades later, the nomenclature of the country, has once again become a topic of debate as a petition filed by a Delhi-based businessman, seeks to amend Article 1 of the Constitution, arguing that “The removal of the English name though appears symbolic, will instill a sense of pride in “In fact, the word India being replaced with Bharat would justify the hard fought freedom by our ancestors,” claims the petition.

“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.,” writes social scientist Catherine Clémentin-Ojha, in her article, ‘‘India, that is Bharat…’: One Country, Two Names’. For that matter, apart from the three most common names — India, Bharat, and Hindustan — used to designate the South Asian subcontinent, there are several other nomenclatures applied across different points in time, and from multiple socio-political points of view, to describe the geographical entity or parts of it that we now know as India. Consequently, when the Constitution of the country was being prepared, a heated argument had ensued with regard to the naming of the country in a way that would be most suitable to the sentiments of its multicultural, vivacious population.

The many names of India

It is important to note that in geographical terms, the space that is today referred to as India, was never a constant entity in the preceding centuries. However, scholars have often pointed out that one of the oldest names used in association with the Indian subcontinent was Meluha that was mentioned in the texts of ancient Mesopotamia in the third millennium BCE, to refer to the Indus Valley Civilisation.our own nationality, especially for the future generations to come”.

“Meluha, it is now generally agreed, was the name by which the Indus civilisation was known to the Mesopotamians: Meluha was the most distant of the trio of foreign lands, and the imports from Meluha mentioned in Sumerian and Akkadian texts, such as timbers, carnelian, and ivory, match the resources of the Harappan realms,” writes archaeologist Jane R. McIntosh in her book, ‘The ancient Indus Valley: New perspectives.’

But Meluha, of course, had lost currency way before modern political systems developed in the region. The earliest recorded name that continues to be debated is believed to be ‘Bharat’, ‘Bharata’, or ‘Bharatvarsha’, that is also one of the two names prescribed by the Indian constitution. While its roots are traced to Puranic literature, and to the Hindu epic, Mahabharata, the name’s popularity in modern times is also due to its sustained usage during the freedom struggle in slogans such as ‘Bharat mata ki jai’.

Bharata, writes Ojha, refers to the “supraregional and subcontinental territory where the Brahmanical system of society prevails”. Geographically, the Puranas mentioned Bharata to be situated between the ‘sea in the south and the abode of snow in the north’. Its shape and dimensions varied across different ancient texts. In that sense, Bharata, as explained by Ojha, was more of a religious and socio-cultural entity, rather than a political or a geographical one. Yet, on another note, Bharata is also believed to be the mythical founder of the race.

Apart from Bharat though, there are few other names associated with the country as well that trace their roots to Vedic literature. For instance, ‘Aryavarta’, as mentioned in the Manusmriti, referred to the land occupied by the Indo-Aryans in the space between the Himalayas in the north and the Vindhya mountain ranges in the south. The name ‘Jambudvipa’ or the ‘land of the Jamun trees’ has also appeared in several Vedic texts, and is still used in a few Southeast Asian countries to describe the Indian subcontinent.

Jain literature on the other hand, also lays claim to the name Bharat, but believes that the country was called ‘Nabhivarsa’ before. “King Nabhi was the father of Rishabhanatha (the first tirthankara) and grandfather of Bharata,” writes geographer Anu Kapur in her book, ‘Mapping place names of India’.

The name ‘Hindustan’ was the first instance of a nomenclature having political undertones. It was first used when the Persians occupied the Indus valley in the seventh century BCE. Hindu was the Persianised version of the Sanskrit Sindhu, or the Indus river, and was used to identify the lower Indus basin. From the first century of the Christian era, the Persian suffix, ‘stan’ was applied to form the name ‘Hindustan’.

At the same time, the Greeks who had acquired knowledge of ‘Hind’ from the Persians, transliterated it as ‘Indus’, and by the time the Macedonian ruler Alexander invaded India in the third century BCE, ‘India’ had come to be identified with the region beyond the Indus.

By the 16th century, the name ‘Hindustan’ was used by most South Asians to describe their homeland. Historian Ian J. Barrow in his article, ‘From Hindustan to India: Naming change in changing names’, writes that “in the mid-to-late eighteenth century, Hindustan often referred to the territories of the Mughal emperor, which comprised much of South Asia.” However, from the late 18th century onwards, British maps increasingly began using the term ‘India’, and ‘Hindustan’ started to lose its association with all of South Asia.

“Part of the appeal of the term India may have been its Graeco-Roman associations, its long history of use in Europe, and its adoption by scientific and bureaucratic organisations such as the Survey of India,” writes Barrow. “The adoption of India suggests how colonial nomenclature signalled changes in perspectives and helped to usher in an understanding of the subcontinent as a single, bounded and British political territory,” he adds.

The debate to name an Independent India

After the Independence of the country, the Constituent Assembly set up a drafting committee under the chairmanship of B R Ambedkar on August 29, 1947. However, the section, ‘name and territory of the Union’ was taken up for discussion only on September 17, 1949. Right from the moment the first article was read out as ‘India, that is Bharat shall be a union of states’, a division arose among the delegates.

Hari Vishnu Kamath, a member of the Forward Bloc suggested that the first article be replaced as ‘Bharat, or in the English language, India, shall be and such.’ Seth Govind Das, representing the Central Provinces and Berar, on the other hand, proposed: “Bharat known as India also in foreign countries”. Hargovind Pant, who represented the hill districts of the United Provinces, made it clear that Pant made his argument in the following words: “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.”

None of the suggestions were accepted by the committee. However, as Ojha, points out in her article, they “illustrated contrasting visions of the budding nation’.

It is worth noting though, that ‘Hindustan’ was hardly a contender in the debates. “Hindustan received different treatments during the constituent assembly,” writes Ojha. She adds 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.”the people of Northern India, ‘wanted Bharatvarsha and nothing else’.

The dispute over the naming of the country has come up several times after the adoption of the constitution as well. In 2005, for instance, a retired member of the IAS and a freelance journalist named V. Sundaram published an article asking to do away with the name ‘India’ and use ‘Bharat’ instead. “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,” writes Ojha.

In 2012, Shantaram Naik of the Indian National Congress proposed a bill in the Rajya Sabha with a similar suggestion. “”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”,” he argued.

The most recent petition for the name change, has once again been rejected by the Supreme Court, stating that they cannot do it since “India is already called Bharat in the Constitution itself’. The court though, has suggested the petitioner to file his plea to the Centre instead.

Whether the government goes on to make a choice between ‘India’ and ‘Bharat’, we are yet to see. What is certain though, is that they both might have very well been the most debated names in the Constituent Assembly, but were hardly the only ones representing the wide variety of ideas that have gone into nurturing and shaping India.

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